Adopt-a-Nonprofit: A Project in Persuasion and Collaboration

Abstract

The term &dquo;new&dquo; may be problematic, for the &dquo;new&dquo; offering is an old plan-the only plan until two years ago and an option for the last two years. As a result, the students need to be cautious about marketing the originality of this plan or its implementation costs-rather, they should emphasize exactly the opposite. The history extends beyond this plan, and these problems were not obvious previous to the ioo% plan.The real strength of this case lies in its ability to challenge the student to see that life, communication, and business are tricky things, and their trickiness must be navigated. While brainstorming solutions and approaches to this case, one of my students jokingly suggested quitting the job because it was too demanding. I pointed out that this might be problematic when it was discovered the next job was just as demanding and that it would be impossible to change jobs every two weeks before challenges crossed their desks. With appropriate training, students will find these sorts of realistic problems easier to approach, and the confidence they develop will assist them in that approach as well.THIS ARTICLE describes a project that meets two common challenges in professional writing classes-teaching effective persuasive writing and finding appropriate team report topics for students in diverse majors. Besides providing practice in multiple communication tasks, it raises students' awareness of the importance of community service.Teams of three or four students research local nonprofit or campus service organizations and design their team projects to address their groups' main needs. After team projects are completed, each student writes a persuasive request letter soliciting donations or volunteers

Introduction to Effective Teaching of Technical Communication

“…Rather than rely solely on case studies, simulations, or textbook assignments, technical and professional communication teacher-scholars have emphasized the benefits of experiential learning because it affords students with opportunities to blend theory and practice by applying their newly learned professional communication skills to real world situations Henson & Sutliff, 1998;Huckin, 1997;Matthews & Zimmerman, 1999;Spears, 1996). Two common experiential learning approaches advocated by teacher-scholars in the field are client projects and service learning.…”