Paula Mathieu's Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition introduces a "public turn" in composition where more and more instructors are looking at ways that writing outside of the university could be done within a university course. Mathieu's introductory chapters of Tactics of Hope relate to last week's reading: Paul Heilker's "Rhetoric Made Real: Civic Discourse and Writing Beyond the Curriculum." Heilker states that "Composition students have suffered for too long in courses and classrooms that are palpably unreal rhetorical situations." He claims these made up situations support the idea that writing has nothing to do with the real world, and therefore students are missing the essential and important connection between the classroom and the community. Service learning is proposed as a solution to this lack of real word scenarios for students to write for, allowing for students to get writing experience that's relevant while connecting them to the community outside of the university.
Although service learning sounds good in theory, there are a few things that concern me. In the descriptions provided by both Mathieu and Heilker, service learning sounds like a lot of extra work for students. Although they would be getting practical experience and helping their community, it appears there would be a lot of work outside of class to accomplish the goals of service learning. I participated in a course during my undergrad where we partnered with The Facing Project and Muncie's A Better Way to interview and write the stories of victims of domestic abuse. The course was an incredibly valuable experience both professionally/academically and personally, but it did require a lot of work that other courses of the same level did not. We had to travel off of campus during weekdays, which was difficult with everyone's schedules. We were also dealing with some pretty traumatic material, so there were some mental health days we had to work into our schedule as well. After my own experience, I would be worried about trusting a group of freshmen to handle the same workload and emotional intensity.
I haven't seen much service learning other than my own experience, so I would love to know other people's opinions on the concept and how other's have incorporated service learning into the classroom.
Natalie,
ReplyDeleteI definitely think it's fair to critique how service learning has its downfalls. I, too, wonder about the time as well as how to enact it as a grad student. Most grad students would be new to the area and not know how to connect with the community yet, let alone intro that to their class. Moreover, there's always the problem of how service learning can go wrong with good intentions, bad impact. This could be when students and profs assume what the community and organization would need, step in as outside "authorities," etc.