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Writing Partners @ Sac State (WP) began in the summer of 2005 in conjunction with the Community Engagement Center to provide a Service-learning experience that offers Sac State students an opportunity to teach and learn through a letter exchange with students from elementary schools in the Sacramento region. Former English Department faculty member Dr. Catherine Gabor, a co-creator of the original Writing Partners Program, piloted WP with one of her classes and the CEC has since been involved by facilitating partnerships between Sac State faculty and elementary school teachers. For the past ten years, faculty across campus, e.g. Nursing, Teacher Education, EOP, First Year Experience (FYE) Seminars, and Composition, have incorporated this pedagogical tool into their courses.

Resources

• Writing Partners One-Pager
• Writing Partners User Guide
• Writing Partners Toolkit
• Writing Partners Procedures
• Writing Partners Timeline
• Writing Partners Information Video

For more information about the Writing Partners @ Sac State program, please contact:

Noel Mora, Community Partnership Coordinator, noelmora@csus.edu

Goals and Learning Outcomes

The overall goals of Writing Partners @ Sac State include:

• Building and/or strengthening literacy
• Enhancing knowledge of writing through a letter exchange with a real audience
• Connecting Sac State students with K-12 students in the Sacramento region
• Using the letter exchange to help Sac State students articulate and reinforce their identities as ‘college students’
• Building relationships through literacy
• Encouraging elementary school students to begin to prepare for college and see themselves as college eligible

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How Writing Partners Works

Writing Partners matches university students with elementary school students in a collaborative letter exchange. Through Writing Partners, students learn that writing has the power to help them make connections across communities and connect with others within their community.

Unlike pen pals, Writing Partners incorporates academic and social learning goals, and intentionally helps to cultivate literacy skills. Both university and elementary school students are asked to think about more than just the basic letter format and to consider how to build relationships through writing, basic document design, and the nature of the audience. Writing Partners enhances creative and critical thinking skills and encourages a sense of authority in students as writers and as members of the community.

Building Multilingual Relationships

Writing Partners offers the opportunity for Sac State and k12 students to build multilingual relationships by exchanging letters in different languages. This allows students to improve on multilingual literacy, while also allowing students who are more fluent in another language, like Spanish, to write confidently and comfortably.

To know more about the importance of language exchange and how Writing Partners has contributed read this article Writing With Joy: Building Multilingual Relationships Through Community-Engaged Language and Literacy Work.