Collaboration and Social Interaction in English Classrooms

English language arts classrooms are especially rich sites for both explicit and implicit collaborations among those who inhabit those spaces. In these venues, Bakhtinian "heteroglot voices" (Bakhtin 278) saturate the oral and written discourse that students produce as they engage in discussions and as they write in a wide variety of genres, media, and modalities. When students speak or write, they draw on this polyphony even though they may not be consciously aware of their reliance on the ideas of others. In considering the nature of collaboration, it is fruitful to note Vygotsky's observation that what humans do is social first and individual later. Collaboration is both explicit, relying on social experiences with others, and implicit, drawing on the voices that rise out of those social experiences and echo in the writer's mind. In this article, the authors provide theoretical bases for collaboration in the classroom and discuss a rich array of new technologies that enable collaborative activities for students.