MAD HATTER 4

 

THE COMMUNITY AS CLASSROOM: LEARNING AT THE
INTERSECTION OF COLLEGE AND COMMUNITY

A crucial role of the community college is to enhance the chances
of success for students who are not adequately prepared to succeed
at other higher education institutions, or who have returned to school
to develop their career potential. In this context the comunity
college has been described by some as a "second-chance" institution,
Our writing project for business communications students has focused
on one specific approach which we believe helps our students get
their second chance where traditional classroom methods often do
not.

Many of our students have not developed a writing "voice" that is
appropriate for specific communication situations (in this case,
in the business world) because they have lacked exposure to such
rhetorical situations. Cognitive research has clearly established
that communication skills arise in response te social situations
or “communication events", and suggests that these students are
therefore culturally deprived to the extent they have not had the
Opportunity to observe and practice these communication skills in
appropriate situations and real-life contexts.

They are thus often not ready to tackle writing assignments which
require this knowledge of the world. tore broadly speaking, they
have not developed a necessary sense of self in the community. They
often founder in their attempts at appropriate language for these
assignments; some revert to jargon and wordiness as a way of distancing
themselves from the product and of coping with the fear of exposing
their writing inadequacies; and they respond indifferently to teaching
methods which isolate specific writing skills and present them out
of context. Their writing, by its very nature, becomes a public
and permanent record of failure. The conventional experience of
these students is that the teacher zooms in for a closer lock at
errors. It's no wonder that students shrink and lose their "voices"
in such situations, sometimes reacting with hostility to their writing
instructors and classes, becoming poor attenders, dropping out, or
seeking easy solutions like the "fill-in-the-blanks" approach to
various business writing formats.

The college can help these students by providing an appropriate context
which gives them exposure to and practice in "real-world" communication
situations. The innovations’ we have introduced are all directed
towards making the classroom an authentic workplace which naturally
generates the kinds of communicative situations our students need
to learn about.

1. With the support of the college and the business community,
we were able to enlist local organizations as real clients for
our students. These clients defined a topic or problem area
for research, met periodically with a team of students assiqned
to the task, and provided an evaluation of the final report.

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