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

On the macro level the poor have little reason for hope of leaving their class. . . . On the micro level there is great hope because individuals can work their way out of the inner cities and defy the odds. The macro level feelings are part of the very problem. In the poor neighborhoods it is expected that there is virtually no way out of the ghetto, and because of that lack of hope adolescents give up and turn their lives to crime and drugs.

The student supports his assertions about what happens at the macro level of society with demographics on the two communities at issue, noting that in his hometown "90% of the inhabitants are college graduates" and that the median income is $105,000. He argues that, therefore, it is "not coincidental that 95% of the students in my high school go on to higher learning." This information is compared to his pen pal's hometown, where the median income is $36,000 per year and where 48% of the work force is in what he calls "low level white collar jobs." These residents, the student asserts, "have a low likelihood of forming large savings or social advancement... [which] makes college much less financially viable for the children" of this community. As with the other students, here we see a student who is working across multiple intellectual registers, bringing the academic to bear on developing an understanding of the experiential. He is developing facility with the conventions of academic discourse which include asserting conclusions (large-scale lack of opportunity dampens individual's sense of hope), providing support (statistics), and offering analysis (lack of opportunity is not "coincidental," but systemic).

Ideally, we might have hoped that all of our students, through exposure to the principles of reciprocity and critical teaching, would develop what Herzberg calls a "social imagination" as these students appear to have done ("Community Service" 317). This social imagination enables students to see that their choices and actions have implications that ripple out from their individual lives, affecting the social, economic, and environmental worlds around them. Some students did indeed achieve parts of this. Many came to see their connectedness to larger contexts as inescapable and to understand that it plays a role in determining the opportunities an individual may be afforded. For some students, this social imagination included a new-found desire to imagine ways of transforming the world around them for the purpose of bringing about greater equity (Herzberg, "Community Service" 317).