This paper discusses the second year of a cooperative penpal project between preservice teacher education students and middle school students. Following a review of the literature to provide a context for this kind of research, the paper offers demographic data about the students on both sites (n=27 at each site) and describes visits to the middle…

For a teacher educator, a 2-year leave in Australia inspired her to replicate in Canada an Australian penpal project in which preservice elementary teachers wrote to school children who answered the letters and eventually met their penpals. Her preservice secondary teachers, English majors, wrote to eighth-grade students taught by one of her…