Conclusion

            Despite the drawbacks and oversights of having first-year writing students at Bryan College, Columbia State Community College, and Middle Tennessee State University  collaborate via e-mail (including the technical nightmare of assigning 100 students to peer groups; not giving students enough time to get to know one another via e-mail before plunging them into the assignment; not requiring that all students use their institutional e-mail addresses; and not anticipating the problem of CSCC students’ inability to open attachments), we found the effort was worthwhile to both students and ourselves.

            One of the goals for the collaborative project was prompted by our shared rhetorical philosophy, which demands that writing be purposeful and audience-centered; therefore, we hoped that by designating their peers at Bryan, CSCC, and MTSU as representatives of their readers, audience would become more real to our students and they would increase their awareness of and adaptation to audience in their writing.  Successfully targeting to specific readers and adapting to them is one of the greatest challenges of effective writing and often the hardest to meet, so we were pleased to see evidence of audience awareness in the writing of our first-semester composition students. The collaboration across institutional boundaries did appear to make a difference, as indicated by this student response: “Working with students from MTSU and CSCC taught me that I need to concentrate more on my audience and what their needs are in reading my essay.” (See Student Reflections)

            We want to make clear that our goals in integrating computer technology into our project did not address the recent discussion of “computers as transformative,” as Russel Wiebe and Robert S. Dornsife, Jr. propose in “The Metaphor of Collage: Beyond Computer Composition,” meaning that “the computer is and will continue to transform the nature of texts, of writing, of discursive practices, and thus inevitably the ways in which we and our students compose” (132). Our goals did not include creating hypertext or integrating multi-media, the metaphors of collage Wiebe and Dornsife suggest (132), nor was our goal to focus “sustained critical attention on what we are doing with rhetoric in our classrooms when we incorporate visual and aural elements into writing assignments,” as Carolyn Handa calls for us to do[i]. Her argument that “the study of visual rhetoric in this age of computers and the Web should be conducted by rhetoricians as much as it is now by artists, multimedia designers, and Web technologists” is a valid one (4), but it is not within the scope of our project. Our goals for integrating technology were more basic and included giving students access to each other and to their writing, facilitating the peer review process, and expanding their concept of audience through their cross-institutional contact and through the resulting web publication of their writing. These objectives were inspired by what Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe call for teachers to do in “The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Classroom”: to “assess ways in which the use of computer technology might shape, for better and worse, [. . .] strategies for working with students” (55), a call for a critical and thoughtful perspective when integrating computers in composition. Selfe reiterates and expands these concerns in her more recent Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-first Century: The Importance of Paying Attention. In other words, our goals were not technology-driven or oriented, but rather enabled by technology.

            In the theoretical backdrop section of this report, we identified ourselves as process--oriented teachers who embrace New Rhetoric but who are also sympathetic to new theories that consider multicultural concerns. Although issues of diversity were not the focus of our study, we are able to make some limited observations on how points of difference emerged in our students’ collaboration across institutional lines. 

            Though similar in situation--all students enrolled in a required, first-level college writing course--our students were separated geographically and, more importantly, by size and mission of the institutions they attended.^[ii]  One obvious difference among our students was the conservative religious orientation of students from Bryan College, which surfaced primarily in their choice of topics and attitudes toward their subjects.^[iii] 

            “Why do the Bryan students always talk about religion?” asked a student in Cantrell’s MTSU class early in the study. 

            “Yeah, they always do that,” chimed in another student or two. 

            “They don’t always  talk about religion,” announced another, “but what’s wrong with that, even if they do?”

The ensuing discussion opened up a space in the classroom to discuss difference that most likely would not have been filled otherwise without the collaborative project. 

            From the beginning of the project, students at CSCC, on the other hand, expressed concern that they would be inadequate to  meet the challenge of the collaborative work; they expressed fear that they would not be able to write as well as students at MTSU and Bryan. The cultural imperative they felt was that they were inferior students because they attended a community college. Their sense of inferiority, if Sharon Crowley is right in her conclusions, may be the product of their class affiliation:

Research on the demographics of universities and colleges suggest that students’ placement in a particular kind of institution results primarily from their class affiliation and secondarily from geographical location. In other words, the primary factor determining admission to a given university is class; the second is place of residency. (222) 

Also the perception held by the great majority of students at Bryan, CSCC, and MTSU that private colleges offer the “best” education seems to be a result of distinctions they make about class, with only students of the higher classes attending private institutions. Not considering differences among private institutions, to our students “private” automatically means “better” primarily because tuition is higher and, they believe, teachers are paid more; thus, economics is a social marker between students and faculty who attend/teach at private colleges and those who attend/teach at public ones.  (See Student Reflections)

            Our perceptions study found that in many respects (such as faculty credentials and student academic preparedness, behavior, motivation, and open mindedness) the great majority of our students saw themselves as essentially different, depending on whether they attended a public or private college. Yet they did cooperate and also reported that they learned from each other.  Their experience seems to confirm John Trimbur’s speculations about consensus and difference in collaborative learning. Trimbur suggests that consensus can be reached in collaborative groups based “not so much on collective agreements as on collective explanations of how people differ, where their differences come from, and whether they can live and work together with these differences” (610). Our students ability to work together productively despite their perceived differences suggests that student collaboration across institutional boundaries is a positive experience which will prepare them for overcoming differences in future collaborations in life.

            A significant change in student perception brought about by the collaboration was that students at all three institutions came to see little difference among their writing skill. This finding appears contrary to Susan Miller’s view that writing process pedagogy does not liberate students.  In 1992 Miller criticized process pedagogy because product is still measure of assessment:

Despite the massive theorizing, both texts and students are subjected to fundamentally formalist interpretations, and basic assumptions remain the same.  Writing is still broadly categorized as either good or bad [. . .]. Thus, whether according to product or process approaches, students remain unliberated, and continue to think of themselves as “not good at English.”

However, our study, though limited, shows that students who combine writing-as-process strategies with collaborative writing across institutional boundaries gain more confidence in themselves as writers and in this sense were liberated from the view that they are “not good” at English. This change to a more positive view of themselves as writers was the most remarkable for the CSCC students who began the study with the least degree of confidence in their writing ability.

            Given these findings, what then can our efforts in cross-institutional collaboration offer to the continuing dialogue about writing pedagogy? We argue that we should not toss out process pedagogy but explore ways to adopt/adapt it for the 21st century. An example is Bruce McComiskey’s Teaching Composition as a Social Process (2000).  McComiskey, according to a reviewer of his book, presents an argument for “remembering process pedagogies” and for

an "integrated theory" of composing, pulling together lessons from expressivism, rhetorical theory, and social models--especially cultural studies approaches--to create a pedagogy that foregrounds what he calls a process approach to social inquiry [. . .] a way of combining the lessons of process-based theory and pedagogy with the social and cultural concerns of cultural studies-based curriculum. (George 666)

Another example is Jane T. Lord’s dissertation (1999) which attempts to reconcile theory and pedagogy:

As compositionists veer toward social approaches to teaching writing, the problem of reconciling oppositional forces that underlie the product-process dilemma becomes increasingly complex. [. . .]  By investigating the extent and nature of the social turn [in composition] and by exploring spaces between disciplinary borders, I attempt to ascertain how a social approach to teaching writing might account for its own institutional context as well as how a sociolinguistic approach might incorporate contrary assumptions of product and process pedagogies. (iii)

Writing-as-process practice still has much to offer teachers in the 21st century, especially when joined with more socially-oriented models and enlightened by greater understanding of the complexities of student literacies.^[iv]

            At the same time we must be critical of the post-modern critique of process pedagogy.  Writing educator James D.Williams observes that students at risk suffer the most from our field’s turn to the postmodern perspective: “they need help to become competent writers, help that they just are not getting.  [. . .]  If unchecked, the result will be a return to the kind of elitism that characterized education prior to the end of World War II” (43). We believe that the freshman English requirement and process pedagogy are more valuable than ever in the 21st century because it introduces all students to academic writing and gives them skills that will serve them in the academy and beyond.

            In the final analysis, as our students were introduced to collaboration across institutional boundaries, we teachers rediscovered the joy of collaboration. Collaboration among teachers is a boon to writing instruction, as well as a benefit to students, and we acknowledge our growth as writing teachers in this closing conversation:

Julie:    Teachers often get stuck in a “rut” so to speak--teaching the same content in the same manner from semester to semester. Through the collaborative project, I was able to fishtail off ideas and approaches I had either forgotten or had never used. For example, I was prompted by an e-mail message from Maria about a better, more efficient way of completing peer response sheets, and Ayne gave me some hints about students’ adaptation to audience in their papers. I think collaborating contributes to teaching effectiveness.

Maria:  I agree. When you share pedagogy, you enrich and expand your own methods and knowledge.

Ayne:   But you also validate some things, don’t you think? Working with you three on this project reinforced my belief in student-centered learning and audience-centered writing.

Maria:  Speaking of audience, it’s interesting to think about how we teachers become each other’s audience, too. Not only were our students communicating across institutional boundaries, the four of us have become each other’s audience.

Ray:     Yes, and the collaboration develops a certain level of confidence in your peers. When you are working on a project with shared goals and aspirations, as we did, you develop confidence in each other and experience a level of comfort in knowing that we are all doing the same thing but in different settings.