Introduction

Welcome teachers! We hope that you will find the information in our textbook helpful, student-centered, and inspiring! We are glad you are interested in a Writing for Community Change curriculum that contains modular units but has proven successful when carried throughout a semester or integrated within a set of learning units.

Prior to adopting the Writing for Community Change approach in ENGL 101, Writing and Rhetoric I, both Amy Minervini and Jennifer Anderson taught this course without a theme.

Jennifer’s major writing assignments included:

• Personal Narrative: Literacy Narrative or Narrative about One’s Relationship with Technology
• Informative: Profile Essay
• Analysis: Ad Analysis/Magazine Cover Analysis
• In Class Argumentative Essay Exam
• Argument: Summary/Response to an Article

Amy’s major writing assignments included:

• Personal Narrative: “This I Believe” Essay
• Informative: Process Essay
• Analysis: Song Analysis
• Argument: Proposing a Solution
• Reflection: Reflective Letter

Though there is nothing wrong with either of these approaches, we noticed that our students had a difficult time seeing how one mode of writing built upon the skills learned in the previous mode, for instance how descriptive writing skills (learned in the narrative essay) were also used in the informative and analysis essays. Further, students didn’t feel as if they had a real stake in what they wrote; they wrote simply to earn a grade and to move onto the next assignment.

But, once we developed the Writing for Community Change thematic approach, this all changed. Students now understand how each assignment and mode of writing builds upon the previous one. They now feel invested in what they write–especially when they must actually advocate for change by sending out a call to action letter to a real person in their community (versus their instructor). See the “Testimonials” section of this book for students’ reflections on the course.

What Is Writing for Community Change?

It means digging into ONE topic, a process that includes aligning the issue students choose with their sense of community (multimodal personal narrative), analyzing the issue from a visual, rhetorical perspective (image analysis essay), understanding how sources ‘talk’ to each other (synthesis essay), reading about and exploring their topic from multiple perspectives (summaries or profiles), and arguing for solutions (proposing solutions essay) with a call to action (letter to editor/officials) or by innovating a design solution (prototype).

Our New Curriculum Now Includes:

• Multimodal Personal Narrative & Reflective Memo
• Topic Proposal
• Image Analysis Essay
• Summaries or Profiles
• Synthesis Essay
• Proposing a Solution Argumentative Essay
• Call to Action Letter or Prototype
• Reflective Essay

Our Desired Outcomes for This Course Include:

• Increase student motivation & excitement
• Build writer confidence
• Enhance student engagement with the reading material & topic choices
• Encourage student agency within and outside of classroom
• Promote more focused discussions on fewer topics
• Replace/update older content and use alternative pedagogical methods
• Play around with the order
• Unify content from first assignment to last
• Emphasize rhetorical analysis in every writing project/unit
• Collaborate with colleagues

Challenges and Solutions:

Since this is the first time many first-year college students enrolled in ENGL 101 have thought in-depth about their communities, we initially developed a 9-page list of possible topics from which they could choose. However, we soon realized that students were overwhelmed with all of the possibilities on this list.

So, for our second cycle, we reduced the number of possible topics to 11, which helped students more easily find a focus, one that other students were likely exploring too, so they could rely on the community of the classroom for support.

For the third cycle, we created folders for each of the 11 topics, which we refer to as the “Digital Resource Archive” (also included in this book). Each folder contains two components:

1. 1. 1. a list of possible sub-topics and resources,
      2. a PowerPoint with videos, songs, poems, and artwork for each topic.

These folders allow us to do some modeling (i.e. examples of [optional] credible sources), help provide a no-excuse environment since foundational sources are provided, and open up opportunities for creative approaches/alternate lenses to approach each topic via video, song, poetry, and artwork.

We hope that our work has inspired you to adopt this theme or a similar one. We are making all of our materials available to you and just ask that you credit the original author (indicated within the chapter in this textbook) or us. Here is the license information/statement that you can use:

This work © 2023-2024 by Amy Minervini and Jennifer Anderson is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 

 CC BY-NC: Users may reuse and adapt the work, as long as it is not for commercial purposes. They must give credit to the author. Derivative works need not be licensed under the same terms

Thank you for joining us on this journey of writing for community change. Because the curriculum is dynamic, timely, and relevant to students’ lives, we have seen amazing changes in our students’ critical thinking and writing skills, and we encourage you to adapt the curriculum to your needs, students, and communities.

Please reach out if you have any questions or share with us how you have adapted or are using all or parts of this curriculum. We would love to hear your success stories! Contact us at:

Amy Minervini:      alminervini@lcsc.edu

Jennifer Anderson:      jsanderson@lcsc.edu