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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
While it is clear that the two groups of students were at very different stages in their developments as readers and writers, the SUNY students had become habituated to seeing writing as an empty, rule-driven activity, especially in educational settings. These attitudes were evidenced in a number of ways. First, in class discussions, they would say as much. Next, in conferences and revisions, they typically focused intently on correctness and gave far less attention to issues of genre and content, regardless of their actual difficulties with writing. These and other behaviors indicated to us that the college students were less engaged with writing as a meaning-making activity and more so with it as a set of discrete skills. However, writing to their pen pals provided the more highly literate college students with an opportunity to revisit what makes writing exciting-having an audience that responds enthusiastically to the content of a text. What both groups of writers wanted was to forge a meaningful relationship through writing, which elevated the importance of content, genre, and style over correctness, formerly their overriding concern as writers. In other words, the college students began to see that it's not the grammatical correctness that necessarily makes the child on the other end respond enthusiastically in her next letter; instead, it's the overall effectiveness of the text at engaging the reader in a topic of mutual interest. This is a fundamental component of rhetorical sensitivity. By extending themselves "downward" as writers, the college students began to experience the degree to which they needed to develop greater rhetorical flexibility. Later in the year, we saw the college students extend themselves as writers into academic discourse as they attempted to use the intellectual tools of biology (particularly nutrition), sociology (especially demographics), and philosophy (primarily educational theories) to make sense of the inequities that were apparent between their own lives and those of their pen pals.
Together, the college students, disciplinary faculty, and preceptors witnessed that even in the more educationally advanced college students, literacy is still an evolving ability at multiple levels. From the perspective of college writing instruction, this renewed enthusiasm for writing helped energize the college students' work on more academic writing projects, pushing their writing and thinking to more complex levels. This enthusiasm is apparent in some of the college students' papers we quote from a little later in this article, where we see that their concern for the pen pals motivates their attempts to work carefully through some complicated disciplinary material. Under these conditions, it became clear that our students were engaging in reciprocal learning, where "[b]oth the server and those served teach, and both learn" (Jacoby 7).
Certainly, our students had as much to learn about the nature of literacy and learning from the elementary students as the elementary students did about college and education from the SUNY students. The lessons learned were numerous and included, for the college students, understanding that all texts are complex, including those written by children, and that literacy is both acquired and learned. These changes were evident in the willingness of the college students to work very hard at interpreting the often very cryptic texts produced by their pen pals and a corresponding willingness to use what at first seemed to be abstract and useless academic concepts to make sense out of social and economic differences between their lives and those of their pen pals. Although we didn't work as closely with the elementary school students, some of what they learned was apparent in their letters and their interactions with our students. This included imitating both the form and style of the older students' writing and learning what it might mean to attend college. Over the course of the year, we witnessed some specific changes in the elementary school students' writing, including increased length and adherence to conventions of letter writing (such as opening salutations). Writing letters, for both the six-year-olds and the college students, seemed to inspire a new set of writing goals and motivations.
