Blogging in the Service Learning Classroom: One Practitioner’s Strategy for Bridging the Communication Gap Between Clients and Students
by Angie Rogers
Lecturer of English and Ph.D. Student in Curriculum & Instruction for Secondary English
Clemson University
Clemson University’s English department’s Advanced Writing Program provides courses geared towards improving the kinds of professional writing graduates from a variety of majors will be expected to perform as part of their work in the professional world. Technical writing and business writing courses help students hone their skills in producing clear, concise, and persuasive pieces of communication designed for both print and the Web. This final humanities requirement is often not a top priority for many students, who are generally immersed in the most demanding classes from their engineering, architecture, and other majors at that time.
To increase student engagement in these courses and help students understand the importance of developing strong communication skills before they enter the workforce, Clemson University’s English department created its Client-Based Program, which pairs Business writing or technical writing classes with clients both inside and outside the university. Originally funded by a grant from the South Carolina Sustainable Universities Initiative in 2002, the program has gradually gone from dealing exclusively with environmental projects to helping a variety of non-profit and for-profit businesses with many different types of writing projects.
Service learning projects, such as the ones students in Clemson University’s Advanced Writing Program, can have a major impact on students’ educational experience. Educational philosopher John Dewey (1933) argued that meaningful learning occurs when students experience the kind of intellectual growth that enables them to apply the learning to other disciplines. Alexander et al. (2000) report that students in a longitudinal study that sought to measure their degree of interest in service learning courses found that students both believe their projects “made a difference” and had a “heightened sense of civic responsibility” as a result of the experiences they had. As a lecturer who has participated in Clemson’s Advanced Writing Program for three years, I have witnessed the increased engagement from students in majors who have not typically been enthusiastic about taking another English class.
Writing projects for real clients benefit my students in a variety of ways. Not only do my students feel more motivated about the work that they are doing, they also learn a great deal about the communication process while gathering the necessary information from our clients while doing their projects. Learning how to write good emails, for example, becomes an essential part of completing a successful project.
Communication Challenges
With more than one class working with the same client, however, it is possible for students to bombard the clients with emails asking the same kinds of questions. During my first semester as a client-based writing teacher, I realized that my clients, two extremely busy women who work around the clock in the Healthy and Safety Division of the Upstate Red Cross, were being asked the same question via email repeatedly. I temporarily struggled to find a way to make answers to frequently asked questions readily available to students in all four sections of my class. Using BlackBoard was not an option since my clients did not have access to our BlackBoard discussion boards. As I pondered the possibility of using an outside forum, the solution suddenly came to me – Why not let my students create their own Web blogs?
Blogging as a Communication Medium
The following semester, I continued working with the Upstate Chapter of the American Red Cross, so I immediately had my students create both personal and team blogs using the free Blogspot blogging service (http://blogger.com). My clients were immediately interested in doing the same. As the semester progressed, I watched my students reflect on their personal experiences in the course on their personal blogs, while they corresponded with our clients on their team blogs. As students posted questions for the clients regarding the business plans they were creating, the problem of bombarding the clients with emails was quickly solved, as I would post on my own blog links to particularly rich interactions between the clients and groups that had gathered useful information that might benefit other groups. While our busy clients never found the time to post their reflections on their blog, they did regularly leave comments for students on the students’ group blogs.
Blogging and Service Learning: Three Different Models
Due to the success of student blogging to correspond with their clients during our work with the Upstate Chapter of the American Red Cross, I have since implemented a more structured program for student blogging in my client-based courses. While all students keep personal blogs on which they must post at least one substantive post per week on all aspects of the course, such as our mock job interview assignment, all client-based project groups are also required to keep weekly blogs on which they provide the client with updates on their progress on the projects. I model the assignment by keeping a weekly teacher blog on which I reflect on the assignments that we are completing. I provide links to all the student blogs in my courses on this blog and encourage students to read one another’s blogs and leave one another feedback. An early assignment in the class is to send a professional email to the client providing him or her with the link to the group blog. The following three examples of client-based projects outline some possible projects scenarios other practitioners might create in their own courses.
Model 1: Internal Client Project
One section of my classes is working with our university’s faculty senate this semester to create a manual for new faculty members. Currently, instructions on how to make purchases with university accounts or how to get reimbursements for different types of travel are located in various locations online, with tremendous amounts of text that often only apply to faculty in very specific disciplines, causing unnecessary reading for many members of the intended audience. Training materials for handling hazardous materials or doing research with certain kinds of chemicals are also arranged in an unorganized fashion. My students are working to create a manual that makes this information easy to access, more concise, and yet still complete. Because they do not have a great deal of prior knowledge about these topics, it is essential that they correspond with representatives from our faculty senate to ensure that they are organizing the manual in the proper fashion. The committee from the faculty senate checks the group blogs on a regular basis to address student questions. A current topic of discussion is whether or not the manual should be distributed via CD so that information already online can be available through hypertext links. Accessing the answers that students receive from the Faculty Senate members is efficient for all students in the class, who have links to the other groups’ blogs on my teacher blog.
One group encountered some communication challenges as they collaborated on their project. One member became particularly defensive about the situation, which became apparent in the writing on his blog. Responding to this situation, the client pointed out the positive contributions that each team member had made in his feedback to the group. He also reassured them that it was okay to have these problems and commented that
First, let me say that I (and all of the faculty!) empathize with the difficulties you have had tracking down the relevant regulations. This is a perfect illustration of the problems that faculty face in trying to make sure they are current on the regulations that pertain to their research. Your finished document should go a long way towards helping alleviate these problems that are currently experienced in parallel by countless faculty. It is unfortunate that many of the problems seem to have been concentrated in your team's area. Hopefully the remaining broken links can be repaired, or the relevant offices can direct you to hardcopies of the policies, before your course's final deadline (Client comment, 11/7/07).
After receiving the client’s comments, one of the group members blogged that
Group work is usually always a challenging task. I feel that there are pros and cons in dealing with working on a project in a group. Overall, I believe that being able to handle and overcome obstacles in a group setting is an excellent accomplishment. Being able to work with one another despite conflict is very important (Student post, 11/7/07).
She went on to say
To improve Phase 2, I think we should be more clear and more understanding of one another. It is easy to get frustrated with each other by not being on the same page. I think that we will be able to work the kinks out and create an impressive outcome for our client! (Student post, 11/7/07).
Model 2: Local, External Client Project
Two sections of my business writing classes are working with the Anderson Habitat for Humanity Re-Sale Store to create a Web site on which people can see items that have been donated to the store, can make donations to the Habitat for Humanity cause, or can find out how to volunteer their time. While many students have participated in the university’s yearly building of one Habitat for Humanity home during homecoming week, few, if any, have ever been to a Habitat for Humanity Re-Sale Store. As is the case in most non-profit agencies, our clients are extremely busy and can only spare a small amount of time to visit our classes to provide information to students about their organization. While a few students have found the time to visit the Re-Sale Store in Anderson, most of them are too busy to drive an hour to visit the store. For these reasons, group blogs have become a valuable communication tool with our clients. Students post updates about their work, as well as questions about potential links that might go on the site. Two current topics of discussion are whether or not we should use PayPal for donations on the site and the possibility of providing a Spanish translation of the content on the site. Once again, making these discussions available to the clients and all seven groups in both of these class sections is key to making completion of the Web site more efficient for all the busy people who are taking part in the project.
Model 3: External, International Client
Our final client for this semester is a particularly exciting one because it is Clemson’s Advanced Writing Programs very first international client-based project. The American Haitian Foundation is a non-profit foundation that supports a school in the Petite Riviere region of Haiti. Around 800 children receive clothing, food, and schooling via the work of this group. My students are in the process of re-designing the American Haitian Foundation Web site so that it is easy-to-update for the individuals who run the school in Haiti. It will include information on various fundraisers, as well as ways to “adopt” children at the school, providing monthly support to one specific child.
As the organization is based in Tennessee, it was far more challenging for our clients to visit us to discuss the project. Additionally, seeing the school in person is entirely impossible for my students, as much as we would like to visit. While the clients were able to fly in for one class meeting, we are using our blogs to gather all the other needed information to make this Web site as informative and persuasive as possible. One thing that is making our work easier is that Internet access at the school in Haiti is reliable and accessible to teachers and students. As present, my Clemson students are posting interview-style questions for children at the school in Haiti, hoping to learn more about what the school is like. Questions thus far include such topics as:
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What do you want to be when you grow up?
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What is your favorite thing about your school?
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How has going to school changed your life?
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What would you like to see on your school’s Web site?
Internet access at the school in Haiti has been sketchy since some damage done by a hurricane that ripped through the region. Students are continuing work on other aspects of the project as they wait for responses to these questions.
When I ask this class to get in groups to brainstorm things that need to go on their blogs, I am often amazed and how quickly they go right to work. I have even had to ask them to stop working on Fridays when our class time has come to an end and students from the next class who will use our room are staring eagerly from the hallway, waiting for us to leave.
Blogging is an easy way to facilitate communication between busy students, busy clients, and a busy teacher, regardless of where we might be located on the globe. Students seem to enjoy personalizing their personal and team blogs by giving them creative names, such as “Radioactive Livestock” for one team in the Model One, internal project. Our clients enjoy the ease with which they can read about what my students have done each week. As a writing teacher, I am pleased with not only how much writing my students from various majors are doing, but how much they are learning about the communication process through the blogs they are keeping. The practical application of their writing is made apparent to my students when they blog each week, knowing that their posts will reach a real audience, one that is expecting needed work from them. It gives them the kind of experience that they will soon need in the jobs they take when they graduate from Clemson. Moreover, as Dewey insisted growth was essential to meaningful learning early in the last century, blogging lets my students see that the way they write has a direct impact on whether or not their ideas are considered by others, something they can apply in any discipline.
Works Cited
Alexander, A.W., Vogelgesang, L.J., Ikeda, E.K., Yee, J.A. (2000). How service learning affects students: Executive Summary. Resources in Education, 36 (3).
Dewey, J. (1933). Experience and education. New York: MacMillian Publishing.
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