Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

[T]he basis for joint action, according to Dewey, is
developing ways of talking so that people can explore
and utilize their idiosyncrasies. […] For Dewey,
once people have forums for communicating their
differences, they can discover their common interests
and use their idiosyncrasies to enhance, rather than
impede, their work. (321)
In this way, Dewey’s Relativity and Diversity function as a
dialectic, one affecting the other, and, for Fishman, taken as a
whole, they find their most profound translation into writing
classroom practice in the form of, not surprisingly, peer
response. Following such explanations, he describes his
observations of those principles at work in “a freshman
composition class” he had attended. In that writing class, he
observed students “carrying out Dewey’s idea that a group
becomes a community when its members exchange roles and develop
common experiences” (321) and, conversely, “making unique
contributions to a developing common project” (321-2). In doing
so, the students in question “identif[ied] a common goal without
submerging their differences” (322).
For Fishman, this back and forth movement between the
common and the uncommon, the similar and the dissimilar – the
certain and the uncertain – serves a greater purpose than simply
urging students "to do more writing.” Like Jones, the formation
of that “community” of student writers, whether it is the peer
response group or the writing class as a whole, can lead to
opportunities for “reconstruction,” of not only what is written
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