Iris Chapman,
Assistant Professor - English
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Assesment
Course for which the funds were used: College Writing 110 in Spring 2003
Iris Thompson Chapman Department: English
Situating students in real writing contexts provides one of the best ways to develop better writers, and real situations give students real audiences and purposes. While serving the community in any capacity is noble, first-year writers learn more about writing when they perform service in writing situations. The collaborative project I undertook during Spring 2003 is one of the ways that joint writing efforts can be realized:
My spring college writing class worked collaborative with a senior English class at Cummings High School. Modeling the senior project on the work from Southwestern Randolph High School, Cummings expected each of its senior students to complete a semester-long research project. Students researched a topic of their choice. Later, using the research that they had done, they worked with a mentor, an expert in the area of their research to discover more about their topic and create a product (something tangible or abstract that reflected volunteer visitation that connected to the research). Pulling on the first and second-hand research to develop a product, students' projects culminated in an oral presentations in front of a panel of judges the last week of their semester.
The high school students were paired with students in my College Writing 110 class. As advisers, they assisted the Cummings students at every level of the writing process: introducing them to the Elon Library, researching , drafting, revising, giving feedback, and speechmaking. Students were bused to Elon in order to use the State of Art library facilities. On the average, students saw their advisees eight times during the semester. Bonnie Roane, Lead English teacher for ABSS High Schools of Alamance County says, "The ability to experience a college library will broaden [Cummings'] students' experiences and may open possibilities for a college education that otherwise might not have been realized."
Description of the Impact of the Project
Below are some of the comments from the Cummings students and the 110 College Writing students about the project:
Cumming High School
What did you enjoy most about the experience at Elon University?
- Teachers and students were warm, friendly and concerned about our progress.
- Every student helped in finding sources and writing the research papers.
- Enjoyed the use of the library.
- My partner
- Meeting new people and having the chance to work with them.
- Able to work with an Elon student and the Elon library sources
- Working with college students who really understood my point
- How my partner taught me to write a good research paper
- The friendly advice.
Would you recommend this collaborative experience for next year?
21 students said "YES." More specific answers were the following:
- It would be an asset to the Senior Project Program
- This experience has been a self-esteem booster.
- It was very helpful and researching is easier to do when you have a partner.
- It was a great experience, and we had the opportunity to access many types of sources.
Comments from my 110 College Writing students.
My interest in the project was to ascertain the impact of the service learning on my students'writing or writing development; therefore, the question I paid most attention to was the following:
How does your experience take you back to your College Writing class or to your own writing development?
- I feel that through these experiences I have improved my expectations of writing and research as well as my own writing skills.
- I have always found that writing a thesis is the hardest part of writing a paper and that once I get through it, the body of the paper comes together, and I told this to my advisee.
- I appreciated knowing why/how she picked the topic as it made me think of how I was picking my own topics, for it was such a tough job trying to find a specific topic in the many journals.
- Reinforced what coach is telling us about how helpful peer editing was; it really does help
- Even though I was supposed to be helping him write his paper, he was helping me to be more organized and not to procrastinate. When I went home that day, after seeing how organized Anthony was, I got myself five manila folders to keep all the work for my five different papers in my college writing class.
- I improved my writing skills by correcting his works and finding mistakes that I commonly make which will make it easier for me to recognize them in my own works from now on. I have improved my people skills by sharing these days with Anthony.
- I realize what a hard-worker April was, and I found that her work ethics began to rub off on me, and I became a more dedicated student.
- By helping Nadine revise, I realized how far I have come in revising my own papers. The experience has allowed me to see the feedback that people truly find helpful. Revising also gave me a chance to better my grammar skills as I didn't want to tell her the wrong change to make, so there were times when I would go look up a proper usage. It helps me review the proper procedure for research and starting a paper.
- It brought me back to organizing information and we work on that a lot in College Writing.
- This experience made me review the writing techniques that I already know. It was a good way for me to look at someone else's writing to see how I could improve it.
- It would have been really helpful in my case to have had someone to help teach me to manage time and work throughout such a long project last year.
Since I had had the project already, I knew exactly what they were going through. I helped them plan what they were going to do and in what order.
- It's good having college freshman helping seniors in high school because the freshmen have been learning about the many types of writing at a higher level and can help students with many different aspects of their papers. Students tend to be more positive too..
- For peer editing to work, the participants too must remember that they too have to revise their own paper.
- The one-on-one tutoring was good for the students, so they could receive a lot more motivation than they would if they were only working with their teacher; I felt the same way about peer editing in my College Writing class.
Other comments that revealed 110 students' assistance in areas other than writing are worth noting:
- I didn't just help a student in need, but I walked away with a new friend as well."
- Most noticeable was the fact that these students didn't have the same opportunities as we did in high school, and that's why I was determined to help even more.
- I have become a better person from doing this assignment because initially I was selfish and felt that I shouldn't be teaching and helping someone else during my class time.
- I appreciated how much I was being appreciated!!
- Even after the paper was completed, April and I continued to email one another.
Next week, April and I are meeting for dinner to catch up on each other's lives and celebrate the ending of her last year of high school and my first year of college.
- Not only did we succeed in working well together, but we formed a friendship that probably would have never happened without the help of the Periclean grant.
- It was amazing to have such a connection with someone who comes from such a different background than you do. Throughout the project, we communicated through emails, and I hope to keep in touch with her to find out how her life goes after graduation.
- We spent lots of time in our meetings talking about the ideas of going to college and striving to do their best, aq perfect situation for college writing freshman to provide inspiration for someone.
- College writing freshman are a great resource for high school seniors to use, for they can easily relate to the seniors and their situation. They can be role models and friends to them.
Funds were used for transporting students to and from the Belk Library, notebooks, note cards, and sheet protectors for 60 students,( even though we were able to work with only one class) and one meal for 40 judges and 110 College Writing students. |
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