We think you'll find these pencil portraits provide especially vivid images of writers putting literacy to work in a wide range of contexts-- ranging from the Center for Writing and Learning at Oregon State University to a course, entitled Rhetorical Education: Contemporary Approaches, offered at Colgate University in New York. Thanks to everyone who contributed descriptions of their projects for this volume of the CLNN.
With an eye toward next spring, please note that the Community Literacy Network Special Interest Group session has been scheduled for the 1996 4Cs: SG1.10, March 28, 1996, 6:45-7:45 p.m.
Several contributors in this volume explicitly ask for responses or comment on prior portraits. This reminds us: please feel free to use the e-mail addresses included in the newsletter to respond directly to the CLNN member posing the question. Then, if you'd also send that post to us, we'll distribute it in early March so others can consider your insights.
We continue to welcome pencil portraits of readers' areas interests, either an initial sketch or an update.
Elenore Long and Linda Flower, editors
Marjorie Roemer (Director of Composition), Margaret Waller (faculty of the graduate school of social work), and I (Director of the campus writing center) have established writers' groups for students whose academic success is challenged in some way. For example, many are second or third language speakers; some are single parents; and some, for a variety of academic and socio-economic reasons, have not yet applied to the college. They meet once a week with two writing tutors, one of whom is a candidate for the Masters degree in Social Work -- everyone writes and everyone shares their writing. The results have been gratifying. The students' writing has improved, but more important, it has become a way to take control of their lives. We're interested in exploring other uses of what Gere calls the "extracurriculm."
This semester, we're also working on a service learning project which involves eight students in a first-year composition course and an inner-city community center. The students' research project is to create a newsletter targeting African-American, Latino, and Southeast Asian populations. Since the students are themselves members of those populations, they are in a unique position to make a meaningful contribution to their community. With the assistance of tutors from the Writing Center, the students are writing interviews, doing needs assessments, and writing articles. Some of the difficulties? Transportation, scheduling, cancelled meetings....
I am an instructor at the Center for Writing and Learning (CWL) at Oregon State University. The director of the center is Dr. Lisa Ede whose portrait appeared in an earlier issue. The hub of the CWL is the Writing Center which, under the able guidance of Dr. Jon Olson, is staffed by undergraduates, graduates, and occasional community volunteers. I coordinate a study skills program which features a How to Succeed in College class. Many students sign up for our Conversant Program which partners international students with English speakers for an hour of conversation each week.
Much of my time is focused on extended education and that's where the fun really begins! My first outreach venture was to set up a community writing group. Even in a university community with a strong literary network, I've found there are many writers still writing alone who respond quickly to the idea of getting support from other writers. I facilitate their first sessions--we talk about reader response, about establishing trust and community and then we get to work. One particularly successful group has in it a photographer who markets his pictures and wants to hone the word packages that go with them. Another in the group is a retired language arts teacher who is making her way into the world of free lancing. Another is a graduate student completing his masters project--a collection of short stories. Yet another is a retired journalist who is writing a book. Each writer brings drafts for everyone, and we generally only look at one person's work each week. The energy that sustains the group is their interest in the work in progress of each member. Did I mention that we hold our meetings in the quiet of weekday afternoons at Squirrel's Tavern, also known as the downtown learning center, a favorite gathering place for community folk, faculty, and students?!!
We've also been lucky here at the CWL to be visited by a group of third graders. I had been leading two small literary discussion groups at my daughter's elementary school; we'd been using materials and methods from Junior Great Books which features interpretive questions and shared inquiry. Since I can't resist the opportunity to involve kids with writing, the groups were soon working on rough drafts of whatever kind of writing they wanted--lots of short stories, some poetry, some essays. One day after school we loaded up a bus with 24 budding authors and came to the Writing Center for reader response to their efforts. Jon Olson had the staff ready and soon the room was abuzz with writers of all ages talking about the work at hand. The children were delighted to be taken seriously as writers and Jon said the staff was completely energized by the event. We are planning a repeat this Spring! Stay tuned.
[From A Guide for Change: Resources for Implementing Community Service Writing by Ann Watters and Marjorie Ford]
We believe that several important goals are accomplished through community service writing. Such writing helps develop audience awareness, since students write not only for an audience of peers and an instructor but also for interested readers outside the classroom, giving student writers a real stake in writing not only to get a grade but to communicate information and ideas. Community service writing also gives students more investment in their learning and provides opportunities for them to reflect critically on their efforts and on important social and community issues. And in many respects, community service writing links student writers to the ancient roots of the discipline of rhetoric, encouraging them to take a public stand on important issues....
When the Community Service Writing Project evolved at our institution, we chose the name to reflect our desire to enable students to write in different discourse communities, both on and off campus, and to reinforce the connections between the academy and its surrounding community. Our use of the terms "service learning" and "study-service connection" reflects, as well, the appropriate goal of college courses with service components: to create opportunities for combining community or public work and academic work in ways that enhance each, while stressing the mutuality of the giving and receiving in any community-based action, whether research, writing, or direct service. If we accept the view of Marian Wright Edelman, in her often quoted line, "Service is the rent we pay for living," we can see service as something we give back for what we have received or are receiving. And if we take the opportunity in journals, discussion sections, essays, and other assignments to examine and reflect on the service experience, we have genuinely engaged in critical thinking, in reading and writing, and in learning.....
One of the fundamental purposes of the first American universities was to prepare individuals to become good citizens. Recent increases in crime, violence, homelessness, the breakdown of traditional family support systems, and the decline of quality of our public schools have led many educators and politicians to acknowledge that we are at a crucial juncture in our national history. Now is the time to return to that principle of higher education which emphasizes the role that high schools and universities can play in preparing students to be citizens through service to their communities....
As a Ph.D. student at Pitt, an important part of my work has involved serving as a mentor and literacy leader at Pittsburgh's Community Literacy Center (CLC), which is described in the first issue of CLNN. While I've spent (and am spending) productive time in both Inform and Hands-On Production projects at the CLC, my dissertation work will center on Wayne Peck's evolving Struggle project there, a program whose goal is to provide means for urban teenagers and parents to develop, articulate, and reflect critically on their life goals and plans for pursuing those life goals; specifically, the program seeks to provide means for urban--particularly African American--teens to develop both an agenda and a forum from which to articulate that agenda. Struggle aims to provide the needed context for critical reflection and action planning to support their work. As I see it, central to Peck's project is a belief in the need for means through which urban teenagers and parents can develop ways of imagining themselves and their lives so that they can project future selves and plans for developing those future selves. The project, then, is an attempt to produce both the "promise of a future" and "the procedures for effecting that future"--that is, to support participants in re-thinking and re-constructing their daily practices--and to do this on both individual and collective levels. It seeks to help to orient participants', including mentors' and literacy leaders', selves toward citizenship and community rather than toward single-minded professionalism and/or consumerism.
My dissertation will treat Struggle to explore the nexus between subjectivities as ways of seeing and doing, on one hand, and material conditions, on the other, and to explore how subjectivities are changed in incremental but also transformative ways. E.g., I'm asking questions like these: how does an inner city teen move from a Cinderella self-conception, in which she marries the boyfriend whom she believes will become a pro ballplayer, to one in which she seriously involves herself in the daily pursuit of her goal of becoming a vet? Or how do we, as academics, move from professional lives in which we do psychologically distanced research studies or cultural critiques of community practices to professional lives in which we bring those studies and critiques into community practices, not as an authoritative set of directions but as tools for genuine participation?
To do this work, the dissertation will combine quasi-ethnographic (anecdotal) sections with historical sections, both of which will try to speak to and pursue theoretical concerns, though not, primarily, in essay or argument forms. Rather, I'll try to adopt more "aesthetic" modes of knowledge production (e.g., story and metaphor) in my dissertation as an attempt to provide one set of possible insights into, and perspectives on, subjectivity and its (trans)formation. (In other words, to invoke Vicky Stein's project ,which really interests me and is described in an earlier issue of CLNN, I don't think that anyone -- and in my experience twelve-step programs don't try to -- can provide a detailed series of specific, universal instructions for changing an active alcoholic to a person pursuing recovery and in remission from her addiction. But--and in my experience twelve-step programs do try to provide this--I think that people can gain insight into how that transformation happens by listening to and reading descriptions of others' experiences.)
So, of course, these "aesthetic" modes can't produce a detailed analysis of subjectivity and its transformation or a series of steps to produce particular subjectivities and proof of those steps' viability any more than other methods can. Instead, my dissertation's narrative forms are an attempt to provide another kind of admittedly limited and provisional insight into these phenomena. I hope that this kind of insight might be useful both in understanding subjectivity and its transformation and in imagining how academics and community activists might develop collective programs that use writing as part of an attempt to change subjectivities. The dissertation's juxtapositions between my and other key participants' understandings of Struggle, as well as its juxtapositions between various narrative forms, will hopefully put in dialogue with each other the different conceptual universes represented by those of us participating in the project. Thus, I'd like to, in a small way, use narrative forms to foster dialogue between academic conceptual universes (e.g., of cultural criticism and cognitive rhetoric) and community discourses (e.g. of theology and community activism).
My interest in community literacy has developed through directing a Master of Arts in teaching program which has a strong literacy/ rhetoric/pedagogy component. A number of the courses in the program are taught by faculty in rhetoric and composition at Oregon State (including Lisa Ede, Chris Anderson, Cheryl Glenn, Vicki Collins), and students in all our master's programs have the opportunity to do coursework which bears on the history and theory of literacy education. Inasmuch as community literacy represents both a utopian project (at least from the standpoint of pedagogy and interdisciplinarity) and a set of current practices, institutional endeavors, pedagogical projects, I see myself primarily interested in defining just what it is about community literacy as an emerging field of study/interest which actually connects it to other, historically-embedded fields and practices--Deweyism in education, for instance, or various cultural projects which have always attempted to build bridges between schools and communities.
My background (before academia) included community arts administration and I'm very conscious of links between what other cultural centers have always done in the community and what recent theoretical discussion on community literacy claims. I've just completed a project which brought teachers, OSU students, and local writers together to co-create school curriculum, a project which has as one of its tangents the exploration of community literacy as a non-orthodox model for curriculum design. A summary of this project will appear in The English Leadership Quarterly in Feb., l996, issue.
At Colgate we're developing a proposal for a new undergraduate course. At present the description goes like this:
Rhetorical Education: Contemporary American Approaches This course will offer an introductory history of rhetorical education in the United States since the nineteenth-century "invention" of composition instruction at Harvard University. The chief focus of the course, though, is a survey of contemporary theories of rhetorical education. In the United States today, students are taught to write and -- perhaps more importantly -- taught to think about writing through a wide variety of pedagogies. These pedagogies, in turn, are propelled by competing and even contradictory theories of rhetorical education, including current-traditionalist, cognitivist, social constructionist, expressivist, and postmodern theories.
When students in COMP 264 have become familiar with the major theories of rhetorical education and the corresponding pedagogies, they will examine these in the venue of writing center theory. Students will have an opportunity to put theory of rhetorical education into practice the practice of tutoring, either in the Colgate Writing Center or in community service. The class will then reflect upon the ideals of theory, the exigencies of practice, and the correspondences -- and tensions -- between the two.
We'd appreciate any advice that the net might give us on how this course might best be structured!
I am currently teaching composition, linguistics and literature at Salt Lake Community College. Two summers ago, I worked for the Neighborhood Academic Initiative housed within the University of Southern California (where I did my graduate work). I am mostly interested in community literacy within urban settings, primarily with those affected by gang culture. As of yet, I have not been involved with any community literacy project here in SLC, but am on the lookout for a way to get involved. I may be working as a mentor to a student in a school which attempts to rehabilitate adolescents who have been in trouble with the law -- usually gang related -- this year, but administrative difficulties have pushed the start date of my participation back.
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ABOUT THE COMMUNITY LITERACY NETWORK NEWSLETTER: Across colleges and universities, many of us are developing university courses and lines of inquiry to address issues of community literacy. And it seems that we are asking many of the same questions: how might literacy, social institutions, and education work together to define and support social action? Our university courses that address community literacy typically share a commitment to innovative, hands-on learning through socially relevant experiences. Yet each of us teaching such a course must shape these commitments according to specific constraints and opportunities. Because of this shared dynamic, we educators have much to learn from one another; conversely, we stand to lose if working in isolation. The aim of the Community Literacy Network Newsletter is to put educators interested in issues of community literacy in touch with one another. The network is sponsored by the Community Literacy Center, a collaborative between the Community House and Carnegie Mellon University, both in Pittsburgh, PA. Editors are Dr. Linda Flower and Dr. Elenore Long.
For information or to send us your contributions to the next volume, please contact Kathy Meinzer [km39+@andrew.cmu.edu]. Postal address:Carnegie Mellon / Center for the Study of Writing & Literacy / Dept. of English / 259 Baker Hall / Pittsburgh, PA 15213. (412) 268-6444