Bridging the Gap: New Scholars, New Forms of Scholarship
Case Study: Michigan Technological University
Authors: Elizabeth A. Flynn, Michael Moore, Mariana Mueller
Michigan Technological University
If or when community service is addressed in professional development guides aimed at graduate students in the humanities, little is said about it, and it is usually seen as subordinate to the more important activities of research, teaching, and academic service. As Director of the Graduate Program in Rhetoric and Technical Communication at Michigan Tech, Elizabeth Flynn teaches a two-term, one credit proseminar in which she uses two such books, Cindy Moore and Hildy Miller’s A Guide to Professional Development for Graduate Students in English (NCTE, 2006) and Gregory Semenza’s Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities (Palgrave, 2005). Service in both books is defined primarily within the context of the academy, and its value, according to these authors, to the extent that it has value, is that it makes graduate students more employable.
Semenza’s chapter on “Service and Participation” begins with the remarkable statement, “Of the three most important activities performed by the majority of graduate students—service, teaching, and research—service is the least important” (224). He nevertheless acknowledges its importance and proceeds to develop what he calls a “Philosophy of Academic Service.” He prefers the word “participation” to “service” since he finds that the former emphasizes the agency of the individual, though for him service is primarily academic service—committee work within departments, universities, and professions. His discussion of community service is brief, though he does conclude his short paragraph on the subject by urging his readers to continue to participate in their communities and perhaps pursue work in an institution that values community service.
Moore and Miller take a more pragmatic approach, acknowledging that that “it is now very common for position announcements to highlight qualifications and abilities in areas outside of teaching and scholarship” (77). These abilities within a university context include chairing committees, ‘jump-starting’ a new major program, running a writing center, or editing a scholarly journal (77). Moore and Miller do acknowledge, however, that nonacademic employers may be interested in hiring people with administrative experience including “organizing community-service events, supervising a new project or initiative, or writing the company newsletter” (77). They find that abilities developed through extracurricular professional activities include being well organized and collegial (78). Although they do not have a separate discussion of service learning outside the academy, they do mention that nonprofit organizations often offer volunteers opportunities such as writing grants, newsletters, and public-service announcements (89).
In both books, service is primarily academic service, it is considered peripheral to research and teaching, and its value is that such work will look good on one’s curriculum vitae. Neither author recognizes that research, teaching and service are often inseparable within an academic context, and neither emphasizes that service outside the academy has educational value in and of itself and can enhance a graduate student’s knowledge base and awareness of social and economic inequities and injustices. Indeed, work outside the academy can change a graduate student’s career goals and life path. In this essay, we illustrate some possibilities for integration of research, teaching, and service by describing a graduate-level course taught by Elizabeth Flynn, “Literacies of Survival,” which Michael Moore took. Mariana Mueller suggests some additional possibilities for the integration of research, teaching, and service at the graduate level.
Literacies of Survival
The course, which Flynn taught in the fall of 2007, focused on the rhetorical and linguistic dimensions of poverty and oppression in cultures within the United States and elsewhere. Flynn describes the purpose of the course in the syllabus as follows:
We will investigate the literacy practices of oppressed groups (i.e., colonized, impoverished, marginalized). We will also investigate the ways in which literacy practices have been used against these groups to maintain the domination of colonial or postcolonial authority, the wealthy, or those who hold position of power within a particular society. Some questions we will consider will include: How have literacies been used as forms of resistance? What alternative literacies have emerged as a way of circumventing domination? How does attention to the situation of survival change our understandings of what literacies are and what kinds of literacies are possible? What might be some ethical literate practices that majorities could develop in order to mitigate the oppression of minorities?
Course texts included Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Women, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham’s edited collection, Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial, Ernest Stromberg’s edited collection, American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic, and Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol’s edited collection, Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminism, and the Politics of Representation. The Fanon and Memmi texts provided an historical context, the Algerian revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Trinh text introduced her experiences of an a Vietnamese-American filmmaker within the context of women’s struggles in Vietnam, the Olson and Worsham text is a collection of interviews with individuals who have theorized postcolonial struggles such as Homi Bhabha, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Stuart Hall. The Stromberg text introduced the context of Native Americans within the United States, and the Hesford and Kozol text provided discussions of human rights abuses in a variety of global contexts.
The course was structured much like a traditional academic graduate course with responses to readings and a research paper at the end. The research paper assignment, which followed a proposal (paper # 1) and a literature review (paper # 2) was to “Explain the literacy practices of a group of survivors or a survivor or of the representations of survivors or a survivor making use of material in assignments #1 and 2 but expanding on them and shaping them into a focused argument.”
From the Classroom to the Community
Courses such as the “Literacies of Survival” can, of course, expose new and advanced graduate students to materials that address and explore the lives and literacy practices of people not often studied in more conventional approaches to rhetoric and composition studies. As a practical matter, organizing the books, papers, and presentations fit within the conventional graduate-course format, but what about after the course is over? How can students—some of whom may already work in community or transnational contexts, or desire to—integrate these materials and ideas into their work? How can a productive atmosphere found in the seminar format transfer to programmatic, departmental, and institutional environments that will inform both individual and collective efforts in understanding and enacting service and service learning? What kind of graduate pedagogy and support is available for new teachers with their efforts to do service learning work?
In the sections below, we illustrate how members in our department try to address these issues. Flynn, who teaches the “Literacies of Survival” course, describes her own work with a community-based organization locally and in Guatemala; Mueller reflects as a first-year graduate student in Rhetoric and Technical Communication as she explores some of the opportunities and constraints in integrating service learning in the first-year writing course that she teaches; and Moore provides some context for his transnational literacy work in Nicaragua.
We welcome feedback, response, and dialogue on the questions we raise here, and collaboration on the projects that we describe.
Flynn: Rhetorical Witnessing: Recognizing Genocide in Guatemala
Flynn’s teaching of the course was also directly tied to her own research and community service. While the course was in progress, she was writing an essay solicited by the Community Literary Journal that drew upon her experiences in Guatemala and that also described the work of a local organization for which she is a board member, the Copper Country Guatemala Accompaniment Project (CCGAP). The essay, “Rhetorical Witnessing: Recognizing Genocide in Guatemala,” co-authored with Rudiger Escober Wolf, a Michigan Tech graduate student who had been a student at the University of San Carlos, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, described two kinds of rhetorical witnessing, the murals on the walls of the University of San Carlos in Quetzaltenango produced by student resisters to a repressive government that was responsible for the deaths of over 200,000 Guatemalans, and letters written by accompaniers from the U.S. whose six-month stays in Guatemala to prevent further violence and to support efforts to bring perpetrators of violent crimes to justice were sponsored by CCGAP. As a member of the board, Flynn had met most of the accompaniers whose letters she discussed and was very familiar with the issues they raised and the problems they encountered. Flynn discussed her essay with the class as it was evolving and shared drafts of it with them. In providing a theoretical context for the piece, she drew heavily upon course readings, especially Fanon, Memmi, Bhaba, and Laclau and Mouffe. Also, Sue Ellen Kingsley, director of CCGAP, attended the class and discussed her experiences as an accompanier, as director of CCGAP, as well as recent efforts to make those responsible for the massacres pay for their crimes. Rudiger Escobar Wolf also attended the class and provided valuable context for the murals.
Service and Citizenship On and Off Campus
Although Mueller is new to the campus of Michigan Technological University and to the city of Houghton, Michigan, she believes it is vital that she and students integrate themselves into the community that resides off campus. Mueller believes an effective teacher works to understand her students and herself as citizens within their communities. She also believes that to be an effective teacher and student, she must understand the role the institution plays as a local, regional force, and how being a part of that institution affects her personally.
Mueller teaches an institutional required course called revisions, a course in oral, written and visual communication, into which she has integrated service learning. She was warned in many ways about the students she would encounter as a teacher of a required, second year writing course. But the only warning that has appeared true is, in her experience with undergraduate students (being one for so long herself) that students like hands on experience and that composition is not solely an act of the mind—the body is also a large part of how we process information and meaning making in our environmental interactions. In order to address the student’s needs, Mueller gets students to do leg work—figuratively and literally.
Mueller fears for the people of her generation and for the fate of the generation her students are a part of. She worries that apathy will spread like wildfire. She and her students are encouraged through their educational careers to follow the rules and told that they are unique and special—her generation thrives on individuality. She fears her students take seriously the ideal that they can have anything they want. As a teacher and a student, she has witnessed privileged, rule hungry students who are on the verge of becoming apathetic. As author Saul D. Alinsky wrote, “the most unethical of all means is the nonuse of any means” (Rules, 26). Mueller hangs on Alinsky’s words and makes sure she integrates service learning into her teaching and research. Alinsky was an advocate for engagement, and his ideas have been vital to fostering a service-learning component within a required curriculum.
Service learning has changed and enriched Mueller’s view of education. It means that education is available for any curious, compassionate, aware, conscious individual. Not just those who are “book smart.” She has noticed that here at Michigan Tech, the book smart students have the hardest time being motivated to engage in the service learning components. In order to meet the objectives of the course, established by the university, Mueller has students produce written, visual, and oral compositions that foster community awareness. During the semester students are required:
To give a public oral/visual presentation of a global issue that has the greatest effect on their generation.
To investigate a local/regional issue and provide suggestions for creating positive social change.
To interview and meet with local “experts” on a local/regional issue of their interest.
To find out how they can post their social issue raising posters on campus.
To write a press release and submit it to local radio stations to market their public speaking event.
To create and foster online, interactive communities regarding a social issue.
To create a campus-wide “zine” that shares with their peers the social issues they researched during the semester.
At this time Mueller is not completely satisfied with her curriculum and the caliber of service learning she wants to integrate into her sections of the required course. However, she anticipate that her knowledge about service learning as well as her ability to integrate service learning into her classes will only strengthen and increase the longer she is a resident of the area.
She understands that creating a curriculum enriched by service learning activities takes time: preliminary organization, planning, and networking by the teacher for the upcoming course. At this time, she is currently working to create the kind of relationships within the community that will be essential for implementing a mutual, collaborative exchange of services for the next semester’s course. As part of that process, Mueller poses these reflective questions:
What kind of graduate pedagogy/support is available for new teachers with their efforts to integrate service-learning work?
What ethical issues arise when service learning is part of a required course?
How might large institutions develop productive and reciprocal relationships in their communities and create opportunities for positive social change?
Transnational Literacies and Collective Expertise
At a time when universities are increasingly pressured to function according to market models and principles of “best practices” and “efficiency,” the field of community literacy and allied calls for service have developed as research areas, as pedagogies of writing, design, and interaction, and as forms of institutional, collective expertise between academics, community members, and community literacy workers.
Two decades of scholarship in rhetoric and composition related to service learning and community literacy attest to the productive nature of community work and scholarship. Moore’s work has focused in a small community in southern Nicaragua: the Solentiname archipelago. Solentiname’s geographic location is important both within Nicaragua and as a research focus by North Americans. The area includes 36 islands, of which six are populated, on the southern point of Lake Nicaragua, 20 miles north of Costa Rica. The total population is about 800 people, most of whom live on the islands of Mancarrón, San Fernando, San Felipe, and La Venada. Mancarrón is the “main” island, and the most populated, with approximately 300 people and 73 families. The people there, individually, as families, and as a community, are the focus of his project. Their geographic location is important to consider because even within Nicaragua, the islands and the people are isolated—access is by boat, only—there are no roads, motorized vehicles, or electricity. Solentiname, although populated for 5,000 years, first by Miskito Indians, and for the last four generations by their descendants and Spanish-speaking natives, did not even appear on Nicaraguan national maps until 1966. Because of their isolated location even within their own country, people on the islands often have an ambivalent attitude toward Nicaraguan governments and toward any sense of national identity. One of the first of several ironies of this situation is that Solentiname is often recognized as the birthplace of the Sandinista revolution and the cultural ideas that occupied the members of the Solentiname community formed "much of the foundation for Sandinista cultural policy" that emerged after the revolution of 1979 (Whisnant).
In terms of “survival,” then, it is possible to sketch out immediately some real, genuine, identifiable struggles that have faced Solentiname historically: food for survival comes from fishing and sustenance farming, the latter in hard, rocky, volcanic soil; cultural attitudes are shaped as much by their proximity to Costa Rica as their distance from the capital of Managua; and their role in a long, violent revolutionary struggle that resulted in the bombing and total destruction of the islands’ buildings and meager infrastructure in 1977, and the torture and killing of people by their own government’s air force and army. That is all local context; to the north, of course, is the U.S., whose influence is strong due to over a hundred years of political and military “interventions,” and its role in Nicaraguan politics via the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and more recently, “sustainable development” funding for projects that directly impact indigenous and cultural aspects of life on Solentiname.
Neither Mancarrón nor any of the surrounding smaller islands can afford, of course, full-time teachers. Moore’s reciprocal relationship with the community, then, is an agreement for him to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) and poetry workshops, in return for his being able to conduct ethnographic and participatory literacy research. Initial inquiries into the values that young people and adults in the community attribute to literacy reveal rich and complicated stories about the power associated with education and being able to make one’s own decisions and to act on one’s individual, community, and collective aspirations.
Moore’s work in Nicaragua takes place at a time, of course, when scholars such as Gayatri Spivak argue for the “charting of a practitioner’s progress from colonial discourse studies to transnational cultural studies” (ix-x). Spivak’s work recently also includes a community literacy project. A recent profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that,
Not long after she started a rural literacy project in one of West Bengal's poorest regions, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — leading postcolonial critic, translator of Derrida, high priestess of literary theory — asked the schoolchildren she was working with to do something very simple: write a little about themselves, on their own. […] even she was surprised by what happened next. "I hadn't realized there was no 'on their own,'" Spivak recalls. "They would write exactly what they did the day before, and when that was all used up, because their lives are the same as far as they're concerned, then they would write, 'A cow has two ears, two eyes, four legs, one tail.'" They were repeating something they had memorized.
I could not imagine heads that had been jammed shut,” she says. "It's a killing of the imagination” (McMillen, B16).
The work also takes place at a time when Nicaragua is revisiting its National Literacy Campaign of 1980, and reinstituting programs in rural areas to promote reading and writing. “Service” in these contexts reveal its role as more meaningful than when tied up in academic, institutional, forms of service, but in fact invites its reevaluation as a driving force behind teaching and research, rather than in its more tradition role as the “least important” aspect of academic life.
Works Cited
Alinsky, Saul D. Rules for Radicals. New York: Vintage Books, 1971.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Flynn, Elizabeth and Rudiger Escobar Wolf. “Rhetorical Witnessing: Recognizing Genocide in Guatemala.” Community Literacy Journal 2.2 (Spring 2008): 23-44.
Trinh, Minh-ha T. Woman/Native/Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
Olson, Gary A. and Lynn Worsham, eds. Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial. Albany: SUNY P, 1999.
McMillen, Liz. “The Education of Gayatri Spivak.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 54(2007): B-16.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon P, 1965.
Moore, Cindy, and Hildy Miller. A Guide to Professional Development: For Graduate Students in English., Urbana: NCTE, 2006.
Hesford, Wendy and Wendy Kozol. Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2005.
Semenza, Gregory Colón. Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1999.
Stromberg, Ernest, ed. American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2006.
Whisnant, David E. Rascally Signs in Sacred Places: The Politics of Culture in Nicaragua. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Read more!
Michigan Technological University
If or when community service is addressed in professional development guides aimed at graduate students in the humanities, little is said about it, and it is usually seen as subordinate to the more important activities of research, teaching, and academic service. As Director of the Graduate Program in Rhetoric and Technical Communication at Michigan Tech, Elizabeth Flynn teaches a two-term, one credit proseminar in which she uses two such books, Cindy Moore and Hildy Miller’s A Guide to Professional Development for Graduate Students in English (NCTE, 2006) and Gregory Semenza’s Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities (Palgrave, 2005). Service in both books is defined primarily within the context of the academy, and its value, according to these authors, to the extent that it has value, is that it makes graduate students more employable.
Semenza’s chapter on “Service and Participation” begins with the remarkable statement, “Of the three most important activities performed by the majority of graduate students—service, teaching, and research—service is the least important” (224). He nevertheless acknowledges its importance and proceeds to develop what he calls a “Philosophy of Academic Service.” He prefers the word “participation” to “service” since he finds that the former emphasizes the agency of the individual, though for him service is primarily academic service—committee work within departments, universities, and professions. His discussion of community service is brief, though he does conclude his short paragraph on the subject by urging his readers to continue to participate in their communities and perhaps pursue work in an institution that values community service.
Moore and Miller take a more pragmatic approach, acknowledging that that “it is now very common for position announcements to highlight qualifications and abilities in areas outside of teaching and scholarship” (77). These abilities within a university context include chairing committees, ‘jump-starting’ a new major program, running a writing center, or editing a scholarly journal (77). Moore and Miller do acknowledge, however, that nonacademic employers may be interested in hiring people with administrative experience including “organizing community-service events, supervising a new project or initiative, or writing the company newsletter” (77). They find that abilities developed through extracurricular professional activities include being well organized and collegial (78). Although they do not have a separate discussion of service learning outside the academy, they do mention that nonprofit organizations often offer volunteers opportunities such as writing grants, newsletters, and public-service announcements (89).
In both books, service is primarily academic service, it is considered peripheral to research and teaching, and its value is that such work will look good on one’s curriculum vitae. Neither author recognizes that research, teaching and service are often inseparable within an academic context, and neither emphasizes that service outside the academy has educational value in and of itself and can enhance a graduate student’s knowledge base and awareness of social and economic inequities and injustices. Indeed, work outside the academy can change a graduate student’s career goals and life path. In this essay, we illustrate some possibilities for integration of research, teaching, and service by describing a graduate-level course taught by Elizabeth Flynn, “Literacies of Survival,” which Michael Moore took. Mariana Mueller suggests some additional possibilities for the integration of research, teaching, and service at the graduate level.
Literacies of Survival
The course, which Flynn taught in the fall of 2007, focused on the rhetorical and linguistic dimensions of poverty and oppression in cultures within the United States and elsewhere. Flynn describes the purpose of the course in the syllabus as follows:
We will investigate the literacy practices of oppressed groups (i.e., colonized, impoverished, marginalized). We will also investigate the ways in which literacy practices have been used against these groups to maintain the domination of colonial or postcolonial authority, the wealthy, or those who hold position of power within a particular society. Some questions we will consider will include: How have literacies been used as forms of resistance? What alternative literacies have emerged as a way of circumventing domination? How does attention to the situation of survival change our understandings of what literacies are and what kinds of literacies are possible? What might be some ethical literate practices that majorities could develop in order to mitigate the oppression of minorities?
Course texts included Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Women, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham’s edited collection, Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial, Ernest Stromberg’s edited collection, American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic, and Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol’s edited collection, Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminism, and the Politics of Representation. The Fanon and Memmi texts provided an historical context, the Algerian revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Trinh text introduced her experiences of an a Vietnamese-American filmmaker within the context of women’s struggles in Vietnam, the Olson and Worsham text is a collection of interviews with individuals who have theorized postcolonial struggles such as Homi Bhabha, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Stuart Hall. The Stromberg text introduced the context of Native Americans within the United States, and the Hesford and Kozol text provided discussions of human rights abuses in a variety of global contexts.
The course was structured much like a traditional academic graduate course with responses to readings and a research paper at the end. The research paper assignment, which followed a proposal (paper # 1) and a literature review (paper # 2) was to “Explain the literacy practices of a group of survivors or a survivor or of the representations of survivors or a survivor making use of material in assignments #1 and 2 but expanding on them and shaping them into a focused argument.”
From the Classroom to the Community
Courses such as the “Literacies of Survival” can, of course, expose new and advanced graduate students to materials that address and explore the lives and literacy practices of people not often studied in more conventional approaches to rhetoric and composition studies. As a practical matter, organizing the books, papers, and presentations fit within the conventional graduate-course format, but what about after the course is over? How can students—some of whom may already work in community or transnational contexts, or desire to—integrate these materials and ideas into their work? How can a productive atmosphere found in the seminar format transfer to programmatic, departmental, and institutional environments that will inform both individual and collective efforts in understanding and enacting service and service learning? What kind of graduate pedagogy and support is available for new teachers with their efforts to do service learning work?
In the sections below, we illustrate how members in our department try to address these issues. Flynn, who teaches the “Literacies of Survival” course, describes her own work with a community-based organization locally and in Guatemala; Mueller reflects as a first-year graduate student in Rhetoric and Technical Communication as she explores some of the opportunities and constraints in integrating service learning in the first-year writing course that she teaches; and Moore provides some context for his transnational literacy work in Nicaragua.
We welcome feedback, response, and dialogue on the questions we raise here, and collaboration on the projects that we describe.
Flynn: Rhetorical Witnessing: Recognizing Genocide in Guatemala
Flynn’s teaching of the course was also directly tied to her own research and community service. While the course was in progress, she was writing an essay solicited by the Community Literary Journal that drew upon her experiences in Guatemala and that also described the work of a local organization for which she is a board member, the Copper Country Guatemala Accompaniment Project (CCGAP). The essay, “Rhetorical Witnessing: Recognizing Genocide in Guatemala,” co-authored with Rudiger Escober Wolf, a Michigan Tech graduate student who had been a student at the University of San Carlos, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, described two kinds of rhetorical witnessing, the murals on the walls of the University of San Carlos in Quetzaltenango produced by student resisters to a repressive government that was responsible for the deaths of over 200,000 Guatemalans, and letters written by accompaniers from the U.S. whose six-month stays in Guatemala to prevent further violence and to support efforts to bring perpetrators of violent crimes to justice were sponsored by CCGAP. As a member of the board, Flynn had met most of the accompaniers whose letters she discussed and was very familiar with the issues they raised and the problems they encountered. Flynn discussed her essay with the class as it was evolving and shared drafts of it with them. In providing a theoretical context for the piece, she drew heavily upon course readings, especially Fanon, Memmi, Bhaba, and Laclau and Mouffe. Also, Sue Ellen Kingsley, director of CCGAP, attended the class and discussed her experiences as an accompanier, as director of CCGAP, as well as recent efforts to make those responsible for the massacres pay for their crimes. Rudiger Escobar Wolf also attended the class and provided valuable context for the murals.
Service and Citizenship On and Off Campus
Although Mueller is new to the campus of Michigan Technological University and to the city of Houghton, Michigan, she believes it is vital that she and students integrate themselves into the community that resides off campus. Mueller believes an effective teacher works to understand her students and herself as citizens within their communities. She also believes that to be an effective teacher and student, she must understand the role the institution plays as a local, regional force, and how being a part of that institution affects her personally.
Mueller teaches an institutional required course called revisions, a course in oral, written and visual communication, into which she has integrated service learning. She was warned in many ways about the students she would encounter as a teacher of a required, second year writing course. But the only warning that has appeared true is, in her experience with undergraduate students (being one for so long herself) that students like hands on experience and that composition is not solely an act of the mind—the body is also a large part of how we process information and meaning making in our environmental interactions. In order to address the student’s needs, Mueller gets students to do leg work—figuratively and literally.
Mueller fears for the people of her generation and for the fate of the generation her students are a part of. She worries that apathy will spread like wildfire. She and her students are encouraged through their educational careers to follow the rules and told that they are unique and special—her generation thrives on individuality. She fears her students take seriously the ideal that they can have anything they want. As a teacher and a student, she has witnessed privileged, rule hungry students who are on the verge of becoming apathetic. As author Saul D. Alinsky wrote, “the most unethical of all means is the nonuse of any means” (Rules, 26). Mueller hangs on Alinsky’s words and makes sure she integrates service learning into her teaching and research. Alinsky was an advocate for engagement, and his ideas have been vital to fostering a service-learning component within a required curriculum.
Service learning has changed and enriched Mueller’s view of education. It means that education is available for any curious, compassionate, aware, conscious individual. Not just those who are “book smart.” She has noticed that here at Michigan Tech, the book smart students have the hardest time being motivated to engage in the service learning components. In order to meet the objectives of the course, established by the university, Mueller has students produce written, visual, and oral compositions that foster community awareness. During the semester students are required:
To give a public oral/visual presentation of a global issue that has the greatest effect on their generation.
To investigate a local/regional issue and provide suggestions for creating positive social change.
To interview and meet with local “experts” on a local/regional issue of their interest.
To find out how they can post their social issue raising posters on campus.
To write a press release and submit it to local radio stations to market their public speaking event.
To create and foster online, interactive communities regarding a social issue.
To create a campus-wide “zine” that shares with their peers the social issues they researched during the semester.
At this time Mueller is not completely satisfied with her curriculum and the caliber of service learning she wants to integrate into her sections of the required course. However, she anticipate that her knowledge about service learning as well as her ability to integrate service learning into her classes will only strengthen and increase the longer she is a resident of the area.
She understands that creating a curriculum enriched by service learning activities takes time: preliminary organization, planning, and networking by the teacher for the upcoming course. At this time, she is currently working to create the kind of relationships within the community that will be essential for implementing a mutual, collaborative exchange of services for the next semester’s course. As part of that process, Mueller poses these reflective questions:
What kind of graduate pedagogy/support is available for new teachers with their efforts to integrate service-learning work?
What ethical issues arise when service learning is part of a required course?
How might large institutions develop productive and reciprocal relationships in their communities and create opportunities for positive social change?
Transnational Literacies and Collective Expertise
At a time when universities are increasingly pressured to function according to market models and principles of “best practices” and “efficiency,” the field of community literacy and allied calls for service have developed as research areas, as pedagogies of writing, design, and interaction, and as forms of institutional, collective expertise between academics, community members, and community literacy workers.
Two decades of scholarship in rhetoric and composition related to service learning and community literacy attest to the productive nature of community work and scholarship. Moore’s work has focused in a small community in southern Nicaragua: the Solentiname archipelago. Solentiname’s geographic location is important both within Nicaragua and as a research focus by North Americans. The area includes 36 islands, of which six are populated, on the southern point of Lake Nicaragua, 20 miles north of Costa Rica. The total population is about 800 people, most of whom live on the islands of Mancarrón, San Fernando, San Felipe, and La Venada. Mancarrón is the “main” island, and the most populated, with approximately 300 people and 73 families. The people there, individually, as families, and as a community, are the focus of his project. Their geographic location is important to consider because even within Nicaragua, the islands and the people are isolated—access is by boat, only—there are no roads, motorized vehicles, or electricity. Solentiname, although populated for 5,000 years, first by Miskito Indians, and for the last four generations by their descendants and Spanish-speaking natives, did not even appear on Nicaraguan national maps until 1966. Because of their isolated location even within their own country, people on the islands often have an ambivalent attitude toward Nicaraguan governments and toward any sense of national identity. One of the first of several ironies of this situation is that Solentiname is often recognized as the birthplace of the Sandinista revolution and the cultural ideas that occupied the members of the Solentiname community formed "much of the foundation for Sandinista cultural policy" that emerged after the revolution of 1979 (Whisnant).
In terms of “survival,” then, it is possible to sketch out immediately some real, genuine, identifiable struggles that have faced Solentiname historically: food for survival comes from fishing and sustenance farming, the latter in hard, rocky, volcanic soil; cultural attitudes are shaped as much by their proximity to Costa Rica as their distance from the capital of Managua; and their role in a long, violent revolutionary struggle that resulted in the bombing and total destruction of the islands’ buildings and meager infrastructure in 1977, and the torture and killing of people by their own government’s air force and army. That is all local context; to the north, of course, is the U.S., whose influence is strong due to over a hundred years of political and military “interventions,” and its role in Nicaraguan politics via the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and more recently, “sustainable development” funding for projects that directly impact indigenous and cultural aspects of life on Solentiname.
Neither Mancarrón nor any of the surrounding smaller islands can afford, of course, full-time teachers. Moore’s reciprocal relationship with the community, then, is an agreement for him to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) and poetry workshops, in return for his being able to conduct ethnographic and participatory literacy research. Initial inquiries into the values that young people and adults in the community attribute to literacy reveal rich and complicated stories about the power associated with education and being able to make one’s own decisions and to act on one’s individual, community, and collective aspirations.
Moore’s work in Nicaragua takes place at a time, of course, when scholars such as Gayatri Spivak argue for the “charting of a practitioner’s progress from colonial discourse studies to transnational cultural studies” (ix-x). Spivak’s work recently also includes a community literacy project. A recent profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that,
Not long after she started a rural literacy project in one of West Bengal's poorest regions, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — leading postcolonial critic, translator of Derrida, high priestess of literary theory — asked the schoolchildren she was working with to do something very simple: write a little about themselves, on their own. […] even she was surprised by what happened next. "I hadn't realized there was no 'on their own,'" Spivak recalls. "They would write exactly what they did the day before, and when that was all used up, because their lives are the same as far as they're concerned, then they would write, 'A cow has two ears, two eyes, four legs, one tail.'" They were repeating something they had memorized.
I could not imagine heads that had been jammed shut,” she says. "It's a killing of the imagination” (McMillen, B16).
The work also takes place at a time when Nicaragua is revisiting its National Literacy Campaign of 1980, and reinstituting programs in rural areas to promote reading and writing. “Service” in these contexts reveal its role as more meaningful than when tied up in academic, institutional, forms of service, but in fact invites its reevaluation as a driving force behind teaching and research, rather than in its more tradition role as the “least important” aspect of academic life.
Works Cited
Alinsky, Saul D. Rules for Radicals. New York: Vintage Books, 1971.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Flynn, Elizabeth and Rudiger Escobar Wolf. “Rhetorical Witnessing: Recognizing Genocide in Guatemala.” Community Literacy Journal 2.2 (Spring 2008): 23-44.
Trinh, Minh-ha T. Woman/Native/Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
Olson, Gary A. and Lynn Worsham, eds. Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial. Albany: SUNY P, 1999.
McMillen, Liz. “The Education of Gayatri Spivak.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 54(2007): B-16.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon P, 1965.
Moore, Cindy, and Hildy Miller. A Guide to Professional Development: For Graduate Students in English., Urbana: NCTE, 2006.
Hesford, Wendy and Wendy Kozol. Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2005.
Semenza, Gregory Colón. Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1999.
Stromberg, Ernest, ed. American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2006.
Whisnant, David E. Rascally Signs in Sacred Places: The Politics of Culture in Nicaragua. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Read more!
posted by kandi111777 at
4:21 PM
3 Comments
Links to this post
