Engagement and Writing across the Curriculum
At our forum on Monday, Bernadette Longo, Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, made an interesting analogy: Might we infuse public engagement into our courses in the same way that we infuse writing?
Writing across the curriculum is an example of teaching a skill while simultaneously teaching a content area. Faculty wonder: How can I teach writing when I’m already short of time for teaching the chemistry I need to cover? Writing becomes viewed as an add-on, rather than an integral skill of the discipline.
Clemson University, Prof. Longo's previous institution, worked to develop a culture of writing across the university. Faculty came together at lunches to talk about writing in their disciplines and in their courses. Writing faculty co-authored articles with colleagues in other disciplines on how to write for those disciplines. Writing consultants went out to talk to professors to help them integrate writing into their curriculum, as part of faculty development. A website and a research institute were established. Writing became viewed as another way to achieve disciplinary learning objectives.
The analogy to engagement is obvious. There are general writing/engagement skills that must be developed, but professional writing/engagement is discipline-specific. On the other hand, disciplinary specificity is not enough; you need to be able to write for/engage with many audiences, not just insiders. Effective written communication about your discipline is an important component of professional success, and so is effective engagement with a variety of public audiences.
Perhaps we can learn from such writing-across-the-curriculum efforts how to grow the intellectual community of those interested in civic engagement as a teaching and learning strategy.
Comments
Thanks, Vic, for capturing my comments so accurately. I feel strongly that integrating public engagement into our curricula can benefit all parties involved:
* students who can apply their learning in community contexts
* community members who can connect to university resources, bring their expertise to the table, and benefit from the collaboration
* faculty who can connect to our consitutents, bring our expertise to the table, and benefit from the collaboration in our research and teaching
* the university (that's all of us) which can demonstrate its commitment to our land grant mission
* the people of our state who reap the benefits of engaged teaching, learning, and research
I could go on, but you get the drift. Thanks again to Vic and the Council for helping to strengthen our culture of public engagementn at UMN.
Posted by: Bernadette Longo | February 22, 2006 01:50 PM
As a graduate student in the English Department—fully committed to integrating writing with all learning—and as an instructor committed to engaged pedagogy (most of the courses I've taught over five years at the University have included engaged components of one sort or another) I certainly appreciate the analogy Bernadette proposes.
I also work at the Center for Writing where writing across the curriculum measures are devised and designed and where instructors and faculty can be supported to infuse their courses with meaningful writing instructions. It's a big task with plenty of uphill terrain.
What seems most helpful to empower instructors to include writing in their courses is a set of discrete suggestions of writing practices and pedagogy that they can plug into their course—a list of grounded, practical suggestions. Those plug-ins are often noticably external—or even extraneous—to the course content at first. But with time the objectives of the instructor, the content, and the writing activities tune themselves to a harmonic chord.
To wrap my brain around the lofty notion of infusing public engagement into our courses as we infuse writing, it seems like we need such a list of concrete examples and suggestions—a list of plug-ins. But my immediate response to that impulse is to question whether such a list, whether a paradigm of plug-ins is contradictory to the nature of developing and deploying public engagement in education. Can sustainable, productive practices of public engagement originate in a list? And a list generated by academics, even if it is based upon actual, successful projects? Don't frameworks for public engagement have to emerge from conversation and collaboration with the public? Isn't the wisdom of our communities central to designing university work that will properly benefits those communities? Isn't the whole project of public engagement based upon long-term relationships and collaborative innovation over time?
I recognize (as a well-trained rhetorician certainly will) that I set up my own straw man here. But I want to acknowledge that writing, as difficult as it is to integrate in our courses at times, is much more (self-)contained and controllable than public engagement. The ethical questions of the next post loom large when we take steps towards institutionalizing public engagement. I know that institutionalization is not precisely what has been suggested, but attempts to roll out engaged learning on a widespread level—public engagement across the curriculum—in an institution such as ours is always in peril of becoming a bureaucratic mechanism.
I'm utterly convinced of—and committed to—the principles of engagement. The way to see those principles into action, however, is to emphasize and embrace process with all of its imperfections, uncertainties, and inefficiencies. There are no short cuts to such a process. There is no plug-and-play curriculum. There is a process—a rather glorious and grueling one—and we need to devise a way that our results-oriented academic culture welcomes processes, including processes that, while absolutely stimulating and quickening, fail to produce in the ways we are accustomed to rewarding and celebrating.
Is there room for process?
Posted by: Mitchell Ogden | February 24, 2006 10:58 AM