Ann Shivers-McNair @a_shiversmcnair These slides are from my presentation at the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication, panel L18 "Transfer and Student Agency: The Risk and Rewards of Negotiation," in which my colleagues and I argued for a view of transfer as a negotiated local practice.

1. The Shared Labor of Meaning
Making: Peer Review as a Site
for Agentive Negotiations
Across Difference
Ann Shivers-McNair
University of Washington

2. Overview
• Literature and research question
• Methods
• Case results
• Implications

3. Literature
Transfer as a negotiated local practice:
distributed/horizontal agency in interactions
• Kory Ching (2007): “Students do not learn from
teachers or from peers, but rather by engaging in the
practices of writing and reading alongside both. This is
a dialogic view of learning. According to Bakhtin, ‘the
unique speech experience of each individual is shaped
and developed in continuous and constant interaction
with others’ individual utterances’ (89).” (p. 315)
• King Beach’s (2003) consequential transitions:
development is fluid, relational, and horizontal, rather
than stable, fixed, linear.

4. Literature
Transfer as a negotiated local practice: verbal
negotiations of difference
Stephanie Kerschbaum (2014): “…even in the
smallest moments of communication—as students
debate the placement of a comma, tell stories about
their high school writing experiences, try to explain
their interpretation of a sentence, or write comments
on peers’ essays—markers of difference make
visible the dynamism, the relationality, and the
emergence of difference” (p. 7)

5. Research Question
• What do agentive negotiations of difference look
like in peer review talk? How are students making
meaning?
• How might peer review conditions affect these
agentive negotiations of difference?

6. Methods
• Year long pilot study of peer review in a two-semester
“stretch” first-year writing course at a midsized
university in the Southeast
• Five students were observed in fall and spring in various
configurations of peer review
• Analysis of verbal interactions:
• Initiation-Response-Feedback (Sinclair and Coulthard
1975; Cf. Stubbs 1983, Black 1998)
• Affective and epistemic stance (Biber and Finegan 1989;
Cf. Thompson and Hunston 2000, Barton 1993, Lancaster
2014)

7. Case Study: Sierra (Fall)
Group: Sierra, an 18-year-old African American woman,
Keisha, also an 18-year-old African American woman, and
Darrin, an 18-year-old African American man, all from
Mississippi
Activity: a peer review session of a draft of an image analysis
with classmates in her classroom, near the end of the fall
semester
Peer review conditions: Allison (a white woman in her mid-
twenties who was also a PhD student) had given the group a
single-spaced, page-long instruction sheet for the peer review
session: students were asked to summarize and explain the
parts of their paper (the introduction, the thesis, the body, the
conclusion) out loud to their group, and have the group say
back to the writer what they heard, then compare that data to
the writer’s draft.

8. Speake
r
Sierra What’s the point of having two papers, though?
Keisha I dunno.
Darrin I dunno.
Keisha I only put in that one, I didn’t know we was supposed to have two.
Sierra I heard it when she said print out two, but I’m like ((makes face))
Keisha I wasn’t here that day.
Sierra I wish I wasn’t here. I don’t want to know this.
Darrin My first paragraph’s long, so I’m gonna shorten this up for y’all. All right.
Sierra You gotta tell about it first.
Keisha Yeah.
Darrin What you mean?
Sierra You gotta explain what it’s talking about.

9. Speake
r
(continued)
Keisha You gotta tell what it’s talking about and then::=
Darrin =Oh, oh. It talk about
how like basketball is always changing, you know, from the way people
play to how they look now, like back in like the 60s and 70s had like the
little shorts and all that stuff. People had the high afros and long socks
and all that. Now people got long shorts, got their all their different kinds
of shoes, everything’s different from how it used to be.
(5) ((Sierra and Keisha are writing))
Darrin So I read it now?
Sierra You can read.
Darrin Oh, all right. ((reading)) Basketball world is forever changing, over the
many decades since the sport was invented in 1891, the many styles of
play, the physical presence of players, the courts, the rules of the game,
even the things they wear. Each generation has their very own way, so
how different they are from the generations before and after them.
(2) ((they look at each other))

10. Speake
r
(continued)
Darrin All right, talking about (thesis)
Keisha Talk about what?
Darrin Gotta talk about what the aim is, right?
Sierra Well I said, when you talked about it, you said something about
basketball is forever changed, you know, and then how it – like in the 60s
how they wore like short pants and stuff like that, and they wore long
pants and how they have their shirts like so thin and stuff, and that’s
basically it. But what you, like – when you read it, and I was – I got that
generations are different from like what they was then and how people
talk about – people wear different clothes and stuff like that from how
they used to wear and that’s basically it.
Keisha M::kay. When you were explaining it, you were talking about how the
world was changing from the clothes and the high afros and stuff like that
to now everything is kind of down and down, but, uh, yeah, you just pretty
much saying how everything’s changed from the 70s and 80s till now. But
when you were reading, you said something about basketball and the
different things of that they wear and do such like the positions and the
clothes that they have now, like their shorts are, like she said, now
they’re kinda lower. And, they require a little bit more from you than they

11. Analysis
• Focus on protocol rather than projects: of the 125 total
turns in this conversation, 74 (59%) were the students
and instructor negotiating (and occasionally, on the
part of the students, criticizing) the logistics of the
protocol
• Stance markers almost entirely about protocol
• Repetition of “don’t know” (epistemic)
• Repetition of “gotta” and “gonna” (necessity modals)
• No author response (for any of the students’ work) and
minimal conversational uptake of peer responses
• No written comments or notes (by authors or
reviewers)

12. Analysis
• How was difference marked and negotiated?
• Mostly in their relative knowledge/understanding of
the peer review protocol
• How might the peer review conditions have
shaped this negotiation?
• The students’ response to the “say-it-back” approach
and the highly structured protocol (both considered
best practices) seemed to shift the site of negotiation
away from drafts and toward the protocol.

13. Case Study: Sierra
(Spring)
Group: Sierra, an 18-year-old African American woman,
and Jerrell, an 18-year-old African American man, both
from Mississippi
Activity: a peer review session of final portfolio materials
with classmates in her classroom, near the end of the
spring semester
Peer review conditions: Allison (a white woman in her
mid-twenties who was also a PhD student) framed the
activity as an open-ended session in which students
picked the drafts they wanted to discuss and what they
wanted their peers to focus on.

14. Speaker
Jerrell Mine make you cry. Ma:::n, I gotta do my finals tonight, man. Dang. (.)
Are you—do you really know FSU stand for?
Sierra ((mumbles))
Jerrell ((referring to instructor)) She know what it stand for, [she—
Sierra [I don’t know
what it—I didn’t know what it stand for. What it stand for?
Jerrell You don’t know what it stand for?
Sierra Okay, come on, make the point. Make the point. The point is, you’re
supposed to state what they saying, if you’re gonna keep using it,
okay like the first time you’re using it in the essay, say what it is, and
you keep on saying it like over and over=
Jerrell =Okay, I’m gonna spell it out if that makes
you happy, I’m gonna spell it out. Florida State University.
Sierra Okay, I know that!
Jerrell I’m gonna spell it out, saying.
Sierra I woulda probably thought of the Football State University. ((smiling))

15. Speaker (continued)
Jerrell Really? Football State.
Sierra Really though, but that’s the point. ‘Cause you don’t know what it
stands for. ((laughs))
Jerrell ((smiling)) Football. State. Listen to what you said. Football. State.
University. We got fifty states, and not one of them got ‘football’ in their
name.
Sierra Okay, that’s just like MSU.
Jerrell Mississippi State.
Sierra Okay, why couldn’t it be Michigan State? Missouri State?
Jerrell ‘Cause they’re not— (.) I understand what you’re saying. ((laughs))
Leave me alone so I can do this paper. Leave me alone so I can do this
paper. ((smiling))

16. Analysis
• Stance markers as epistemic play
• Repetition certainty/doubt markers (do/don’t know;
really)
• Turn-taking similar to a conversation
• Focus on writer-reader relationship
• No written comments or notes (by authors or
reviewers)

17. Analysis
• How was difference marked and negotiated?
• By what each interactant claims to know: Jerrell teases
Sierra when she says she doesn’t know what “FSU”
stands for, but this serves her point that Jerrell doesn’t
seem to know what is reasonable to expect a reader to
know.
• How might the peer review conditions have shaped
this negotiation?
• The nature of the final portfolio project (with its emphasis
on reflection and demonstrating engagement with learning
outcomes) may have encouraged the students to critique
each other’s work rhetorically; the unstructured nature of
the peer review session may have encouraged the more
playful interaction.

18. Implications
• Toward a non-linear, distributed, interactional
model of “transfer” as a negotiated local practice:
• In sharing the labor of discursive meaning making
• In agentively negotiating difference
• Peer review as a site for practicing and critically
engaging in this work
• Cultivating awareness of the negotiation and
supporting students in engaging in negotiation
• Critically considering how the conditions we set for
peer review might shape students’ negotiations