Students’ rights to their own language: “Peer review sucks!”

introduction for presentation at TYCA (a conference about teaching writing)

Wendy Bishop pointed out years ago that the method of peer workshops “has been presented in glowing terms, [but] it can prove problematic in practice” (32, qtd in Ransdell). I think the term “problematic” may be the understatement of the decade in composition, one we repeat ad finitum to justify our poor “results.” Let’s face it: most peer review groups are a waste of time if the goal is to immediately improve student writing. Students rarely discuss each other’s work in any detail and often merely write, “This is great!! :)” or, at the other extreme, begin to cross out and amend every sentence, especially if the group is lucky enough to contain an ESL student to work over. During the last decade composition classes have spent far too much time lacksidaisically going through the motions of peer review merely because it is mandated as some sort of Expressivist, liberatory, democratic practice.

First and only claim: Don’t do peer review unless you are willing to give it significant and sustainable time in your curriculum and unless you truly believe, yes I said believe, in its potential to alter what counts as knowledge in the composition class.