JAC Volume 14 Issue 1

This article chronicles a cross-disciplinary project that began informally as a series of conversations among three faculty who met through our university's Writing Across the Curriculum program. These faculty—Lauren Wright (Marketing), Tom Imhoff (Philosophy), and Thia Wolf (English)—discovered several shared commitments in our work: all of us believed strongly in an ethics-based education; all of us used student-centered learning strategies in our classrooms; and all of us recognized that group work in our courses fell far short of promoting the kind of independent, critical thinking we hoped our students would practice. As our work in our university's WAC program brought us in contact with one another more frequently, we began to consider ways of building on each other's experience and knowledge in the classroom. We became especially interested in evaluating our collaborative teaching experiences. In an attempt to analyze these experiences more systematically, Lauren and Thia created a WAC workshop which provided a forum for the conscious critique of collaborative pedagogy.

During that workshop Lauren presented a transcript of a taped student discussion from her course in Case Studies in Marketing. In this transcript, a group of students responds to a segment of film which depicts a young married couple arguing about the woman's reluctance to accept an advertisement (for the newspaper that employs her) from a fur coat distributor. The dilemma presented in the film clip arises between the woman and her husband. She dislikes the fur industry, but her husband wants her to accept the ad because of the good commission that will go along with it. The students were instructed to define the ethical issues, discuss what they would do in this situation, and develop a "win-win" situation for all parties involved. An excerpt from the students' conversation is provided below:

Transcript One

The conversation recorded in this transcript raised a series of disturbing questions for Lauren about the plausibility of critically exploring ethics in a collaborative classroom setting. She was dismayed by the transcript because it revealed how easily students constructed business as an environment where profit provides the primary justification for decision-making. In response to her concerns, Tom pointed out that her students lacked what he called "a model for moral reflection." He suggested that an ethics-based method he had been using in his philosophy courses might prove useful to Lauren.

Tom, Lauren and Thia met after the workshop to discuss the possible applications of Tom's methods to Lauren's class and other courses we taught. As we analyzed the reasons why Lauren's class discussion did not meet her expectations, it became clear that the design of the assignment had contributed to the unsatisfactory outcome. The task of defining the ethical issues, identifying the interested parties, and coming up with a "win-win" situation was much too complex and unstructured for students to handle within a single class period. Tom described how the ethics-based method he used in his classes simplified the students' tasks and provided a more structured framework for complex decision-making. Since this approach seemed to address the problems we had initially identified in the transcript of Lauren's marketing class discussion, we decided to use it as the foundation for a collaborative method that we hoped would lead to more productive discussions in our classrooms.

Development of Our Collaborative Method

The ethics-based method that Tom uses in his classes is based on the theoretical work of philosophers T.M. Scanlon and Brian Barry, who developed a model of contractualist ethics. Their model proposes that individuals involved in a conflict usually work together in a complex process of negotiation. For negotiations in this model to be considered ethical, negotiators must be fully informed. They must also be guided by the idea of constructing "a proposal which cannot be reasonably rejected" (Scanlon 111). The goal is to consider some moral problem (most often a conflict of interest) in order to design a compromise solution which creates no big losers among the interested parties. The guiding rule of the negotiations is that if it is reasonable for any negotiator to reject the compromise proposal, then it would be immoral to implement that proposal. This rule requires all interested parties to continue negotiations as long as objections to a proposal arise. Since the contractualist ethics framework requires repeated negotiations based on an understanding and consideration of all parties' positions, it becomes a useful tool for systematically developing new knowledge and problem-solving strategies.

While we agreed that the contractualist model seemed an effective way to provide students with a framework for making complex ethical decisions, we were concerned that it did not address all of the variables inherent in collaborative classroom interactions. In reexamining the transcript from Lauren's class, we felt that group dynamics were limiting the students' abilities to examine all sides of the ethical issues they were addressing objectively. To understand the nature of these dynamics better, we referred to the work of Erving Goffman, who is well-known for his sociological descriptions of group interactions.

We were especially interested in Goffman's conceptualization of "performance" in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. According to Goffman, performance includes behaviors designed to obscure truths or possibilities in favor of making a desired impression. Goffman suggests that people interact by assuming roles and residing behind masks. Interactions are characterized by the attempt to control the impressions which others form of the self and by the defense of particular impressions as accurate and justified (9, 14). It seemed to us that the concept of performance might explain some of the outcomes observed in Lauren's transcript. As Goffman notes,

It seemed very possible that even though the marketing students were instructed to examine moral issues, they were unable to do so on any meaningful level because of their inherent roles as "performers."

Based on this insight, our pedagogical goal became the undermining of group performances as they traditionally occur in our classrooms. We wanted to disrupt dysfunctional group practices and replace them with a model for ethical (or "moral," in Goffman's terms) interaction that would cause them to question and to evaluate their behaviors by entering into genuine dialogue with one another. It seemed to us that the contractualist framework could effectively upset traditional group performances by encouraging the types of collaborative conversations that force students to reflect on their own and others' ideas and behaviors. The recursive nature of the contractualist process provides students with many opportunities for such critical self-examination.

We hoped that this method would encourage intellectual inquiry in our students that maintains, in the words of feminist liberation theologian Sharon Welch, a "tensive" quality. According to Welch, true knowing is tension-laden, uncertain, and always in internal discussion/argument with itself (31). Truth can only exist "as conversation." Welch believes that without this understanding of truth/knowledge as a process, it is impossible to maintain a necessary "openness to continued change and modification" (87). This openness, by its very nature, runs contrary to Goffman's observations about the behaviors of traditional groups who work very hard to create a well-orchestrated group performance. The contractualist framework we have designed provides students with a systematic structure for examining ethical dilemmas. This structured process allows them to transcend the suboptimal group performances described by Goffman and encourages them to create their own knowledge (as advocated by Welch) based on critical self-reflection and awareness of others.

Contractualism in Our Classrooms

Our contractualist approach involves a series of collaborative role-plays. At the beginning of a role-play, students are assigned well-defined roles. They begin the exploration of moral disputes by adopting a specific, self-interested view of social reality. Our method then attempts to free students from these self-interested roles by specifying the performance of a drama which requires them to empathize with the roles assumed by each of the other players. Ideally, this leads to an examination of group processes, performance strategies, and self-interested motives as students learn to listen to and consider the stated interests of others. The process we developed to implement contractualism in our classrooms included the following steps:

This process became our guideline for designing in-class negotiation activities. We used the method in several different courses and taped student discussions from the various phases so that we could examine the outcomes of our collaborative framework. Excerpts from some of these conversations plus an analysis (based on our interpretations of Goffman and Welch) of student responses during the various phases are provided below.

Phases One and Two

In the first stage of this process, students are assigned an interest group role and a task. In the second stage, they must create both an identification with the role they will play and a group method for entering and examining this role. As the excerpt below indicates, initial attempts at identification often require frequent discussions about the group process itself, setting the stage for later examinations and critique of group decision-making and representation.

The first excerpt, from a literature course, shows students considering Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening from the perspective of the protagonist's Edna's) children. The students were asked to articulate the children's preferred, self-interested outcome regarding their mother's affection for Robert, a young man who inspires for the first time in Edna's adult life feelings of passion/love.

Transcript Two

In this excerpt, Anne helps the group on two different occasions to think about the "point" of the task. She first asks the teacher for direction then reminds the group that they need to focus their efforts on imagining the children's view rather than commenting on the personality or behavior of their mother. The group reviews the task and examines its progress four times during the conversation. One member, Clem, points out that the group has gone "kinda off track" after several members critique Edna and consider Robert's point of view about their relationship. Later in the discussion, Michael stops Linda's digression about Edna's viewpoint by reminding her that "that's not the thing. The thing here is, what about the kids? How do they see it?"

These students reframe their task several times because they need to create a single point of view in reference to a complicated situation. In this early phase, they are pushed by the task toward an artificial form of consensus. The clarification and adoption of a view that is not their own marks the interaction as a performance from the start. This permits self-conscious evaluation of the group's process (and makes the group independent of the instructor once the task is clarified).

Because the group is required to explain its position to the other interest groups in phase three, this process also exposes facts which provide what Goffman calls "destructive information" (141). This kind of information is closely related to Welch's discussion of "subjugated knowledges." According to Welch, for "dominant knowledges" to prevail the conflicts posed by subjugated knowledges (considered "naive" or irrelevant by those in power) must be hidden or erased (19). These knowledges have the potential, if they are uncovered or restored, to "discredit, disrupt, or make useless the impression that the performance fosters" (Goffman 141).

An example of these dynamics occurs as the group develops a position that focuses only on the children's view. The students act out a form of oppression practiced by at least one character in the novel: Madame Ratignolle. For this character (who is in accord with the "dominant knowledges" in this situation), the occupation of mothering supersedes all other rights a woman might demand and all other roles she might occupy. When asked how they have arrived at their position that "Edna should be with her children," this group has no difficulty describing its process of weeding out "extraneous" issues such as Edna's feelings and her very real experiences with social oppression. This process, called "information control" by Goffman (141), reveals how subjugated knowledges become subjugated. Information is selectively arranged so that only a single, simple and devastating picture of the truth emerges: Edna is "a bad person" or "a bad mother" (these terms being synonymous in the group's argument) because she committed suicide. By the time their initial position statement is created, the group has expunged the following facts: Edna's marriage is loveless and oppressive, her love life with Robert is unhappy, and, in Jane's words, "she couldn't choose anything." Since the contractualist framework provided students with an opportunity to develop a single position and then to reflect on the implications of this position during a whole-class discussion, they were able to come to a better understanding of some of the subjugated knowledges underlying Edna's behavior.

To understand how this process gives students an effective avenue for critical self-reflection, compare transcript two with transcript one from the marketing course. In the first transcript, we find students exhibiting "team dynamics" as defined by Goffman. He states that if members of a team have a reason for "maintaining a show of self-respect before one another," it may be necessary for members of the team to learn what the group position is and adopt it without admitting to themselves or to each other the extent to which that approach differs from their own individual beliefs (88). In transcript one, Keith tries early in the conversation to direct the group's attention toward the ethical problems inherent in business choices. Al makes a tentative move to express disapproval of the fur industry. Both are quickly silenced as more dominant group members define the issue in non-personal ways (business considerations or aesthetic criteria for justifying which animals should be killed). Everyone adopts the "party line," and the character of the position held by the team starts to change. Goffman describes this phenomenon in the following way:

A comparison of the marketing and literature groups provides some interesting insights about the different collaborative processes. The marketing group, because its task is overly complex, touches on several moral positions without examining any position in depth. The literature students, whose task is simplified because they have been assigned a defined role, ultimately construct a realistic viewpoint of a single interest group. This provides them with the foundation for a more complex investigation of the ethical dilemmas inherent in the situation.

Because its task is so unstructured, the marketing group has no way of critiquing its own progress or process. Unlike the literature group, these students cannot define their task in a way that helps them judge the appropriateness of their inquiry and discussion. For example, in an extended transcript of the entire group conversation, it is apparent that the marketing group never realizes it has ignored the husband's role in the conflict. In its eventual construction of a "win-win" situation, it considers only profit motives, siding with the fur industry's "right" to advertise in the newspaper. The group overlooks the conflict between the husband and wife and thus has not fully explored the possibility of a "win-win" compromise that addresses all parties' interests.

Finally, the marketing group sees their task as purely academic and, hence, not related to their own interests. They make no move, other than deciding that they are not animal activists, to enter the ethical dilemma on a personal level. Perhaps the lack of identification with its task encourage the marketing group to devise a clever rather than a carefully constructed response. When asked to describe their position to the whole class, the students declare that ugly animals could be killed while "cute" animals could not. They are unable to describe how they arrived at this decision. The many strands of group discussion and partial analysis are lost once the students decide on the statement that summarizes their views. In this case, the subjugated knowledges (such as the views of animal rights activists or the role of personal values in conducting business transactions) are never available for further examination.

By contrast, students in the literature group create and maintain an identification with their assigned role, comparing the experience of the children in the novel to their own experiences. They are also able to examine the position of the children in the text for clues to the children's probable feelings and desired outcomes. The strength of this identification becomes apparent during a phase five negotiation between groups when a member of the "Robert" group sympathized with Edna's position:

Here we see John, a member of the "Robert" group, viewing Edna through a new, more empathic lens. Michael, a member of the "children" group, chastises the Robert representatives for overlooking Edna's children's feelings. Both speakers demonstrate the extent to which students can come to identify with their assigned roles as the contractualist process proceeds.

A major difference, then, between the assigned role-play and the unstructured ethical debate is that the first invites self-conscious development of a single view which permits later access to an evaluation of this position and its history, while the latter allows students to touch on many positions without ever fully exploring any of them.

Phases Three and Four

In the third phase of collaborative negotiations, all groups report back to the class as a whole. They define their position and describe their desired outcome in the conflict, explaining why that outcome meets their needs. In this phase, students may ask each other questions in order to understand each group's report more fully, but no other interaction across groups takes place. This phase permits students to hear and comprehend alternative views and solutions without entering into debate with other interest groups.

In phase four, students are required to acknowledge the wealth of disparate views and solutions by attempting to design a solution "package" that takes all groups' stated needs and preferences into account. In this phase, students may develop solutions that are still based primarily on their own role-based interests; thus, they must be clever in the rhetorical design of their compromise solutions if they hope to win other interest groups to their view. Phase four externalizes many underlying motives and strategies that support self-interest. Students tend to admit within their own groups that their solutions arise fundamentally for the betterment of their identified interests rather than for reasons of compassion or a desire to benefit all parties involved in the dispute. This is true even though they now know (from the presentations in phase three) what the other groups' needs and concerns involve.

The excerpts below are taken from an Advanced Composition course where students read a newspaper editorial about the employment of gay men as Boy Scout leaders. The piece focused on a gay Boy Scout leader named Dave whom the writer knew and believed was an appropriate role model for young men. The group whose conversation is recorded below takes the role of the Boy Scouts of America organization and develops a position statement on the right of gay Scout leaders to continue working within the organization. The first excerpt is from the groups Phase Two discussion, the second from Phase Four.

Transcript Three: Phase Two

Transcript Three: Phase Four

During their phase two conversation, this group has difficulty entering its assigned point of view. The members support Dave's right to lead Boy Scouts and see anti-gay policies as discriminatory. By Phase Four, the group has entered its task more completely, consciously trying to devise a strategy for excluding Dave from Scouting. They are starting to participate in a team performance that is maintained through the use of what Goffman labels "strategic secrets." These secrets

This process permitted at least one member of the group to reconsider the choices she makes when writing persuasively. In a written reflection on the ethical component in the Advanced Composition course, Betsy states that she is now more aware of the numerous temptations facing her as a writer. Her group's work on the creation of an exclusionary policy made her realize how "often I wanted to embellish things in my rhetoric for effect. Who would it hurt, anyway?" Ultimately, she sees herself as a writer/thinker who must repeatedly tell herself that using rhetoric "for our own purposes, 'just this once' can really get us into trouble."

Phase Five and Beyond

Phase Five is the culmination of the previous phases. In this phase, students engage in debate after presenting their initial solution packages. Students begin this phase in character and negotiate with other groups (who also remain in character). The negotiation process is an attempt to design a compromise solution that addresses each interest group's needs and desires, with compensations offered to groups who benefit the least from a proposed solution. A negotiation is completed when all groups agree that an acceptable solution has been reached.

Phase Five does not usually result in a satisfactory compromise solution. This phase does, however, make evident the difficulty of rising above self-interest in order to consider what is beneficial to all involved parties. Our goal in this phase is to give students opportunities for violating the usual rules of negotiation performance. We hope for what Goffman calls "moments of great crisis" (167), when the well-defined boundaries of each team begin to erode. These moments of crisis did not always occur in our classroom settings. A shortcoming of our method was the lack of well-designed catalysts that could systematically create these productive crises. In fact, we discovered that students were occasionally able to complete phase five without disrupting their group performances at all. This is clearly illustrated in the conversation presented below, where students in a political science class stay in their assigned roles to the bitter end. Transcript four is an excerpt from a complex negotiation among six interest groups about the large retirement package offered to a Chancellor in the University of California system. The "voice" of the Regents is actually a single student who dominated the regents' conversation; the rest of the parties are represented by multiple group members' voices.

Transcript Four

Throughout this transcript, students maintain a strong identification with their assigned roles. The Regents never appear to hear the students' arguments, nor do they take those arguments into account when considering whether an alternative plan might be created. In this class, true negotiations never occur. The students cling to their poses and adopt the typical political ploy of making speeches rather than entering debate. Their performance follows Goffman's maxim that when "teams present themselves to each other for the purposes of interaction, the members of each team tend to maintain the line that they are what they claim to be; they tend to stay in character" (167). Given this outcome, it became obvious that we needed to incorporate additional exercises into our framework that would systematically create the "moments of crisis" referred to by Goffman.

Although the results weren't optimal, the negotiation described above did have some positive consequences. The students were given an opportunity in a whole-class setting to discuss what went wrong and how public negotiations among bureaucrats and politicians involve more posturing than listening. They put this learning to good use later in the semester during a phase five negotiation about the building of a minimum security prison near a small town called "Ninaville." In the discussion that is partially described below, the debate has been in full swing for some time. A number of objections to the prison have been raised, including the damper it will put on tourism, and local residents' fear that their safety will be compromised.

Transcript Five

This interaction represents the most complete negotiation we've observed in a class based on our method. The students playing the City Council role make sure that all interest groups have a chance to declare their concerns, and the final agreement appears to take all of the groups' concerns into account. It is unclear, however, what the cost of this negotiation would be in a real-world setting. The students' compromise maintains a certain strategic vagueness when it comes to the actual location of the prison (for example, will the prison be secluded, or will it in fact be placed nearer another town whose interests have not been fully acknowledged?) In evaluating this transcript, we considered the possibility that the students demonstrate a facility for what Goffman calls "colleagueship," the ability to identify individuals or groups whose interests square with one's own (163). If, in fact, the groups have acted as "colleagues" who have protected themselves at another community's expense, they are still acting out of self-interest alone.

Some of our classroom outcomes did include "moments of crises" when team boundaries started to dissolve and more critical reflection was possible. The next transcript (from the literature course discussed earlier) includes the students' reflections on their motivations in phase five. Through discussion, they are able to clarify the way they have viewed and manipulated the negotiation process. In the excerpt below, the groups are proposing compromise plans in response to the concerns of characters in The Awakening. The different groups are indicated by the names of the characters whose interests they represented.

Transcript Six

In this conversation, the students disrupt their performances in order to critique the work they've done. No longer speaking in character, they begin to explore the implications of what they've been saying. The critical examination of Robert's proposal by the "Edna" group is readily accepted by Robert's representatives. Rather than staying in character to save their performances, the groups have stepped outside their roles to create a moral critique of the fairy tale belief that it is possible and desirable to live happily ever after. Having abandoned their group identities, this class never chose to reenter them. They spent the rest of the class period imagining how role-playing and collaborative negotiations might have changed the lives of the characters in question. Then they moved beyond the realm of the novel to consider the application of contractualist problem-solving to models of political power they'd been studying throughout the semester.

One person, in response to several other students' evaluations of the role-play/negotiation method, summed up by saying, "I think if people really did this, this ethics thing, we'd have to think different . . . . How could there be room for war? You'd be too busy talking." This speaker's reflection on classroom practices of role play and negotiation matches Welch's assertion that one's own interpretations must be brought "into dialogue with other interpretations, without assuming that the dialogue is to be one-sided, a 'dialogue' of persuasion of the other" (87). The student notes that there would be no "room for war" because talk would require all of our energy and attention. She does not seem to imply that one particular discourse would dominate; the conversation she envisions is "busy," not persuasive.

This type of conversation does occur in transcript six. Though the speaker from the Edna group begins to critique the Robert group, she moves quickly to a whole-community critique: "We're trying to make happy endings." Applying her insight across all groups, she opens the door for the Robert group to recognize its complicity in promoting a damaging cultural myth. There is no attempt to persuade other groups to a particular point of view; rather, the views here build on each other (for example, when "Robert" begins to articulate that happy endings may never actually occur) and intersect (as when "Robert" connects "Edna's" insight to his group's attempt to ensure a happy ending by killing a character). This is a class engaged in truth-making through dialogue. Argument has been set aside as team performances are abandoned in favor of a broader and more critical examination of the issues involved.

Conclusions

The classroom experiences described above indicate that our contractualist method provides students with a learning environment that encourages critical self-reflection and awareness of the positions of others. It also appears that the process has the potential to disrupt dysfunctional group dynamics by systematically encouraging students to examine their own behaviors as well as those of others in the class. However, we recognize that there are many additional opportunities to "create knowledge" (in Welch's terms) that we have not yet incorporated into our collaborative framework.

Our future plans include the creation of multiple activities and assignments which will encourage students to examine the implications of their actions more completely. We also intend to design these exercises so that they stimulate the types of productive crises that force groups to critically examine their own performances. These activities and assignments include: in-class shortwrites asking students to reflect on their own learning and their insights about the group process at the end of each class period; essays about the role-play/negotiation strategy (how it works and doesn't work, what it challenges and why); the recording and transcribing of group planning interactions followed by a reflection paper on the secrets and strategies that enter or frame group conversation; team journals (Graybeal) permitting students to discuss and critique in writing their teams interactions; group presentations on the negotiation performances of political leaders and other "real world" interest groups; and the development and direction of role-play/negotiation scenarios by students.

Reflections on Our Own Collaborative Process

As we reflected on the experiences we had shared in developing our contractualist methodology and integrating it in our classrooms, it occurred to us that we had begun focusing more on the development of the method itself than on its value as a theoretical construct for reshaping the nature of our classrooms. (This is not unusual for new teaching techniques that trace their roots to university WAC programs. See Mahala for a critique that examines the "dissociation of theory from pedagogical innovation" in these types of programs.) Our emphasis on the pragmatic concerns of developing and implementing the model had obscured some interesting information about our own collaboration. When we began to analyze the transcripts from our courses, it became apparent that different priorities and separate, sometimes conflicting, theoretical underpinnings had led us to implement our common method in radically different ways. The most striking example of this is in Phase Five, where students in Tom's political science class learned to perform all five steps in the role-play negotiation process without engaging in obvious or verifiable self-critique. However, in Thia's literature class the students spent most of the final stage reflecting on their own actions throughout the role-play/negotiation process. These differences in the final phase can be traced in part to differing classroom goals on the part of the teachers.

During our conversations about the transcripts, it became clear that Tom was deeply interested in helping students achieve "reasonableness and impartiality," goals of the contractualist ethics theorists. In his political science class, students worked repetitively with the role-play/negotiation method until they were proficient at reaching well-negotiated outcomes. Thia's literature class, by contrast, had incorporated the five-step method within a larger context of liberatory pedagogy. Her students had been rewarded for critiquing and, in some cases, rejecting and redesigning classroom structures. Their decision to step outside of assigned roles in order to examine their learning process was not at odds with their previous experiences in that particular classroom setting.

Further, it became apparent as we discussed the transcripts that our measures of teaching success differed across disciplinary boundaries. Tom was most interested in outcomes: what could the students produce at the end of the process to demonstrate that they knew how to negotiate a reasonable compromise? He genuinely wanted his students to behave impartially and believed that this was possible. Lauren cared less about outcomes than about the students' experience of the process: could they articulate an understanding of their own and others' points of view? Because ethical decision-making and problem-solving skills are vital in the world of business, she wanted her students to develop decision-making processes that considered a multiplicity of people and perspectives. Thia's interest in contractualist ethics turned out to be political: could this method offer students a framework for deconstructing oppressive power models in favor of more egalitarian problem-solving among all people? She hoped to enrich the ongoing critique in her classroom by providing students with an alternative model of communication that could provide all students with a voice.

We began to realize that the systematic method of collaboration we had designed for our students bore little resemblance to our own practices of collaboration. Due to our hectic academic schedules, we could meet to discuss our classes and transcripts only sporadically. During these discussions, we began to focus primarily on descriptions of the role-play/negotiation technique. Thus, what began as a self-critique of our collaborative learning pedagogies became a pragmatic conversation about the machinery of the method we'd agreed to use Only our difficulties in returning to Goffman and Welch during the writing of this article made us aware of how many differences our similar method had obscured.

Our recent conversations, while certainly tension-laden, have challenged us to revise our method, bringing more reflection to bear on each stage of the process. We have agreed that we are ultimately less interested in the method itself than in the critical self-examination that we believe the method can encourage. If truth exists, as Welch asserts, not in a particular body of knowledge or a single process of knowing but in dialogues that include many knowledges, then the most appropriate educational practices must foster and value conversations which speak across disciplinary boundaries. Our collaboration continues in the hope that we can find ways to promote this conversation among ourselves and in our classrooms.

California State University
Chico, California

Works Cited