Service-Learning in First-Year Writing Courses Nora Bacon University of Nebraska at Omaha

Last month in this space, David R. Russell articulated one of the foundational questions underlying scholarship in composition studies: “What are we teaching when we teach ‘writing’?  How to put words together?  Or how to put words together to get things done in the worlds we inhabit as human beings?  Surely the latter.”  

Our interest in how language gets things done in the world, together with our commitment to building a more just and humane social world, explains why composition has been among the first fields to embrace service-learning.  At colleges and universities across the country, students in first-year composition classes undertake community-based writing projects; many composition textbooks now include chapters about service-learning; dozens of presenters at the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication share ideas about community-based assignments; and Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy will soon begin its fourth year of publication.

In what follows, I pose eight questions about service-learning in composition.  The first three are “what-is,” “why,” and “how-to” questions that have been discussed for years, and since I think I have some answers, I’ve written a few paragraphs about each.  The remaining questions are harder; I raise them in the hope of provoking discussion.

Integrating community service into a writing course

1.      What does service-learning look like in a writing course?

Service-learning integrates community service with academic study.   Typically, instructors design service-learning projects in partnership with staff members at community organizations, planning activities that will meet genuine needs in the community and advance the students’ understanding of course content.

The shape of any service-learning project depends, then, on community needs and course goals.  When a key purpose of the course is to sharpen students’ rhetorical flexibility, students work as volunteer writers at community organizations.  They write newsletter articles, press releases, fact sheets, brochures, agency histories – documents directed toward particular audiences (not just a teacher) with well-defined social purposes.  These assignments give students a chance to immerse themselves in a new discourse community and to study how language is used there.

In a writing course organized around a theme (e.g., families, homelessness, literacy, health care), service-learning projects might involve conventional volunteer work at a community organization (caring for children, serving food at a shelter, tutoring, reading to hospital patients).  Students in such courses write papers reflecting on the service experience, exploring the connections between their experience and assigned readings. 

For a useful discussion of three models for integrating community service into writing courses (writing for, writing about, and writing with the community), see Thomas Deans, Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning in Composition.

2.      Why do instructors integrate service-learning projects into college courses?

The specific benefits of service-learning naturally depend on the sort of work students do, but some generalizations can be made.  Service-learning can potentially achieve these goals:

·        Advance the progress of worthwhile community initiatives

·        Ground course content – whether broad rhetorical principles or specific editing lessons – in another context in addition to the classroom, providing an opportunity to apply concepts learned in class and to test the limits of their application

·        Familiarize students with the community – especially valuable in schools where most students are newcomers to the area

·        Provide an opportunity for students to “give back” to the community, sharing their time, energy, and talent with others

·        Provide experience in working collaboratively to solve real-world problems

·        Develop students’ awareness of community issues and their underlying political causes

·        Encourage the habit of linking everyday experience with intellectual inquiry

·        Encourage the habit of active citizenship.

Participation in service-learning supports students’ intellectual, social, and emotional growth.  Research demonstrating these effects is summarized by Janet Eyler and Dwight Giles in Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning? and by researchers at UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute in How Service-Learning Affects Students (Astin et. al).

3.      What does it take to develop a successful service-learning project?

The success of service-learning projects depends on careful planning and continual communication among participants – teacher, students, and community partners.

Instructors typically meet with potential community partners well before the beginning of the semester to identify projects that will meet genuine community needs as defined by the community organization’s staff; support the course’s learning objectives as defined by the instructor; match students with agencies whose mission is consistent with their personal values; and be feasible given the limits of students’ experience and the constraints on their time.

Throughout the semester, students are challenged to adapt their writing practices to a nonacademic setting.  They must work collaboratively with agency staff as well as other students, study the agency as a rhetorical context, gather information about the topic of their assigned text, and submit drafts on a timeline that accommodates the community organization and the course.  Since so much of this work is unfamiliar to first-year students, they need supervision and instruction from both the community partner and the instructor. Experienced service-learning teachers check in frequently with their community partners, and many teachers design other assignments such as project proposals, agency profiles, audience-analysis papers, and progress reports to support the community-based work.

In community-based projects, the teacher cannot control the learning environment.  Students writing for community organizations confront real-world writing in all its complexity – so the experience is likely to offer more frustrations and deeper learning than we would see in a classroom-based assignment.  In service-learning courses, students and instructors find that they must be flexible and resourceful, approaching problems with patience and a spirit of inquiry.

Questions for further consideration

It is rewarding to engage with the community, to see the talents of our students and the resources of our institutions directed toward community problems.  But nobody should initiate a service-learning course in haste. Asking students to engage in service raises practical and political questions that deserve careful attention.

4.      What is the best model for service-learning in writing courses?  Is writing about the community better suited for first-year writers while writing for the community is more appropriate for students in advanced writing or technical communication courses? Is it better to select a single community partner for the whole class or to offer a range of choices?  In choosing the best model of community-based writing for a particular context, what other factors should be considered?

5.      What resources do service-learning instructors need?  Is it advisable to develop a service-learning course in an institution without a service-learning center?  On your campus, are adjunct faculty and TAs eligible for curriculum-development grants and other resources earmarked for service-learning?

6.      How can we reconcile the needs of the community with the traditional structures of academic work?  How, for example, can teachers and students grounded in a single discipline meet the need for interdisciplinary expertise to address real community problems?  How can we be sure that service-learning programs will be sustainable beyond the end of one semester or the duration of one teacher’s career?

7.      Is service-learning a progressive pedagogy? Does service-learning encourage students to accept volunteerism rather than collective political action as the answer to social problems? Does service-learning encourage a representation of the community – the served – as needy and helpless, requiring a rescue operation from the capable and virtuous folks at the university? Should we avoid the concept of “community service,” describing projects as “community based”? How do the politics of service-learning vary with the nature of institutions and the social class of their student populations?  What can teachers do to ensure that students make the connection between observed social problems and underlying political inequities?  Are we as writing teachers responsible for prompting a radical analysis of the social problems and political issues our students may confront?  Are we qualified?

8.      What directions for scholarship are suggested by our experience with community-based writing?  Which empirical questions are most pressing? Which theoretical models of writing and learning are best suited to frame our research?

Resources

Teaching Composition

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