University Students Mentor Young Writers via E-mail.

Abstract

Through electronic mail, university students were engaged in a

service-learning project in which they mentored middle school students in writing development, study habits, and career planning. Students exchanged weekly e-mail messages and shared writing samples. Both groups reflected on the effectiveness of their contributions to the project. As a celebratory activity, the middle school students visited the university campus and attended class with their buddies.

Introduction

Academic service-learning is a means for college-level students to learn through an experience in which they apply skills by addressing a community need or social problem. Such service-learning provides concrete experiences that when paired with the synthesis of how the service relates to the course content stimulates growth and strengthens student's positive attitudes toward learning. The Collaborative E-mail Project was developed to provide education majors with a technology activity through which they gain and apply knowledge about language arts activities in the classroom while participating in service-learning. The education majors served as writing mentors to eighth grade students via e-mail correspondence. The participants wrote weekly e-mail messages focusing on various topics relating to the language arts curriculum and school life. This project provided a unique and innovative opportunity for education students to apply knowledge and theory about teaching language arts in a real situation that went beyond the typical practicum assignment.

The Collaborative E-mail Project is based on the belief that education majors would benefit from additional practicum experiences, technology activities, and service-learning opportunities. The middle school language arts teacher's instructional practices closely matched the theory and teaching strategies that are included in the university methods course. Therefore, connecting the university students with her classes provided an excellent opportunity to have all students observe the same effective teacher. At the same time, this project also opened the window to new ideas for using technology in ways that support our goals as teachers. Such experiences would hopefully encourage teachers (and future teachers) to try to integrate both technology and service-learning into their classrooms (Maring, Wiseman, & Myers, 1997).

This collaborative writing project provided an excellent opportunity for the university students to participate in a direct service-learning project as defined by Carpenter, Pittman-Page, & Flicker (1997). This project provided a service-learning activity that provided the students an opportunity to learn through active participation in thoughtfully organized service that met a community need. The Collaborative E-mail Project was integrated into and enhanced the academic curriculum and provided structured time for students to think, talk, write, and reflect about their service activities. In this project, the university mentors provided service by acting as an audience for the eighth grade writers, and the eighth graders, in mm, provided insightful observations into their language arts classrooms. Both groups of students received positive feedback and reinforcement from the comments of their e-mail buddies to their written messages. This project was an in-life instructional technique through which the students at both the university and middle school level utilized a hands-on activity to perform a function that in turn continued to improve their respective school communities.

The Service-Learning Cycle

Students often find direct service to be most rewarding type of service-learning, in that they work personally with the people that they are helping (Carpenter, Pittman-Page, & Flicker, 1997). This project addressed the four basic components of a service-learning project: planning, service, reflection, and celebration.

Planning

The initial planning for the project focused on the logistics of the project (number of participants and e-mail address exchange) and the development of the goals that would drive the service-learning activity. The goals of the project were to

* Involve university and middle school students in purposeful communication and mentoring activities that included special events.

* Enable university students to learn more about diversity by mentoring an adolescent middle school student (his or her personalities, interests, and abilities).

* Help university students learn about successful methods of instruction in language arts classes at the middle school level.

* Involve future teachers in a project showing how technology can be utilized to gather and share information through Internet services in real classrooms.

* Provide middle school students with a real audience for their writing and one-on-one feedback during each stage of the writing process.

* Provide middle school students opportunities to find out about college life, academics, class preparation, career planning, and the teaching profession.

Service

After student e-mail addresses were exchanged, the students completed a minimum of ten communication exchanges with their e-mail buddies. The suggested topics were correlated to match the university course syllabus and middle school writing assignments. The following topics were suggested for discussion:

* The language arts program at the middle school in terms of content, activities, and instructional methodology;

* Campus life and discussion of all aspects of what a college education entails in terms of course expectations, study habits, tuition, dorm life, and entertainment; and

* Student writing products such as short stories, editorials, and poems. In addition, participants provided their buddies with feedback on shared writing pieces.

As an introduction to the project, the university students produced videotapes of the university campus which were delivered to the middle school students. In return, the middle school students videotaped personal introductory messages for their buddies.

Throughout the twelve week project, the students exchanged samples of their writing and shared their ideas for improving language arts instruction. Thus, both groups of students were writing for genuine purposes and for authentic audiences as recommended by Tompkins and Hoskisson (Mating, Wiseman, & Myers, 1997). Through the e-mail project, the students had the opportunity to revise and improve the quality of their writing and to dialog with their e-mail buddies about their on-going writing projects and ideas.

As the students collaborated in the various phases of the writing process (brainstorming, topic selection, writing rough drafts, and publishing), they formed a community of learners. Such a community existed because members facilitated their own and each others' ideas, and learned by sharing, offering support, suggesting possibilities, and evaluating their ideas within a social context. (Mating, Wiseman, & Myers, 1997).

Reflection

As part of the project, both groups of students maintained notebooks of all e-mail correspondence sent and received. At the conclusion of the project, students analyzed their correspondences and summarized the content of the messages. Students were asked to reflect on how well they had been able to answer their buddies' inquiries, how helpful they thought they were to them, and in what ways they supported their partners' growth in writing. University students also summarized the information that they had received relating to the various topics of the language arts curriculum and formulated a philosophy of teaching language arts. The middle school students described what they had learned about university life and career goal setting. In addition, all students shared their experiences with classmates and made recommendations to the instructors about the benefits and problems of the project. After the end of the semester, the instructors also met and exchanged reflection notebooks from their respective classes.

Celebration

As a celebration activity, the middle school students visited the university campus on a field trip. In preparation for the campus visit, the students completed a shared writing activity based on a children's book about friendship, Rosie and Michael by Judith Viorst. Each student wrote parallel poetry stanzas about his or her e-mail buddy. The students included statements about how they were alike and different and how they had learned from each other. During the campus visit, the buddies used Polaroid cameras to record their time together on campus and added the photos to their friendship book as illustrations. In addition to meeting their buddies, the eighth graders toured campus, attended classes, and had a pizza picnic with their buddies.

Conclusion

The e-mail interaction appears to have fostered a sense of responsibility and genuine concern in the participants about ensuring their buddies' ability to complete the goals of the project. The university students assumed the role of mentors for their younger buddies and as such felt the responsibility towards providing them with the support and guidance they needed. Students from both groups were conscientious of the need for maintaining the required level of correspondence not only for their own grade, but also for the successful completion of the assignment by their buddies. This reciprocal sense of responsibility towards each other appears to have guided the students in their correspondence and ensured the maintenance of the level of correspondence needed for the successful completion of the project. Projects like the Collaborative E-mail Project can be used not only to provide a service-learning opportunity but also to help students develop the communication skills necessary for the demands of today's society.

References

Carpenter, D.C., Pittman-Page, D. & Flicker, B. (1997). Service learning: Meeting student and community needs. Teacher Education Journal of South Carolina, Fall, 14-18.

Maring, G.H., Wiseman, B.J. & Myers, K. (1997). Using the World Wide Web to build learning communities. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 41(1), 196-207.

Dr. Kaminski is Assistant Professor in the School of Education and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in literacy development. <[e-mail]>

Rebecca A. Kaminski, Clemson University, SC