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

This passage demonstrates much about the reciprocal learning process established among the academic and service learning components of Project Renaissance and the benefits for the college students as writers. First, it exemplifies the unevenness of literacy acquisition and intellectual development.

This student's analysis of the detrimental effect that this lunch could have on her pen pal's ability to learn reflects her learning about nutrition from the biology module, demonstrating an emerging dialogue between academic learning and service learning, between abstract knowledge and experience. The "proven fact" line seems to be an attempt to provide academic support for anecdotal evidence, revealing a developing sense of what constitutes an academic argument. Finally, this passage demonstrates the inherent difficulty of this student's effort to move from the unexamined assumptions of liberal idealism (good moms pack good lunches) to a more complex understanding of social and biological issues (society has some responsibility to provide nutritious food at school). The resulting text is a mix of interpretative frameworks and discursive registers that demonstrates the extent to which the Project Renaissance program was pushing students out of their comfort zones as writers, intellectuals, and members of society. Their development as writers is uneven but, nonetheless, still evident in these texts and those written by other students in the program.