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INTEGRATING WRITING, ACADEMIC DISCOURSES, AND SERVICE LEARNING: PROJECT RENAISSANCE AND SCHOOL/COLLEGE LITERACY COLLABORATIONS
Composition Studies, Spring 2005 by Mastrangelo, Lisa S, Tischio, Victoria
Two main themes guided our work in Project Renaissance and, thus, feature prominently in this article. One important concept is embedded in the view of service learning we enacted in the program. While the students first understood service learning as being the equivalent of volunteerism, we worked with students toward developing a more complex view of service learning based not on "charity" (as with volunteerism), but on "reciprocity" as its central tenet. Even though we consistently presented the project in this way, it took time (or, more precisely, experience) for the college students to see the reciprocal nature of service learning as valuable. Additionally, integrating service learning with reflective and academic reading and writing assignments and with study of three different disciplinary areas (biology, sociology, and philosophy) helped students see how academic knowledge can be put to work in actual social contexts, bringing the ivory tower and lived experience a little closer together. However, this connection also took time; in fact, it really wasn't until the second semester of the project that we actually witnessed the students putting specific disciplinary knowledges to work to understand the nature of their service learning experiences. Here, writing assignments played a pivotal role in encouraging the students to work through their experiences in finer detail and to interpret those details through disciplinary lenses. Over time, the SUNY students began to see that the benefits of service learning can flow in multiple directions, both to the community and back to their own classrooms.
In an effort to create a coherent service learning experience for our students, a pen pal project with a group of elementary school students from a local school district was the main ongoing activity throughout the school year that cemented academic study, writing, research, and service into an integrated whole. The college students recognized the benefits of this pen pal project in the form of modeling writing behaviors and providing the elementary students with college-student role models early on. The importance of these benefits was not lost on the SUNY students, who were well aware that their pen pals came from an underperforming urban school district, where few students go to college. Later, they came to see benefits for themselves, in that the pen pal project added "real life" significance to the concepts they studied in the academic modules (such as the connection between nutrition and intellectual development in biology; the effects of economic stratification on individual achievement in sociology; and the theoretical underpinnings of specific educational policies and social values in philosophy) that deepened both their academic and their service learning experiences, making both more rewarding.
