Knowledge is like a...

What is knowledge? How is it produced? What is the role of the student, teacher, tutor in the production of knowledge?

All of these questions are raised in Andrea Lunsford's essay "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center". While her essay mostly focused on the role of collaboration in a learning environment, the most striking question raised by her comments was that of the nature of knowledge and how it is produced.  Lunsford believes that knowledge, rather than being an external, unchangeable force is "mediated by or constructed through language in social use, as socially constructed, contextualized, as, in short, the product of collaboration" (48). Knowledge is not doled out like rations of food (a view purported by the Storehouse Centers) . Knowledge is not like a jewel to mined out of oneself (a view purported by Garret Centers). Rather knowledge is like a house, dreamed of by architects, constructed from external pieces, and created with multiple hands and viewpoints. This is the collaborative approach that I long to see in my classes, but unfortunately does not exist. Too many times is knowledge handed out by the teacher like blueprints, collecting dust. At the other extreme, too often knowledge is laid out on the floor of the classroom by students like pieces of wood, nails, and hammers, never synthesized into anything of worth. True collaboration brings these two together, a professor guiding and drawing out ideas and the class constructing them into something new. If this kind of collaboration can exist, then the bullshit discussed by the previous article will hopefully be made irrelevant, as the best ideas make the best houses.