Rider's English Education program partners with middle school to create a compilation of student writing

On Monday, Dec. 14, the eighth-grade students from the Helen Fort Middle School in the Pemberton Township school district received their own personal bound copies of their collected writing at a pizza party and reception held in their honor on Rider’s Lawrenceville campus. These students were the first from the Pemberton area to take part in Rider's School/University Writing Partnership, a program that connects Rider’s graduate and undergraduate English Education pre-service teachers with student writers.

Amanda Schott '16, a master's degree candidate in educational leadership at Rider who also received her teacher certification through Rider’s graduate-level Teacher Certification Program, teamed three of her eighth-grade language arts classes with Dr. Kathleen Pierce’s students who were taking the Teaching English Language Arts course. 

Starting in September, writing workshops were conducted between the eighth-grade students and their university mentors via Google Drive. The eighth graders produced three distinct rounds of writing, and the pre-service English teachers responded with feedback then editing support. The eighth graders wrote on the same topic across three different genres: narration, poetry and essay writing. Initially, writers responded to this prompt: "Think of a time when a situation required you or someone you know to bounce back from difficulty. This ability to bounce back — or rebound — is called resiliency, resilience, or grit. Tell the story of the difficulty and the resiliency."

Dr. Kathleen Pierce, Rider associate professor in the Department of Graduate Education, Leadership, and Counseling, ran the Writing Partnership with Notre Dame High School in Lawrence until 2013. "The partnership creates authentic learning within the campus-based course as students work closely with adolescent learners through their writing and discuss problems of real-world teaching practice in class," she says. "In turn, the eighth graders receive individualized attention from teachers who are committed to putting their own learning into immediate practice."

About 60 eighth graders participated in the School/University Writing Partnership. Though they did not meet their university writing mentors face-to-face until the culminating celebration in December, the eighth graders considered their mentors’ advice and feedback in choosing a piece of writing generated during the partnership to submit for publication in the compilation booklet. In the end, the book presented personal accounts from students that ranged from light-hearted depictions of football games to more serious moments such as losing a parent to cancer. "The feedback from our university students encouraged the eighth grade writers to harness their stories and shape them into art," says Pierce. 

In seeing their work presented together in formal, bound booklets, the eighth-grade students were also able to take away tangible representations of their writing and to see the work of their classmates. For Rider students, this semester-long experience provided real-world opportunities to mentor adolescents in their writing and expand their teaching practice. 

Reflecting on the value of the experience for everyone involved, Schott quotes from William Nicholson’s Shadowland: “We read to know we are not alone.” She adds: “This also applies to the power of the writing produced by my students with the guidance of their Rider mentors. The impact of this Partnership has been immense. Students have found a love of writing that they may not have had before and some found a connection with a mentor who was simply there to say: ‘I understand what you're going through, and it's going to be okay. You are brave.’"   

Schott said her students “reaped profound benefits due to their Rider mentors and their mentor, Dr. Pierce."