Assignment Design: Student-Led Community

This assignment design asks students to craft a story in collaboration with students involved in university-affiliated student organizations.

The aim is for students to write either a panel interview, organizational profile, or reflective observation with a focus on how these student organizations foster community among themselves and with a broader community beyond the university campus.

Central to the storytelling will be how the student organizations navigate community-engagement in light of its university affiliation, bringing to the forefront the power dynamics of local community within a larger institution.

course
WRD 550 Topics in Teaching Writing: The Community-Engaged Classroom

instructor
Dr. Monica Reyes

term
Spring 2024

course summary
The course explored what community is, how it’s cultivated, how classrooms engage with a community, and the ethical and pedagogical challenges associated with designing a community-engaged course.

assignment
Imagining Community-Engagement Assignment

prompt

This final project will be a 1,500-word rationale of a community-engaged assignment for a writing class that you imagine yourself teaching after you finish the WRD program. This assignment should be as realistic as possible and informed by research from our discipline(s) and our course. In addition, you will submit an Assignment Sheet for your imagined students.

Student-Led Community Assignment

"storytelling as cultural rhetorics not only expands knowledge beyond traditionally academic forms, it offers a critical lens towards the makers of that knowledge so that 'the students are teaching the teacher and each other, that we are all listening to one another' (Cedillo et al., 10)."

"The main purpose of the assignment is to identify and explain how the student organization, as a discourse community, uses rhetoric to create community, engage with other communities, and negotiate their status as a university-recognized student organization in their capacity to nurture community."

Reflection

This assignment was developed in the midst of the student encampments for Palestine across the country and world. Seeing the way these students leaned into community and connection among themselves and with those far away was inspiring and hopeful.

Having read in class about the ethics of community-engaged teaching and making sure that the community is not simply a passive participant or othered, I couldn't help but think of how students themselves are often othered in their own universities, even when they are practicing precisely the ideas and concepts they learn in the classroom. Thus, I wanted to design an assignment that honors that experiential expertise of students and gives voice to the stories of learning in community.