i can productively apply x to y in order to productively extend y to help us as we move toward z

Writing Together: An Arendtian Framework for Collaboration

Jessica Restaino

Abstract: This essay considers the long-standing challenges, in both practice and theory, to collaborative writing in the first-year classroom. I argue that Hannah Arendt’s concepts of plurality and natality are useful frameworks for thinking constructively and practically about teaching argumentative writing through collaboration. I explore these concepts in terms of foundational scholarship on written collaboration, such as Candace Spigelman’s work on writing groups and intellectual property, as well as recent considerations of evolving technological resources (Howard). Ultimately, thinking through Arendt, I offer examples from my own classroom practice, and also generate a series of questions designed to support instructors’ incorporation of collaborative writing and thinking across their own diverse contexts. My goal here is not to suggest that there is a singular “best practice,” but rather to demonstrate the ways in which Arendtian concepts can foster complex and scaffolded pedagogies of collaboration in the first-year classroom.

[In-class conversations] may well produce, from time to time, consensually derived singular texts—but singular texts always animated by a self-conscious plurality, a polyphonic chorus of voices, whose difference—as well as sameness—speaks and is heard. Hannah Arendt has said that, ‘For excellence, the presence of others is always required.’ We agree. And so, in spite of our many unanswered questions, we believe that writing toward a pedagogy of collaboration is worth our efforts, for it holds the potential for allowing, finally and fully, for the presence of others. (Lunsford and Ede 125)

In their foundational effort to explore collaborative writing, Singular Texts/Plural Authors, Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede reference Hannah Arendt’s notion of “plurality.” Plurality, indispensable to Arendt’s thinking, insists that our words and actions are given their greatest power by others. Action and plurality are inherently linked, for Arendt, because our “words and deeds” must occur in the presence of others to have any relevance to the human world. In fact, our contribution to the world as actors functions as a renewal, a regeneration, of the world. Accordingly, Arendt likens action to birth, which she terms “natality,” because each time we “insert ourselves into the human world,” the event is “like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original appearance” (Arendt 176). As I have argued in my book, First Semester, I believe Arendt has much conceptually to offer our field, particularly since her thinking is hinged so closely to lived, human realities; similarly, I see the need for theory in composition studies as inseparable from its usefulness to the classroom, to teaching, and to the generation of texts.{1} In this essay, I want to acknowledge long-standing concerns about the idea of collaboration and argue that, despite even her own wary resistance to the practice, Arendt’s concepts offer a productive alternative framework for teaching the most effective kinds of collaborative thinking and writing in the first-year classroom.