Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

ut what is thought and, possibly, what is experienced – what is
lived. It is no different than Jones’ “reconstructive
collaboration.” As Fishman asserts, “[T]he effect of
participation in such communities is that members may examine
and reform their original points of view” (322). But such a
thing happens outside of peer response also, very well because
of what happens during peer response. He explains further:
As the writer, during composition, transacts with her
beliefs, she must decide which to conserve and which
to reform. As the writer transacts with her
culture’s beliefs, she must decide which cultural
beliefs to accept and which to resist. And as she
transacts with her developing text, she must choose
her genre and decide how much of it to reshape in
carrying forward her work. This means, according to
Dewey, that the individual’s writing is always a
mutual reshaping of author, culture, and text. It is
never just private but always private and social,
personal and political: to change one’s text is also
to change one’s self and one’s culture. (323)
Because of this, the community “reconstructs” the individual as
much as the individual “reconstructs” the community, the two in
a dialectical relationship that offers the promise of the
“growth” of the whole. And in his essay, Fishman testifies to
having observed that same growth with the students he observed,
namely “Ramona,” a female student writer. He writes: “[H]er
writing group’s sense of community enabled her to overcome her
initial resistance to her classmates’ comments and, as a result,
enabled her to reconstruct her discussion” (327). Furthermore,
“Ramona” had confessed to Fishman her “increasing
comfortableness with her writing group’s comments and her
205