I really like that you’ve pointed out the idea of knowledge as social construction; I found this to be one of the most thought-provoking ideas within this past week’s readings. Like you mentioned in your post, Winsor explains that “knowledge may be defined as that which most people in a discourse community are convinced of, and what a discourse community is convinced of is indicated by the texts it has accepted” (343). I wonder if this definition could also be used for Truth (with a capital “T,” of course). It seems to me like we could look back at the esteemed writings of a given discourse community of a given time period and be able to identify what that group considered the be “True.” That’s just a random thought I had while reading the Winsor article, and your post made me think of it!

In terms of collaboration and conflict in the classroom, I like to give my students the opportunity to evaluate their group members on productivity, participation, engagement, etc after the task is complete. A lot of times students will positively assess the members of their small group because they don’t want to throw any of their peers under the bus, but at least you’re giving students (like the girl who expressed concerned to you about the conflict within her small group) a chance to identify any problem areas within the group dynamic (not all conflict is problematic, like you said — they need to know the difference between problematic and constructive conflict ahead of time) and to explain whether or not group members contributed to the successful completion of the task. This peer evaluation only slightly factors into my students’ overall participation grades, but the students might be more willing to cooperate and constructively contribute to the task from the very beginning (artificially or not) knowing that they’ll be assessed by their peers at the end.