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prospective employer can form an image about them
and make a possible hiring judgment. Because there is
so much competition for jobs, these students realized
how very important it is to learn to communicate
through the writing medium.

Students were not the only beneficiaries for this
activity. One important lesson learned by the volun-
teer teacher was the great need for students to learn
basic “survival” skills. As the instructor noted in her
report to the Corps, “Many students are seriously
lacking in fundamental knowledge about how to even
start a successful job-hunting plan. In one of my
classes of 24 students, only three turned in applications
that the BPE and I considered to be neat and complete
enough for a prospective employer to even contem-
plate employing them. The students themselves were
surprised at the number of errors in their applications
and then grateful that we had done such an in-depth
critique. As one student put it, ‘I can understand now
why I’ve had such a hard time even getting called in
for an interview.’”

Like the team whose unit was just described, most
Corps T-Teams attempt to tailor classroom units to the
needs of their students. Most also demonstrate the
relationship between communication proficiency and
problem solving. Further, most teams try to develop
communication skills activities which have discernible
relevance to course content and which are grounded in
the working world. The functional value of literacy is
sometimes particularly enhanced in classes in which
BPEs emphasize the real-world necessity of correct
spelling and punctuation, effective organization of
ideas, clarity, and polish.

What had impressed us about the SWRL project was
its success in improving student attitudes about the
real-world necessity for communication skills. Our
experience in the Corps has been similarly gratifying.
For Corps teachers, the old adage “Secing is believing”
is reflected in altered student attitudes—changes which
teachers alone have been unable to inspire in years of
futile classroom preachments. And we have discov-
ered that when student attitudes about communication
skills undergo favorable change, the change is trans-
lated into enhanced learning. Ina sense, the real value
of having the BPE in the classroom lies, not in teaching
the teacher’s class, but in reshaping student attitudes.

Project evaluations, based on 64 T-Teams working
with approximately 1300 students, confirm the benefi-
cial effects of the BPE in the classroom. Virtually every
participating faculty and BPE gave enthusiastic ap-
proval to the experiment, and 84% of participating

@

students deemed their Corps learning experience to be
substantially worthwhile.

Whether the Corps will survive over the long run is
an open question, of course. One thing, however,
seems clear. Educators will have to do more than they
are currently doing if our students are going to meet
the twenty-first century with real-world communica-
tion skills. The Corps is our attempt to help students
do just that.

Stanley P. Witt, Director, Community Communication
Corps

For further information, contact the author at Pima
Community College, 8202 E. Poinciana Drive, Tucson,
AZ 85730.

 

Suanne D. Roveche, Editor

December 8, 1989, Vol. XI, No. 30

©The University of Texas at Austin, 1989
Further duplication is permitted by MEMBER
institutions for their own personnel.

 

INNOVATION ABSTRACTS ts a publicaton of the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD),

EDB 348, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, (512) 471-7545. Subscriptions are available to nonconsor-
tium members for $40 per year. Funding in part by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and the Sid W. Richardson Foundation.
Issued weekly when classes are in session during fall and spring terms and once dunng the summer. ISSN 0199-106X.

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