Ideologies of Language, Authority, and Disability in College Writing Peer Review
Keating, Benjamin
2018
Abstract
Peer review is intended to help students develop authority over the texts they produce and support them as they position themselves as new members of scholarly or professional communities. Despite the important role peer review plays in composition pedagogy, research on peer review has declined since the 1990s, and few recent studies examine how ideologies around social diversity and standard language shape peer review. Does peer review work as intended for all students, or can it reproduce the same social hierarchies it seeks to destabilize? To address this question, this dissertation uses qualitative methods to explore language, identity, and diversity in peer review, focusing on two sections of a first-year writing class at a diverse and non-selective regional university in the Midwest. Through an analysis of ethnographic observations, audio-recordings of peer review, longitudinal student interviews, and course materials, the study shows how face-to-face peer review is fraught with the intersecting effects of ideologies around language and identity. This dissertation posits that authority in peer review is a relational phenomenon that depends on a multifaceted construction of standardness in the writing classroom, where social categories are marked and maintained in relation to standardized English, whiteness, and normalcy in ability. Analysis of peer review conversation alongside interviews with students about that conversation allows yields thick descriptions of student experiences that illuminate the interplay between individual perceptions of authority and the larger social forces that shape such perceptions of authority. When students were marked as non-standard—via their written or spoken language(s) and their racial appearance—their access to authority in peer review was constrained. Students marked as standard, however, claimed an unwarranted authority in relation to their peers. An additional key finding concerns ideologies of disability in the temporal space of peer review. When students were marked as deviant (e.g., too slow), time emerged as a phenomenon based in social dynamics and timeliness (kairos) that affected the authority of an utterance. This analysis illuminates what before were the unseen effects of normate time on peer review, alongside ideologies around language and race, contributing to current scholarship on authority, translingualism, disability studies, and antiracist pedagogy. Given these findings, instructors can plan for students to undermine the goals of peer review by mimicking the hierarchical authority of their instructor, assuming a problematic caregiving stance relative to their peers, or disregarding or sidelining feedback from peers whose writing is seen as deficient or whose language or ability is marked as nonstandard or deviant. In not preparing for such challenges, instructors risk condoning harmful ideologies around writing and identity. Further, given the stigma of markers of temporal deviance, developing tools to help students govern the pace of conversation can authorize students to participate fully in group work. Such tools can also reinforce a non-hierarchical mode of collaboration, wherein students claim equal time, labor, and authority. Theorizing inclusive models of collaborative learning in general will require an intersectional approach that considers time, identity, and power.Subjects
Writing pedagogy Language diversity Disability Critical Whiteness Theory Peer review Collaborative learning
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