What common writing strengths/weaknesses exist among students at these institutions? What differences exist?
Crossing Institutional Boundaries: Defining the Collaborative Project
Ayne Cantrell
Middle Tennessee State University
Teaching writing is often a lonely act. Teachers spend hours in isolation choosing textbooks, making out lesson plans and writing assignments, and, of course, marking papers. For most of my twenty-five years of teaching writing, I worked in isolation. Given a few departmental guidelines, including a list of composition standards and the required number and length of essays students were to write, I taught writing with little knowledge of what my colleagues were doing in their classes; we rarely talked about the teaching of writing--except for complaining about students, of course. In 1994, however, my situation as a writing teacher changed when I joined others at my institution to collaborate on the design and follow through of the Portfolio Composition Program for first-year writing students. Today, the collaboration continues as volunteer full-time faculty, Graduate Teaching Assistants, and other part-time teachers try out the same writing assignments, gather at workshops to practice portfolio assessment, and serve on teams to assess the writing of each other’s students.
The collaborative nature of the Portfolio Composition Program at Middle Tennessee State University gave birth, in part, to a cross-institutional writing project that Maria Clayton, Ray Legg, Julie Lumpkins, and I undertook as first-semester writing teachers at three institutions of higher learning in Tennessee in the fall semester of 2000: Bryan College, Columbia State Community College, and Middle Tennessee State University. Even though we now teach at three different institutions, we all have ties to the MTSU’s Portfolio Composition Program where we first experienced the joys and challenges of collaborative teaching and collaborative learning.
In the Spring Semester of 2000, Professors Clayton, Legg, Lumpkins, and I met via e-mail to explore ways that we could continue to collaborate, but this time across institutional boundaries. We expected that our collaboration would benefit us as teachers. How would it benefit our students? Already in our individual classrooms, students worked in peer groups to respond to their works in progress. What if we asked that they collaborate with first-semester writing students at other, quite different, institutions of higher learning in Tennessee? Since we were all teaching first-semester composition in Fall 2000, we decided to ask our students to write the same essay assignment and to share that writing via e-mail with peer readers at our institutions. We were motivated by a desire expand our students’ writing community and knowledge of each other. We set out to answer these questions:
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What common perceptions about public/private, two-year/four-year institutions of higher learning exist among writing teachers and students and will collaboration cross institutional boundaries change these perceptions? |
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Will writing to students at other college campuses make the concept of audience more real to our students, thereby increasing their awareness of and adaptation to audience in their writing? |
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What common writing strengths/weaknesses exist among students at these institutions? What differences exist? |
Over the summer we met face-to-face to collaborate on the process-based writing assignment, to establish deadlines that would work for our different schedules and to assign project tasks. This meeting gave shape to the collaboration, but it was only after countless e-mails (at least 75) that the details for the project were ironed out. (For a discussion of the theory that informs this project, see Theoretical Backdrop)
We introduced our students to the writing assignment during the eighth week of the semester. It would be the third essay they would write, Essay 3 Assignment, Writing a Profile: A Collaborative Project for Internet Publication. The assignment asked students to create a profile essay, which would be included in a collection of essays published on a web site in collaboration with students from the three schools. More specifically, the assignment gave students two topic options. Students could either (1) profile a campus program, publication, service, or club, or place or (2) profile a place or activity in their campus community. Each of us suggested topics for the profile, although students were not required to choose from these, and many did not. For example, one of my students chose to profile a tattoo pallor. Our assignment also identified audience, purpose, and writer’s role:
Audience/Purpose: Since your essay will be published in a collection posted on the Internet, anyone around the globe could read your essay, including future students for your institution. However, we ask that more specifically you target readers at our three colleges. We are using the collection of essays to learn about each other and our colleges; therefore, the general purpose of your profile is to inform. Please assume that your target readers are first-year college students at Bryan College, Columbia State Community College, and Middle Tennessee State University who are unfamiliar with the subject of your profile.
Writer's Role: You will write in the role of an informed college student, a knowledgeable ambassador for your college and campus community.
Students were to make at least one observation visit and to conduct an interview of at least one knowledgeable individual. In addition, they were to
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Target and adapt to an appropriate audience |
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Have a unified angle of vision for the profile expressed as a thesis |
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Present the profile with adequate interesting detail |
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Organize material as a logical extension of the thesis |
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Avoid overt persuasion |
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Use correct and appropriate language |
The assignment also outlined steps for following through with the electronic peer group and designated due dates for activities over the course of the seven weeks that it took to complete the assignment.
Before the writing assignment was introduced, students completed an Institutional Perceptions Questionnaire that elicited their knowledge and impressions of the three types of institutions involved in the project--a large public university, a small private college, and a two-year community college. Also during the eighth week of the semester, we established cross-institutional peer groups for the students (students were placed in groups of three or four, each group consisting of a student each from Bryan and Columbia State and one or two students from MTSU; we tried to stack the groups with students of varying writing skill so that there would be at least one strong writer in each group).
In the tenth week, students shared a coversheet and draft 2 of the essay with their peer groups through the use of computers; via e-mail they gave each other feedback. The coversheet asked students to identify the rhetorical context of their writing, including audience, purpose, and writer’s role. Using the feedback from their peers, students revised their coversheets and wrote draft 3, which they submitted to their teachers during the eleventh week of the semester; teachers returned this coversheet and draft with additional feedback the next week. The revised and edited fourth draft for the essay web site collection was collected in the fifteenth week of the semester.
During the completion of the assignment, students wrote a reflective piece on the collaborative experience and responded to a post Institutional Perceptions Questionnaire. Also we teachers kept a journal reflecting on our experiences.
A total of eighty-seven (87) students at the three schools started the project. Seventy-seven (77) completed the project and contributed essays to the web site, which the students named Not Shakespeare But It Will Do: Campus and Community Profiles by Tennessee College and University Students. The web site address is <http://www.mtsu.edu/~mclayton/Studentcomps>. The collection contains an introduction to the web site, brief introductions to our schools (these introductions are teacher/student collaborations), and the essays themselves. Visitors to the site may read about subjects as varied as Betty’s Parkway Steak House, a family owned restaurant in Columbia, Tennessee (“Betty’s has a country, everybody is welcome attitude,” says the writer); MTSU’s Office of Student Health Services (an essay entitled “Need a Band-Aid?”), and the Scopes Trial Museum, which is located in the basement of the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, where in 1925 William Jennings Bryan prosecuted John Thomas Scopes , a high school biology teacher, for teaching the theory of evolution.
Judging by the students' responses, the experience of collaborating on an essay across institutional lines was a success. Of the 73 students who submitted reflective pieces on the assignment, twice as may students found some value in writing cross-institutions (49 students) than those who found no value in the experience (24 students). On the whole, students at Bryan College and Columbia State Community College found more value in using email peer groups than students at Middle Tennessee State University. Over twice as many Bryan/CSCC students (34) remarked favorably on their experience than MTSU students (15), and twice as many MTSU students (16) commented unfavorably about their experience than Bryan/CSCC students (8). Only in one class (Cantrell's at MTSU) did the majority of students (10 of 17 students) judge the email peer group negatively. A factor in these students' negative response may be their unique academic situation. As members of MTSU's Raider Learning Community group, these students took some of the same classes together, lived in the same dormitory, and had contact daily. Because these students enjoyed the privilege of classmate peer groups both in and out of class and because many of the students were roommates and/or friends, they were not a typical first-semester writing class and may have found long-distance collaboration less fulfilling than their in-class writing community.
From the teachers' perspectives, the project proved successful, too (see Conclusions). As their writing communities expanded across institutional boundaries, our students gained a greater understanding of their counterparts at the other schools, became more aware of the importance of audience in their writing, and gained more confidence as writers.