Panel Proposal
Staging Student Peer Review
Third Annual Tri-State Best Practices Conference: Collaborations and Connections
Sponsored by Bergen Community College (NJ)
March 1, 2014

This panel will examine the theory and practice of peer review in the First-Year Writing classroom. Peer review is one of the most pervasive practices in our writing programs. We just marked the 20th anniversary of Kenneth A. Bruffee's pioneering work, Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge, which continues to provide critical tools for practicing and theorizing collaborative learning practices. Bruffee does not discuss peer review directly. Instead, he discusses peer tutoring as being either "direct, centralized, and monitorlike" at one extreme and "indirect, polycentralized" at the other. While Michael Hall, in his 2009 article "The Politics of Peer Response," does discuss peer review, he does not connect the practice to collaborative learning. He challenges the profession to think about how our unstated assumptions inform peer review design and possibly undermine our goals. We should be able to describe the rich contexts in which peer review takes place. Better understanding such contexts will help us more effectively assess peer review as part of the various rhetorical strategies students practice in our classrooms. We welcome paper proposals that explore this idea of "staging" in its complex theoretical and practical forms.

Proposals should include a 250-300 word abstract and must include presenter's name, address, institutional affiliation, and email, title of presentation or paper, and full description of presentation.

Send all proposals to Kimberly J. Banks @ kbanks@qcc.cuny.edu by October 25, 2013.