When students write for money: Reflections on teaching grant writing through experiential learning

Abstract

Experiential learning plays a significant role in our professional writing pedagogy, as the pedagogical strategies of EL situate students within authentic purposes, audiences, and consequences for their writing. These authentic contexts provide students with opportunities to understand unfamiliar genres and written conventions of professional discourse as well as the ethical and social commitments of writing with accuracy, clarity, and concision. One especially successful approach to experiential learning in professional writing is through community-engaged grant writing. In this project, students collaborate with community partners to identify a funding need, target a donor, and write a grant proposal on behalf of a community organization. Along the way, students have guided practice in research methods to solicit organizational information, persuasive communication, writing in multiple new genres (meeting agendas, progress reports, grant narratives), strategies for collaboration, and project management. This discusses the ways we have employed grant writing as an community-engaged experiential learning project over the past decade. We attend to how grant writing projects serve as a way of fulfilling institutional learning goals and the goals of the Common Academic Program (CAP) as we outline the sequence of activities and that students produce as they develop a grant proposal for a community partner. Finally, we discuss our personal reflections on the significance of grant writing as well as students’ reflections on the impact of grant writing on their vocational choices and professional preparation.