\n| You are required to come to class carefully prepared, and all students are expected to participate in one way or another. It\u2019s reasonable to expect this participation to be thoughtful and respectful of all the class members.<\/p>\n The same courtesy expected in the classroom is also expected outside of the classroom.<\/strong> Absences or tardiness during your scheduled meetings with community members is not only inconsiderate but will severely affect your grade. Remember that you are not only representing yourself as a student, but you are representing yourself as a member of a shared community and of Northeastern University.<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\nCiting from the Writing Program\u2019s website positions our small class amidst larger parts of the institution; this is only furthered by emphasizing expectations for students as they represent themselves as part of a \u201cshared community\u201d and the university. Instead of viewing this course as a closed-set of ideals and expectations, drawing attention to the university as a piece of a larger puzzle disrupts the imagined ideal of a writing classroom and requests that students see themselves as socially situated in larger spaces of the Writing Program, the University, and the community in a way that works to both collapse and open up binaries in a critical way.<\/p>\n Through reading my students\u2019 reflections on this project and discussing it in context of the whole course on the last day of class, this disruption of what a writing course entails seemed welcomed by most students as they were able to draw on other literacies that were seen as important to their lives both in and outside of the classroom. As thinking about \u201cwriting\u201d and \u201ccomposition\u201d as dynamic and changing terms was another goal of this course, this disruption to the social space of the writing classroom was epistemologically important; however, I believe the project itself\u2014leaving the classroom to interview veterans\u2014affected the type of thinking that was able to be produced by my students as it worked to keep opening up their conceptions of writing as a social activity. To understand what this change of physical space meant for my students, let us turn to two different students who reflected on the location of their interview:<\/p>\n \n\n\n| Mary<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n | \n\nWe chose to meet [the veteran] at [our university\u2019s library] and we conducted our interview in one of the group study rooms on the second floor. The room was very small so we sat around a table\u2026. The fact that we were physically so close definitely had an impact on the interview\u2026. I believe that it worked in our favor and helped [the veteran] feel that he could trust us.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n| Caitlin<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n | \n\n| [We chose] a cozy corner of [a chain sandwich shop] that had soft lighting and intimate booths. We hoped that our location choice would make [the veteran] feel comfortable\u2026. [W]e pulled up two extra chairs and made a circle so he could look at all of us while he was speaking. This setup made his interview feel less like an interrogation and more like a discussion.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n In these two selections from the individual reflections that accompanied each video, we see that there had been some thought as to appropriate spaces. Most of the groups, like Mary\u2019s, met somewhere like the university library\u2014essentially an academic space that can be thought of as an extension of the classroom. This was convenient for its centrality as well as its semi-private rooms. Although Caitlin\u2019s group decided to meet in a public space off campus, both students emphasize the physical closeness of meeting directly impacting the veteran\u2019s \u201ccomfort\u201d and ability to \u201ctrust\u201d these students. Students related their conceptions of psychological comfort to ideas of biophysical comfort and the ability to share stories.<\/p>\n It was not by one-sided convenience that my students met with their veterans on or around our campus: as mentioned, the veterans we worked with were also Northeastern students. When I explained that we would be working with other students, my class\u2019s mental conceptions\u2014that is, of thinking of who a \u201cveteran\u201d is\u2014were challenged. No matter how much my students thought of veterans as \u201cold guys,\u201d their idea of \u201cstudents\u201d interfered with their thinking. The idea of \u201cstudent\u201d also became complicated in itself as the men my students interviewed were older than my traditional first-year students, and they clearly had different pre-university experience. No matter how much my students had interacted with war in their lives, none of them had experienced war as closely as the men they interviewed, and this disruption of conceptions made an impact on the lived experience of the project as we can see in the following representative selection from Mary:<\/p>\n \n\n\n| Mary<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n | \n\n| The process of Interviewing [the veteran] was a very unique, powerful experience. When I heard that we were going to interviewing a veteran, I automatically assumed that he was going to be an older man with stories from Vietnam. However, [he] is only 24 years old and a student at the same school that I attend\u2026. I do believe that him being so close to me in age made his stories even more powerful.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n What is interesting about such sentiments are the emotional connections that students came to because of the disruption to their conceptions about the veterans themselves as physical beings. After viewing all of the videos, we thought about how a veteran\u2019s age affected the \u201ctrueness\u201d of his war story: does the short temporal distance from their story make it any \u201ctruer\u201d in that they remember things more clearly? Or does having distance from a story, like one of the older veterans did when discussing his role in the Coast Guard in New York Harbor during 9\/11, allow one to reflect on an experience that makes it truer? Back in the classroom the action of restabilizing the disrupted social space of our course and its themes proved to be one of the most fruitful times for thought and discussion.<\/p>\n One of the most interesting projects came from a group whose conceptions of a veteran were not only disrupted by their veteran\u2019s physical appearance but also by the sentiments he spoke of:<\/p>\n \n\n\n| Mike<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n | \n\n| [What we] heard from [the veteran] in that small room all caught us off guard. The stories carried a different notion and emotion from what we expected to hear from a war veteran. Instead of patriotic enthusiasm, [he] expressed resentment and hatred throughout his stories. He hated his experience during his time of service.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n The image of the unconditionally patriotic veteran was disrupted for this group and, in turn, for our class when this group decided to take a humorous approach to their video. While it seemed perfectly logical for someone to hate their job, why were we surprised by this sentiment from a veteran? When our preconceived notions of veterans were disrupted, my class began to reconsider the idea of a \u201cveteran\u201d again in quite productive ways as they worked through what this meant for the lived experience of this person.<\/p>\n For some students, with this newfound authority came a sense of vulnerability. While we had talked about vulnerability as a class, the ways students talked about vulnerabilities in their reflections surprised me. Mike\u2019s group members both expressed vulnerability in different ways:<\/p>\n \n\n\n| Rachel<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n | \n\nAlthough this may have been one of the most challenging assignments I have taken on in my college career [Rachel was a transfer student], I think it has also been one of the most rewarding. This certainly brought up some feelings of vulnerability; creating something and sharing it brings up a lot of anxiety. It is human nature to want others to connect with what you are sharing.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n| Stephanie<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n | \n\n| I felt vulnerable also in the sense that we were meeting the works cited, the author, and the reason for why we were creating this movie in the first place\u2026. With a text, I can say that this part was horrible and that part makes no sense, but when listening to a person tell his life story, I don\u2019t find it appropriate to show the emotions that I was feeling\u2026. In general, it took more connected and emotional thought to create this project.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n From these two reflections, and others like them, I gather that actually meeting with someone and hearing their story influenced my students\u2019 commitment to doing a good job on a much deeper level. While the repetition of the word \u201cvulnerable\u201d was understandable to me in terms of leaving the safety of the classroom, meeting a stranger, and sharing personal stories, I did not expect this term to show up in terms of the work produced for the project. Furthermore, I think that having a visceral reaction to a project does something for student authority in that when we feel something <\/i>about a subject, we are more inclined to be careful in our thought and more prideful in the work we produce, and these types of sentiments were expressed by many of the other students as well.<\/p>\n More than just \u201ccaring\u201d about a subject, perhaps there is something in this connection\u2014in this disruption of spaces\u2014that works pedagogically to foster student authority in ways traditional writing projects cannot always complete. This is not to say that we should do away with reading and writing activities, but community engagement projects allow us to take an authoritative role in our criticisms of texts we encounter because it opens up ideas of social space in that our roles as university students becomes part of our role as community members in much more explicit ways.<\/p>\n As we think about the risks and rewards of disrupting social space in community engagement projects, we should not forget the goals for writing courses or the goals our students have. It is not that the interviewers left their role as students outside of their interviews, just as they came to understand that veterans did not lose their identities as \u201cregular people\u201d just because they had served in the military. Caitlin drew my attention back to this fact:<\/p>\n \n\n\n| Caitlin<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n | \n\n| Partially, I think we all worked so hard to make a video we were proud of was because we wanted a good grade. However, I believe the driving reason was the fact that we had met with our veteran, heard his story, and felt that it was something inspiring that deserved to be shared in an emotional and true way.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n However briefly, this student was the only one to comment on the fact that this was a project for a course. This is where I see the greatest room for student development and the most apt examples of how the disruption of social space has influenced these writers. As Caitlin points out, just because one has an interesting, eye opening, or emotionally palatable community experience, it does not detract from the fact that this is work for a course. This also works to highlight roles for students, such as university member or researcher, because they are switching to a more active role in their learning.<\/p>\n In understanding the social-educational space of community-based learning projects, we can see how the work of positioning students this way allows them to begin to critique their understanding of their roles as members of the university. While much scholarship criticizes community engagement projects for \u201cOthering\u201d and dichotomizing universities and communities, there is something to be said for enhancing a first-year student\u2019s conception of what it means to be a member of the university. This is a space where authority for student-writers can manifest. In my classroom specifically, the break my students took from traditional writing gave them distance from their writing that seemed to allow them to internalize some of the conventions we had practiced all semester. Perhaps the \u201cbreak\u201d from traditional writing assignments, as well as the \u201cnew\u201d practice of composing did something for their writing in its disruption of spaces that allowed them to gain authority over their own positions as student writers. And pairing this with Morton\u2019s risk\u2014\u201cthe risk of caring for another human being\u201d\u2014seemed to only offer rewards in terms of wanting to produce quality work.<\/p>\n Works Cited<\/h4><\/p>\n Morton, Keith. \u201cThe Irony of Service: Charity, Project, and Social Change in Service-Learning.\u201d\u00a0Writing and Community Engagement: A Critical Sourcebook<\/i>. Ed. Thomas Deans, Barbara Sherr Roswell, and Adrian J. Wurr. Boston, MA: Bedford\/St. Martin\u2019s, 2010. 117-37.<\/p>\n Welch, Nancy. Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World<\/i>. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton\/Cook, Heinemann, 2008. <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reflections on a Community-Based Learning Project By Kristi Girdharry, Johnson and Wales University One of the major challenges of intertwining \u201cthe community\u201d with \u201cthe classroom\u201d is the perception that community is denotative of \u201coutsider\u201d rather than as an integral part of the university itself: the community can become exoticized and difficult to talk about without […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9762,"featured_media":0,"parent":1851,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1862"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9762"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1862"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1885,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1862\/revisions\/1885"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} | | | | | | | |