ABSTRACT
In 1999, twenty of my honors first year composition students at the University of Central Florida participated in a pilot course called “Writing and Reading in the Community.” The students served as tutors, readers, listeners, mentors, extra hands, researchers, observers, and, most importantly in the case of this course and for the argument of this paper, writers at a local Orlando school, Hillcrest Elementary. This school, the only foreign language magnet in central Florida, is an amazing model of public education as a democratizing enterprise, which I describe in more detail in a later section of this chapter. In 1998, President Clinton visited the campus, and the many public suggestions he made late in his term about the integration of foreign language into elementary education are significantly shaped by what's going on at Hillcrest and other schools like it.
