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Consulting and collaborative writing connections.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Collaborative writing is a frequent and rhetorically complex activity common to most environments. However, educators know little about how to teach workplace activities such as collaboration, negotiation, and consultation in academic environments. This paper presents experiential learning as a pedagogical model, describes a program utilizing the model, and provides an example of a course promoting academic-workplace collaborations through genre-based writing assignments (e.g., marketing brochures, promotional materials, grants) and interactive activities (e.g., client interviews, user and task analyses, usability tests).

Experiential learning has been defined as a "direct encounter with the phenomena being studied rather than merely thinking about the encounter, or only considering the possibility of doing something about it" (Borzak, 1981 : 9 qtd. in Brookfield, 1983). As applied to teaching writing, experiential learning is a pedagogy that encourages active experimentation and applies classroom skills through the collaboration and consultation to a community outside of the university. Many experiential learning courses ask students to draw on the combination of coursework and their experiences to engage the community in ways that benefit both (see, for instance, Cooke and Williams, 2004). Community organizations often need help with the writing tasks students are learning about, and students often need the opportunity to practice completing certain tasks with audiences beyond the classroom. At first glance, the experiential learning model may appear to be a market-based approach built on simple supply and demand principles (with the student as cheap labor) rather than on established and emerging theories of teaching composition. However, immersing students in communication contexts outside the university--like workplace and institutional discourse communities--can help students apply rhetorical principles of audience, purpose, and context to their own writing practices. Moreover, experiential learning provides opportunities for collaborative writing, consulting, and negotiating, all skills necessary to students' development after their academic career ends.

It is our intention to outline a pedagogical paradigm based in composition theory which we feel teaches students to write within (and for) particular workplace environments and creates lasting relationships between the university and public communities. We begin with a brief review of collaborative and professional writing research, then illustrate the idea of collaborative consulting in teaching writing skills by way of example, and end with a brief discussion of experiential learning as a model for teaching writing.

Theoretical Framework

Over the past decade, research on collaborative writing has received an increasing amount of attention in composition research. To varying degrees, theorists perceive of writing as collaborative, social, and context sensitive. Ede and Lunsford (1986) claim quite simply that writing is a process that begins with the intention to write, ends with a product, and is collaborative only insofar as writers...

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