Writing Communities is an exciting new text and reader that connects students to neighborhoods and writing courses to communities. Part One introduces students to academic reading and writing skills and prompts them to examine how their communities influence their writing. Part Two then shows students how their academic reading and writing skills can serve as a bridge into working—and producing writing—with the community. The text promotes involvement in and advocacy of social issues such as education, housing, and cultural justice, and assignments provide students with opportunities to put concepts into practice, such as setting up community writing groups, hosting events, and producing publications. A rich variety of readings ranging from personal narratives and poetry to essays and educational scholarship help show students the myriad ways in which writing makes things happen in the world. The skills students learn from Writing Communities will prepare them for any collaborative work they may take on—in any community they may be a part of—in college and beyond.
A Community Writing Itself features internationally respected writers Michael Palmer, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Stephen Ratcliffe, Robert Glück, and Barbara Guest, and important younger writers Truong Tran, Camille Roy, Juliana Spahr, and Elizabeth Robinson. The book fills a major gap in contemporary poetics, focusing on one of the most vibrant experimental writing communities in the nation. The writers discuss vision and craft, war and peace, race and gender, individuality and collectivity, and the impact of the Bay Area on their work.
First-year college composition textbook features a series of recursive assignments that allow students to research & write about issues confronting their individual communities. Covers the basics of the course (the writing process).
Explains how to create the philosophical and physical environment needed to develop successful writing communities in which students learn, practice, and apply writing-craft skills.
The first volume in AAHE and Campus Compact’s series on service-learning in the disciplines, the book discusses the microrevolution in college-level Composition through service-learning. The essays in this volume show why service-learning and communication are a natural pairing and give a background on the relationship between service-learning and communication with maps to suggest where it should go in the future.
From the history of the community college in the United States to current issues and concerns facing writing programs and their administrators and instructors, Writing Program Administration and the Community College offers a comprehensive look into writing programs at public two-year institutions.
Creative Writing in the Community is the firstbook to focus on the practical side of creative writing. Connecting classroomexperiences to community-based projects, it prepares creative writing studentsfor teaching in schools, homeless centres, youth clubs and care homes. Each chapteris packed with easy-to-use resources including: specific lesson plans; case studies of students working with community groups; lists of suitable writing examples; "how to..." sections; examples and theoretical applications of creative writing pedagogy and techniques; reflection questions; writings by workshop participants. Enhanced by contributions from directors,students and teachers at successful public programs, Creative Writing in the Community is more than an essential guidefor students on creative writing courses and leaders of community-basedlearning programs; it is practical demonstration of the value of art insociety.
Service-learning and Writing: Paving the Way for Literacy(ies) through Community Engagement discusses service-learning as a teaching and learning method and its integration with writing. The various authors, from different disciplines and institutions, present service-learning as a means of having students practice writing in real world settings, and they show how relationship-building and partnerships between higher education and diverse communities produce benefits for all involved - the students, faculty, administrators, and the communities themselves. This volume demonstrates how writing instruction and/or writing practice can complement community engagement and outreach at local, national, and international contexts. Through different cross-cultural contexts and academic disciplines, the various authors explore reflection, assessment, internalization, diversity, and multiple literacies and their importance when integrating service-learning in higher education and community literacy.
The role of writing in building community is an important topic. This book moves us through that process by describing the journey into the fold of a particular writing community. While it may be helpful to describe community membership as a typical journey, it is nonetheless important to interrogate this journey of belonging through examining the specific nature of one such community. Given that both the nature of collaborative writing and community practices are situated, the journey itself is also situated practice. The writing community described in this text is Inkshed, an academic collaborative that has existed over twenty-five years at the publication of this text. What is Inkshed? It is the nickname of the Canadian Association for the Study of Language and Learning (CASLL), an organization that has the purpose of exploring relationships among research, theory, and practice in language acquisition and language use, particularly in the Canadian context. Inkshed has a website, LISTSERV, publication group, and annual meetings. The membership is a mixture of mainly Canadian academics and professional writers from across the provinces and territories. Regional members organize a yearly conference. For these conferences, members are provided with a guiding theme that creates a common thread for member presentations. Following and often during presentations at each one of these conferences, a special type of sharing takes place: members write responses to each of the presentations; they literally shed ink on the presentations and then place these response writings on conference tables for others to read and engage in further writing, responses to the responses. Writings in response to the speakers are then gathered together by a team of conference organizers, edited and distributed so that all members, including the presenters, can read the written responses of their community throughout the duration of the conference. As the technology has become available, some responses have been posted online. This writing-in-community response was a forerunner of the current social networks, which became an inevitable consequence of writing collectives online such as Wikis, Twitter, online letters to the editor, fan fiction, or Facebook. Inkshedders have always described this conference as a working conference and described the collaborative nature of their responses in writing as a far deeper experience than merely listening to a speaker and/or asking questions at the end of a session. The audience is purposefully engaged. The investment of self is personal. In this text, Miriam Horne has addressed the nature of this deeper experience. She notes that it is a risk-taking venture and that the feeling of membership goes beyond paying fees to belong. Inkshedders must pay their dues in other ways toward full membership. Legitimate peripheral participation (LPP), as introduced by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, is only the beginning. Horne's book provides insight into knowledge about membership and invites us to think about our own and other communities of membership such as school classrooms, Web 2.0, churches, and clubs. We see that peripheral participation is an important and tenuous aspect of membership and that success in this outside margin is important to the nature of how one sees oneself later, on the inside of membership. Horne's interrogation of what it means to become an Inkshedder allows us to interrogate the meaning of membership through collaborative writing, and determine what it really means to become part of a community. The book describes a personal journey into academic writing in community and is a good read for anyone who aspires to that destination.
