Leadership and Civic Engagement

ENGLISH W240 - Community Service Writing
Spring 2008, Tarez Graban

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Description & Goals

course rationale

Most people don't associate writing with visual intelligence and perception, or research with personal observation and ethics. However, fieldworking relies on the principle that how you take in information from the world around you does affect how you write. "Fieldworking," or ethnography, is the process of living and studying among other people in their own contexts. This research-based writing course asks you to use fieldworking as your investigative lens by taking notes, conducting interviews, doing observation, searching archives, and constructing visual representations of one local community agency where you choose to serve

By completing an ethnographic study, you will learn how writing and research shape your own and others' views of culture. You will also learn the ins and outs of integrating community and academic research so that it results in stronger writing. And, you will learn how reading writing across several genres--including memoir, autoethnography, popular history, and theory--can help a community to question, formulate, challenge, and re-formulate its notions of what it means to "lead" and be "civically engaged."

Think of this course as an opportunity to develop your written communication skills, where you learn how to write for diverse audiences. Think of it also as an exploration of the different writing situations that face you as students at a major university and citizens in a larger community, where you respond to those situations by asking questions, conducting research, and composing your answers using relevant media. Finally, think of this course as knowledge making, not just knowledge reporting. It is less about expressing the "right" answers in the "right" format, and more about learning how to thoroughly investigate your ideas, and how to write them up in a way that is rhetorically sound.
 

course goals

As part of that process, this course will encourage you to:

• shape your writing for multiple needs and contexts

• access, evaluate, and use information from a variety of sources

• move beyond summarizing facts to synthesizing complex ideas

• understand argument as a way of explaining multiple perspectives, where those multiple perspectives act as means of persuasion

• understand structure, language and style as ethical choices in creating credible public discourse.