“I don’t need your help!” Peer status, race, and gender during peer writing interactions.

Christianakis, Mary. (2010). “I don’t need your help!” Peer status, race, and gender during peer writing interactions. Journal of Literacy Research, 42(4), 418-458.


This is a cautionary tale for any educator considering implementing peer editing during a writing workshop, particularly in a classroom with a diverse group of students. The article also shows the dangers of taking an educational theory, here, Lev Vygotsky’s well-known concept of the Zone of Proximal Development, too literally and without considering the social and cultural complexities that are an inextricable part of every classroom environment.

Christianakis spent a year as a participant-observer in the diverse fifth grade classroom where this research is situated. The teacher was implementing two different kinds of peer editing structures, one structure which utilized the concept of the more expert peer (as per Vygotsky’s theory) and one structure intended to be more collaborative and equitable. As things turned out, race, gender, and social status complicated the enactment of these structures in ways that created power structures and power struggles that privileged some children and marginalized others. That is, children with high academic ability (who were mostly White) and high social status were privileged, and children with low academic ability and low social status were marginalized, with apparent detrimental effects on their learning to write. Although academic ability was an important factor, it was often “trumped” by social status, gender, or race, which seemed to be the most influential factors in who worked with who and who had status in the classroom. “Scaffolding” from peers only works if there also is mutual respect and a desire to help the less-expert peer achieve independence. These fifth graders did not demonstrate those things.

Several focal students were discussed in depth. The most interesting one to me was “Aqueenah”, a gifted African-American girl, who in many ways felt “peerless” because the only other students she got to work with were lower-ability girls of color. Another interesting case was “Mindy”, a high-ability white girl who had low social status. No one wanted to work with her, in spite of her ability. Reading this account was painful, but the author’s observations rang true with my own experiences of classroom reality, both as a former upper elementary/middle school teacher and as a young student in my own girlhood. Classrooms can be raw and cruel places. It is even worse when the teacher facilitates and privileges hierarchical structures, as the teacher here did, in spite of (probably) good intentions. The author is hopeful that teachers can meet these social complexities head on and help their students interrogate the dynamics of classroom group work, and perhaps make decisions to change these all-too naturally-occurring classroom hierarchies. Although I applaud her idealism, and wish for the same thing myself, I am less optimistic. I see too many hierarchies like this being enacted by people of all ages in the world outside school, in my own metropolitan area, and in my own college classrooms. It feels as if trying to enact change is swimming upstream.