Add to students’ discomfort a requirement for computer collaboration, and anxiety multiplies. Although an increasing number of students every year come to first-year writing class already experienced with word processors, spreadsheets, and databases and even with electronic mail and the World Wide Web, the use of these tools for collaborative planning and writing can nonetheless be disconcerting. The use of any platform, even a pen, for collaborative planning and writing unsettles many.

The busy lives of these students make the continuation of their collaborative groups outside of class almost impossible: conflicting work schedules, family responsibilities, transportation problems, and heavy course loads. The classroom itself therefore is the only place to establish writing communities--indeed learning communities of any kind--for many of them. The opposite situation applies to our online students, for whom coming to campus at the same time or at any "reasonable" time between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday is difficult or impossible. Designing writing assignments that foster both writing partnerships and a comfortable environment are critical to their success in composition classes and possibly in their college careers.

This presentation will describe some strategies for using pen-and-paper or electronic mail to share personal histories and foster community in introductory writing and writing-intensive introductory literature classes, using photographs from students' private collections as the source for their stories and using personal approaches to literary criticism as a strategy for understanding fictional stories. Nontraditional students in particular, whether at two-year colleges or at universities, find that such writing partnerships and small groups enable them to enter the classroom and college community as well as to discover a written voice for identifiable audiences.

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