Multi-Party Transactions
  • "Negotiating" around the emergence of a text

  • Community building, including affirmation, challenge, invitation

  • Playful excursions

Two-Way Transactions can be found in familiar teacher-student interaction patterns within a wide variety of classroom settings--at primary and secondary levels, in traditional on-campus courses, and even in courses relying on teacher presentation as the main means of instruction. What I call "Multi-Party Transactions" assume an important role wherever collaborative learning and peer responding are used; these set up writing contexts that favor the development of rhetorical awareness as students come to recognize the transactional nodes of writer, reader, and text.

Multi-party discussions in composition classes frequently focus on writers "negotiating" around the emergence of a text as they share their writing with a group for scrutiny and response. Assignment drafts still under construction may be at the best stage for reading and comment, and it is around these that most Multi-Party transactional episodes occur. As teacher, I participate in these discussions but do not try to direct or channel the conversation as much as in other two-way contexts. The complexity of transactional teaching and learning is fully apparent here, where the power of synchronous networked conferencing most supports learning by making such transactional exchanges possible.

Other shades of Multi-party Transactions shift the focus from work at hand to the group itself for purposes of community building. These kinds of exchanges usually fly off on a tangent from the "academic" center--indeed, "conferencing" seems to become "chat"--but important dynamics of affirmation, challenge, and invitation occur within them. Moreover, these group transactions usually include "playful excursions," where the focus of concentration revolves in a recursive way, turning toward wit and relaxation (with a kind of foolery that especially grows out of the group's virtual identity) then back again to academic concerns. I consider humorous play to be important as a social catalyst in this distance education context, in which members of the class rarely see or talk with each other face-to-face. It provides a device that prepares us for "listening" to each other through the limited bandwidth of synchronous interchange, confirming that we are all engaged in good faith conversation even if it involves critiquing each other's work. (The discussion of Melissa's draft is particularly rich in the transactions of community building and play.) Of course, in ENG 103 we never articulated our joking in that way, but in the perspective of a whole semester's conferencing, that appears to be how it worked.

One "playful excursion" during a conference in March demonstrates particularly well how fun draws people together.

Four Multi-Party Events

Just as all face-to-face discussions are unique, so with on-line conferences. Each has its own peculiar flavor from the mix of personalities and subject matter and the general humors of the moment. When we discussed students' argument texts and topics on April 3, four Multi-Party subconferences unfolded, showing differing modes in which a group can approach a text's emerging meaning. Through all of these discussions, negotiation of meaning, community building, and play intertwined to form a complex, organic web of conversation. Remaining fairly constant in the background, however, was the students' collective will to use these processes to enable each other to learn together in a virtual community.

The following links connect with each of the four discussions of students' topics and drafts; readers are invited to read through as much of the transcript as possible so as to create their own sense of the transactions ocurring in real time.