To begin, I’d
just like to mention how much I appreciated Steve Parks’ Gravyland. In particular, I was struck by the incredible frankness
with which he assessed both the successes and failures of his program, as well
as the regularity of his contextualization of such occurrences within both the
philosophical debates of composition studies as well as the very local debates
over educational institutions and community engagement at Temple University and
in the city of Philadelphia. Furthermore, I found the actual projects which he
described to be incredibly thought-provoking for how and to what extent my own
work in the classroom might engage with the larger community (and as might be
expected given my interests I was particularly intrigued by his description of
the No Restraints anthology of
writings by and about people with disabilities in Philly).
That
being said, however, I did find myself with one very big question after
finishing the book, and that was the following: how well were the students
involved in these courses prepared for the actual work they would be
confronting in the remainder of their college and professional careers? I
guess, part of my question comes down to the issue of what the purpose of the freshman-writing
classroom is. Is the purpose to foster the development of students as composers
(widely defined in a highly multimodal sense) or to foster the development of
students as engaged members of communities? Are the two mutually exclusive? I
think not, but I also think that Parks’ approaches, as he details them, might
not ultimately be the most balanced way to help my students develop as both engaged
community members and composers.
In
my deliberation of such issues, I found Dominic DelliCarpini’s essay “Coming
Down From the Ivory Tower: Writing Program’s Role in Advocating Public
Scholarship” from the Rose et al. volume Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn From Engagement incredibly useful. According to DelliCarpini, one way to bridge
the divide between the necessity of academic skill-building and civic
engagement is through students’ imagined professional identity. Or as he
himself describes it: “Engaging students in civic deliberations that ask them
to consider their future roles as professionals and as citizens of the
wider community through the lens of their present role as academics” (195). By engaging with such identities,
DelliCarpini argues that we might help students to both develop as academic
investigators in their chosen discipline while also teaching them the necessity
of making their investigations relevant to the communities and publics which
they are members of. Based on a notion that abandoning or too radically
reformulating the work of the freshman writing classroom into volunteer-style
civic engagement projects can undermine the very goals of such classrooms and
the academy as a whole, DelliCarpini suggests that while recognizing town/gown
connections and interdependencies we also must recognize the unique features of
the academy as a space for what he calls deliberation. By pushing students too
much to work in the community on the kinds of projects that Parks describes,
DelliCarpini suggests we might in fact be ignoring the crucial lessons we might
be teaching our students about the connections between their work in the
classroom and their work in the community. Thus, he instead suggests that we
have students engage in deliberative research about communities, and furthermore that we teach students to do so
in conventionally academic ways, but also that we teach them how to translate
academic research into public scholarship.
While DelliCarpini’s suggestion that
we focus on getting students to think about
the community as much as in the
community is admittedly problematic by Parks’ account, I believe it is vital to
recognize that DelliCarpini’s suggestions are based on his own programmatic
experiences at York College and that many of Parks’ most radical projects were
in fact failures. Thus, for my own course I hope to find a kind of middle
ground and engage my students in both a modest group project in the community, as well as facilitate
their development as composers in their respective fields/areas of interest
deliberating on and writing about the
issues in such communities.
Concretely,
I am thinking that in the first half of the semester I will have them work
collaboratively on a digitally produced civic engagement project using crowd-sourced
knowledge, which will be a remix of a public digital project called the AXSmap [for a little detail behind the creator of this project, see the following
article/video from the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/opinion/the-long-wait.html?_r=2&
] and on an assignment of a colleague of mine at NYU called "Cripping the City."
I have for the time being decided upon the issue of spatial accessibility for
the group project as it remains one of the most pressing concerns for
disability communities (especially in poorly designed cities like Atlanta) and
it is something that all students might relate to, as we all inhabit spaces
constantly, though often without giving much thought to the literal ways in
which many others might not be able to enter such spaces. In my assignment,
following discussion of both theoretical readings and other materials about the
social construction of disability via the inaccessibility of environments for
some bodies/minds as well as the specific legal codes for architectural accessibility,
I hope to have the students actually go out and explore both the Emory campus
and the surrounding environs for accessibility issues and document sites (and
perhaps the experiences of individuals with disabilities as well through
ethnographic interviews?) using a rich (partially self-determined) combination
of modalities, including textual narrative, video, and photos, and the collate
such materials together onto a publicly accessible (in all senses of the
term, which will add further complexity to the project) map.
Following some
of DelliCarpini’s ideas, however, in the second half of the semester, I would
plan to turn away from this more community motivated project to having each
student develop individualized research projects that deal with the realities
of disability in their respective areas of interest (from business, medicine,
and law, to film and the arts, etc.). In the course of such a project, however,
I would have students not only engage with scholarship on an issue in their
field, but also relate that issue and make their unique contribution to such
scholarship based on that problem’s iteration in Atlanta, and creating a publicly accessible version of such scholarship for consumption by interested
parties in the local community and publish it on a web page (for an example of
this practice which DelliCarpini gives, see: http://wrtifl.pbworks.com/w/page/6249035/FrontPage).
Ultimately,
I believe that by having students engage with the community from both their own
emergent areas of interest/expertise, as well as the communities’ own immediate
need of better information about accessibility, the students will leave the
classroom with not only a volunteeristic experience, but with a new orientation
towards the potentials of scholarship and the deliberative labor of the academy
as well.
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