INTEGRATING WRITING, ACADEMIC DISCOURSES, AND SERVICE LEARNING: PROJECT RENAISSANCE AND SCHOOL/COLLEGE LITERACY COLLABORATIONS

Sometimes it was difficult for our students to understand exactly what they were learning from the pen pal project, where the discourse in use was not "academic" and their commitment seemed to come so easily. Write a letter; get one in response. It couldn't be simpler. In order to help them better theorize the work they were doing as writers, we assigned them several chapters from Sondra Perl and Nancy Wilson's work in Through Teacher's Eyes.

While some students still resisted the notion of literacy as constructed, the majority were astonished by what they were learning about the ways children learn to read and write and began to see that they had been taking their own literacy for granted. They began to see that functional literacy was a misleading concept. Instead, they recognized that literacy was not a basic skill, but an ever-developing set of complex verbal, textual, and social abilities that are difficult to acquire. The pen pal project and the formal contexts for learning that supported it also helped the Project Renaissance students explore the difficult Vygotskian notion that words and images are symbols that have meaning because we assign such meanings. This new understanding of literacy as complex was evident in a more informed approach to reading the writing of the youngest students, the pre-literate kindergarteners. The college students shifted from seeing scribbles and doodles on a page as the insignificant work of immature writers and artists to seeing them as part of complex literate texts. Our students began to develop techniques of interpretation, which is further evidence that they were coming to value them as meaningful text, as signs of literacy. The college students' reading strategies included developing a familiarity with a writer's lexicon of symbols/images across a group of letters and comparing texts produced by different letter writers to identify specific themes in the images. And because of the motivation toward literacy and textuality fostered by the pen pal project, the Project Renaissance students were willing to work very hard to make meaning from their pen pals' texts. The college students who wrote to the youngest writers observed that the drawings they received from their kindergarten pen pals were, in fact, narratives about their lives and their dreams, as they painstakingly picked out identifiable images and developed a sense of the individual child's iconography. This is a significant change because it marks a shift from seeing literacy as the equivalent of grammatical rules to understanding it through a broader, more complex social framework and from seeing literacy as learned through the study of abstract rules to seeing it as acquired from interactions in literate social contexts. One student remarked in a paper for the philosophy module that "these children are learning how to write letters by writing to the Project Renaissance students. They are learning sentence structures and other principles of English through this letter writing." This student demonstrates a growing awareness that the conventions of writing can actually be acquired by interacting with texts rather than just through memorization and worksheets. Although the college students were not applying these reading strategies to the published poetry of "great writers" or to understanding differences in various scholars' interpretations of a major historical event, the college students were, nonetheless, developing an ability to interpret complex texts. In addition, they were increasing their repertoire of genres by coming to recognize that effective "writing" can take on numerous forms that look nothing like the five-paragraph theme. Although these abilities did not materialize primarily in academic reading and writing, but in reading and writing related to the pen pal project, we feel that these new interpretive and rhetorical strategies transferred to the college students' academic writing as well.