Bruffee Bio, 2007 NCPTW
Ken Bruffee is professor of English emeritus of Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He taught there for forty years; twenty of those years were in directing the college's honors programs. He has published books and articles on modern fiction, teaching composition, and changing higher education. His essay "Peer Tutoring and the 'Conversation of Mankind'" is a classic read in many tutor-training courses. His Short Course in Writing is in its fourth edition. The third edition of his Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge is due for publication by the Johns Hopkins University Press next spring.
Many of us consider Professor Bruffee the father of peer tutoring in writing that is based on collaborative learning. He thought of peer tutoring when, in 1970, open admission brought to the City University of New York system waves of new students with unfamiliar needs in numbers the faculty were not equipped to handle. He applied peer tutoring to writing after reading M. L. J. Abercrombie's research on how University of London medical students acquired better diagnostic judgment more quickly when working collaboratively than they did when working alone. The rest, as we say, is history.
Bruffee established the peer tutoring of writing when he was Brooklyn College's writing program administrator. He co-founded the national Council of Writing Program Administrators, was the founding editor of the WPA Journal, and was the first chair of the Modern Language Association's Teaching of Writing division.
Just as Bruffee is important to the history of writing instruction and peer tutoring in general, he is vitally important to the history of Penn State's writing center. Ron
Maxwell established the peer tutoring of writing at Penn State's University Park campus in the winter of 1982 after attending Bruffee's Institute in Peer Tutoring and Collaborative
Learning (supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education) in the summer of 1981. Bruffee's concept of constructive reading that the institute participants
practiced, with its exercise of writing descriptive outlines, remains the linchpin for peer tutor training at University Park.
On Saturday at our conference, Maxwell and Bruffee will join institute alumni Peter Hawkes, Mara Holt, Harvey Kail, and John Trimbur to discuss their experiences, in a roundtable
session titled "Living History: The Brooklyn College Summer Institute in Training Peer Writing Tutors Twenty-Five (or so) Years Later."
In 1990 when Maxwell and the University Park peer tutors hosted the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing, Bruffee was the keynote speaker. As we now celebrate
twenty-five years of peer tutoring at Penn State and host the conference for the third time, we are delighted to have Ken Bruffee back to "set the key" for us again.
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