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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