The Unending Conversation

“Coleridge’s great metaphor for composition is the journey outward from the center of the self in order to embrace diversity and bring difference into harmony with the self. Such a journey requires an active mind and a perspective of composition that welcomes each act of composition as an attempt to explain something to yourself in such a way that others will want to join with you in composing” (Veeder 22).

For Coleridge, knowledge and truth are created inside the self through a process of examination, judgment, and questioning that leads to the development of personality and self. It is a constantly evolving process that requires some flexibility of mind to adapt to the changes that experience and facts necessitate. However, the learning process does not end with the self. Collaboration with others is necessary to test the self’s knowledge and develop a sense of the self’s role in the whole of society. The testing wasn’t for the purpose of convincing an audience, but rather to inform the composition author of the validity of the self’s truth. Composition then has both a very personal beginning and a collaboratively social polishing stage. “Coleridge’s philosophy of composition fundamentally asserts that composition is both dialectic and dialogue, dialectic being the discourse of reason and understanding and dialogue being the social equivalent of that discourse” (Veeder 23).

Coleridge’s view of composition seems rather prescient in light of modern teaching pedagogy, and Kenneth Bruffee would likely agree. Bruffee’s article, Collaborative Learning and the “Conversation of Mankind,” discusses collaborative learning and the social approach to classroom teaching. It began because students were unwilling or unable to take advantage of traditional university-sponsored tutoring and counseling programs by graduate students and teachers. An alternative to the traditional social structure of the classroom was proposed in peer tutoring. In the classroom, collaborative learning manifested as the teacher assigning a problem and the class collectively working on the solution. The students learned from each other, providing and receiving help in a social context far removed from the traditional teacher-centered classroom.

Bruffee argues that thought begins as external social conversation which is then internalized as reflective thought. Much as Coleridge theorized, we take what we see outside ourselves, internalize it, and then process it. Also like Coleridge, Bruffee believes the process of developing knowledge does not end there. “If thought is internalized public and social talk, then writing of all kinds is internalized social talk made public and social again” (Bruffee 550). Once the knowledge, the truth, is processed, it must be tested in public. Collaborative learning provides the setting and structure to pursue that testing through social interaction in an educational environment.

In The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, Michal Oakeshott argues that “what distinguishes human beings from other animals is our ability to participate in unending conversation” (Bruffee 548). Coleridge would perhaps, as an active participant in the unending conversation, agree with that notion. And as teachers, we are actively engaged in perpetuating that conversation and enabling our students to be able participants as well.