Writing Across the Curriculum

“Service Learning: Writing for/about the Community”

Chair: Joseph A. Barda

Robert Morris College, Chicago, Illinois

jbarda@robertmorris.edu

“From the Academy to the Community and Back Again, or, From the Paper to the Pavement”

Beth Edelstein and Amanda Gates

Towson University- Towson, Maryland

sbeth428@aol.com; agates1@towson.edu

Students entering first-year composition classrooms encounter, often for the first time, an academic language and culture far removed from those of their home communities. We, as two novice teachers, will draw on experiences with the diverse population of students in Baltimore to examine the intersection of service learning and writing in our city.

Baltimore is a city of approximately 650,000 people, the majority of whom are African-American. Nearly a quarter of Baltimore residents live below the poverty line, in neighborhoods that are often highly stratified by race and class. In this paper, we will show the steps taken to design a course that takes first-year composition students from the classroom to the streets of Baltimore and back again.  Through their re-exploration of Baltimore neighborhoods, students will learn ways to articulate the richness and variety of the discourses of their home communities, and examine ways in which they can use writing to benefit these communities. Our paper will explore ways of promoting students' development of pride in themselves and their heritage, of fostering a bilingualism that enables students to negotiate the rocky terrain between academic language and their home languages, and of encouraging the use of tools from the academy in their daily lives.

Using lecture, dialogue and experiential activities, we will encourage participants to join in discussing the development of a curriculum rich in civic engagement and writing experiences. 

“Tellers of Tales: Constructing the Life Stories of the Elderly in ENG 340 Gender and Autobiography”

Dr. Carolyn Perry

Westminster College- Fulton, Missouri

perryc@westminster-mo.edu

Because we live in a postmodern world, where blurring the line between fact and fiction is a given, autobiographical writing stands as a vibrant literary form, raising numerous questions about identity, memory, and truth. Yet what can this mean to a group of undergraduates who, fulfilling a course requirement, spend an hour each week listening to senior citizens tell stories about their lives? That was the question I set out to answer when I designed my upper-level writing intensive course, Gender and Autobiography.

In 2001, I launched this project convinced that the theoretical and autobiographical writings I assigned for class would make far more sense if students saw life writing in the making. Each student was matched with a resident from the Fulton Presbyterian Manor. The students and residents met weekly to put down on paper the story of the residents’ lives. The students tape-recorded the stories of the residents, transcribed and edited them, and then wrote analyses of the autobiographies in light of what they learned in class. The final meeting was spent at a reception for all the residents who participated in the project, at which time the students presented the residents with spiral-bound copies of the autobiographies they had written together.

In addition to the pedagogical gains, I have found that both the students and the seniors benefit personally from the project. Even though many were reluctant to take on the project, they realized that they have what it takes to become active members in their community.

“Meeting the ‘Monster,’ Literature, and Social Engagement: Reading Frankenstein, Encouraging Critical Thought about ‘Difference,’ and Service Learning in the Composition Classroom”

Helen Doss, Ph.D.

City Colleges of Chicago, Malcolm X College- Chicago, Illinois

hdoss@ccc.edu

The primary function of Composition courses is to provide students with the requisite skills to communicate effectively in prose for an academic audience. Teachers of Composition must encourage students to engage critically with and to write analytically about cultural and political issues of “difference” so that they can learn to be effective problem solvers and coalition builders while in college and once they graduate. It is essential that students understand that the work they do in class has significance in the community in which they live and the larger global society. In order to accomplish the aforementioned, there must be an integration of the personal rewards of community service with the learning objectives of the Composition classroom.

In this presentation, I shall focus on the experience of designing a service learning assignment, which required students to engage with the themes of difference, exclusion, and alienation in Frankenstein (1838, Mary Shelley), through community service to the dispossessed and the physically and mentally challenged. I shall delineate the ways in which the reading of the text and objectives of Freshman Composition were parallel, providing the opportunity by which students made productive connections among reading, thinking, and writing. Encouraging students to think critically about and to reflect upon their experiences working with those who were “different” economically, physically, and mentally, provided an unexpectedly fecund foundation from which they wrote truly innovative and well-argued essays that demonstrated a profound understanding of prejudice and the means by which it might be eliminated.