The "new discourse city" of older writers: Aging and disability as assets to collaborative learning

The purpose of this chapter is to describe new forms of collaboration that occur between undergraduate and graduate-level student writers and community partners who are senior citizens, some of them disabled and dying. We provide three case studies of writers working in a senior learning center, hospice, and a home care setting, examining the productive conflicts that arise in these community sites. By engaging in cross-generational life story projects, student and community participants come to see abstract concepts like rhetorical context and purpose in terms of specific strategies for interacting with diverse others. They learn that writing is inherently a generative, collaborative, and multivocal process, and that we are always accountable to others in creating texts. They find pleasure and meaning in working together, despite and sometimes because of their conflicts. We suggest that composition scholars and teachers re-think their meanings of "community" and "collaboration" and re-consider writing as an act of collaborative risk-taking, experimentation, and imagination. Teaching and learning across the divides of age and ability remind us that writing is, above all, a living social act.