So…service
learning…community literacy…bringing the classroom into the real world. Engaging
students with community-based writing projects can show students the meaningful
impact that writing can make. It can also show them real world applications for
what they are learning in the classroom, taking the learning from theory to
practice. But what does it mean to provide students with real world writing
experiences?
In
“Tactics of Hope” Paula Mathieu gives some great examples of what not to do in
planning for community-based writing experiences. It is far too easy for
professors and universities to establish relationships with outside
organizations which only benefit the university. These are often shallow, short
term relationships with no history or mutual goals. Mathieu even cites examples
of students being sent to outside organization with no prior understanding
being established. One of the many challenges of community-based writing
projects is the academic calendar. Outside organizations do not operate on a
semester-based system, and trying to fit a meaningful writing project into a
semester is both challenging and somewhat artificial. Mathieu states that
“Writers working in the public realm often need a long-term vision to get a
sense of the impact of their work.” Often a commitment beyond a semester is
needed to see progress with such programs.
Another
challenge that is seen in community-based writing projects is that the
university, and by extension the student, is seen as the expert and the
community is seen as somehow deficient or in need of fixing. Such centering of
the university is why “service learning” leaves such a bad taste in the mouths
of organizations. Mathieu spends a great deal of time explaining that these
organizations and the people in the community have their own expertise and
knowledge that should also be centered and honored. She says:
“The
value in all of this work is to create relationships that not only claim
reciprocity in a general way, but create bodies of knowledge that undercut
elitist notions that frame communities, especially in urban areas, as sites of
problems that only academic experts can fix. Tactical projects prioritize and
exchange of skills or ideas over ameliorating a problem.”
In
other words, students are coming to partner and to learn versus to teach or
fix. I can imagine how, in certain situations, some students could eagerly try
to take on the role of the expert rather than as a partner or even as an
assistant in such relationships. Such an action by a student would lead to
failure, and the relationship would not produce what it might otherwise have
accomplished.
This
concern is elaborated on in another work, “Community Literacy and the Rhetoric
of Public Engagement” by Linda Flower. She writes:
“Community
members typically exist as participants in social projects, not as partners
with expertise who must be respected as agents in their own right. So to
the extent that such partnerships are diminished—and people from mainstream and
elite circles become experts, leaders, directors, service providers, and tutors—the
possibility of a community for inquiry with others, across difference,
evaporates.”
What
might students be striving to do instead of usurping the lead in such projects?
Flowers writes that “The community literacy I am hoping to document is an intercultural
dialogue with others on issues that they identify as sites of struggle.”
Mathieu’s work reflects on the ideal working relationship as well. The term
“tactical” is used throughout “Tactics of Hope.” Mathieu uses the phrase first
coined by Michel de Certeau. Of tactics, Mathieu says that “Tactics are
available when we do not control the space,” and that “Tactics seek
rhetorically timely actions.” Combined these two brief descriptions leave one
with a clear idea of action in an unfamiliar area. Mathieu further states that:
“A tactical academic balances personal convictions with close connections and
dialogue about the work he or she does, not to arrive at final answers but to
build some useful projects that hopefully will do good work in the world.” This
gives any community-based service project a very clear goal and a pragmatic
focus.
This
is an active, engaged form of rhetoric. Flower writes “If rhetoric and
composition is to achieve the personal, public, and social significance to
which the field lays claim, it must recover the practice of “doing” rhetoric in
its wider civic and ethical sense.” She continues: “The rhetoric of making a difference
demands more than critique from academics or conventionally acceptable prose
from students; it required an audience-attuned rhetoric, capable of turning
critical reflection and personal exploration into rhetorical action.”
What
does such action look like? We often think of writing as a disengaged action,
and we often teach writing to be separate and free of the personal. Strict
academic writing tries to eliminate the personal altogether. But for
community-based literacy projects to be effective, they must embrace the
personal. Flower writes:
“But
for disenfranchised groups, denying one’s identity as a working-class student,
an inner-city African American, or a migrant laborer denies the reality of
social difference, of power, and inequality—the very issues these groups want
us to see as public concerns. When a discourse insists its members
suspend, ignore, or neutralize the identities of women, workers, peoples of
color, gays, and lesbians, it effectively removes those realities from
deliberation.”
What
does this mean for my writing classroom? I feel that while community-engaged
learning can be an important addition to some composition classrooms, I feel it
doesn’t really work with the time constraints that I work under as an adjunct
professor. However, I still feel like I gain important and validating tactics
from these readings. At the community college I teach at, as well as the
university I teach at, my students are the disenfranchised public described by
Flower. They are working students, first generation college students,
immigrants, first generation American, they are multilingual students, they are
a diverse mixture of students that I am privileged to teach. These two readings
reaffirmed for me the importance of empowering students to write what matters to
them, and to use their voices to promote positive change in their communities.
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