Our original proposal: ISW Gowan and Hagel Proposal 2010.doc
I was thinking about what is a practical way of going about answering our questions, because every time I talk through our project, I feel like I end up going in circles, because of the chicken-and-egg nature of student attitudes towards writing and encouraging students to write for communities.
It seems to me that the first step, other than doing a lit review (simultaneous to lit review?), is talking to students in focus groups. The goal of the focus groups would be to ascertain what they view as the purpose of their own academic writing and to find out how they think professors could support them in "real" writing. Or, if they don't buy into writing for communities, they could help us understand what might motivate them to find writing for communities a meaningful pursuit.
Obviously the next step would be to analyze the information obtained from the focus groups. Hopefully this information can translate to assignments/tools that can be used in class to encourage students to write for communities. I guess I'm not sure whether we originally intended to create tools for professors to use to assess student attitudes, to encourage writing for communities, or both. On a practical level, I think it makes more sense to develop writing tools/curriculum to encourage "writing for community." While this proposition assumes that students share this priority, I think it's important that we encourage this type of writing, whether or not it is something they value a priori. We should help them realize the importance of writing for community, even if they did not originally (as I'm sure some of the focus groups will reveal -- this will be important info for the students to give us, because hopefully they will be able to tell us how we can help them make it more of a priority for them).
Once these curriculum tools are developed, we will test them next year in courses (perhaps Consume This and/or Cities and Social Change). We can then analyze/evaluate/redevelop and share them with other professors.
Concrete (not really in order) steps that I see:
-email summer course professors
-develop recruitment materials
-make IRB changes
-email CSL folks to see what techniques they use in their courses
-talk to Katie about additional literature to explore
-develop questions for focus groups
-meet with Jake (Public Policy RA interested in focus groups) to discuss project/potential questions
Hi Abby,
All these initiatives sound good. About the central "writing for communities" issue... you are probably partly hung up because " community" is a sprawling and often rather empty category. I think I prefer "public." (You should see what Nikolas Rose says about the turn to “community” as a bedrock element of the neoliberal dismantling of the democratic public! If you are interested, read "The Death of the Social.") Anyway it seems to me that maybe we should not get stuck on the idea of "community" for now but move back to the basic question of what writing is for. Who is the audience? Every audience is a public of some sort, and it seems like a great idea to encourage students to think about their different "publics" - who they might want to communicate to. Why does college writing feel dead and alienating?
It seems that many students continue to prefer assignments which draw on their own "individual" opinions and experiences (no matter that many of these "individual" reactions can seem quite standard to the reader). We are taught as professors to discourage such first-person "reflection pieces" after the first year of college, to encourage students to write in dialogue with other readings, as well as to write on the basis of solid "research." This should potentially give them more scope and authority, but many students never reach any sense of empowerment through their college writing, and continue to prefer "I think/remember/feel" pieces.
Thinking about it now, I wonder about whether this project is ultimately about civics to some extent. You have to feel a connection to a "public" or "community” before you can write for it. So maybe we have to help students to identify their publics at the same time as we get them to write for them. Have you come across anything along these lines in the literature yet? What do you think about the idea of reframing in the direction of "publics" for now?