Students Writing across Cultures: Teaching Awareness of Audience in a Co-curricular Service Learning Project

Abstract

We examine a model for outofschool literacy instruction using language and cultural available designs for teaching awareness of audience across cultures. The literacy model described here engages undergraduate and secondary students in a cross-cultural storytelling exchange and calls for anticipating the needs of young readers who do not share linguistic or cultural backgrounds. We describe the process of helping the writers to understand their Rwandan audience and highlight some of the linguistic and cultural issues that arose in the early drafts and persisted throughout the editing process despite direct feedback. We describe the workshops in which we discussed available linguistic and cultural designs and track some of the responses of the writers. And finally, we examine a story from the third volume for evidence that the writers had addressed the needs of the Rwandan readers in their stories.