WRITING NATURE:
THINKING AND WRITING ABOUT NATURE AND IDENTITY
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The Community Service Writing Project is one of many assignments in WCT classes with CSW components. Researching and writing documents for community non-profit agencies, within the context of an academic class, extends students' experience, thinking, and writing beyond the university walls. |
CSW: How It Works Generally in WCT
CSW: How It Works in Particular in "Writing Nature"
"Writing Nature" is one of many classes in WCT designated as a Community Service Writing course. While satisfying a portion of the writing requirement of this class, CSW offers students the opportunity to write something of specific and tangible use for a non-profit organization outside the university. Most CSW writing is published and distributed to a much larger audience, and to different kinds of readers, than as college writers students are accustomed to. With the CSW Project, students make a contribution the larger community, and their writing stands to have a real effect on people and policies.
CSW: How It Works Generally in WCT
Instructors and students teaching and taking courses in Stanford's Writing and Critical Thinking Program choose whether or not to participate in the Community Service Writing Project. Instructors decide in advance whether or not their courses will be designated as having Community Service Writing components, and students elect in advance (in responding the summer before they arrive on campus to questions posed in Approaching Stanford) whether or not to be placed a class designated as a Community Service Writing class.
Most instructors as well as most students participate in the CSW for two (sometimes separate, sometimes combined) reasons:
1) They see Community Service Writing as an opportunity to extend the audiences for and the purposes of their writing outside a traditional and sometimes constricting academic context, an opportunity to engage in "real" writing, and
2) They wish to extend the thematic content of courses and/or readings to issues and communities outside academia, to compare and apply theoretical discussions of, say, multicultural, race, gender, or environmental issues to "real" world situations.
CSW lends itself, therefore, to purposeful learning and purposeful writing.
CSW: How It Works in Particular in "Writing Nature"
Each quarter, "Writing Nature" is offered a selection of potential placements with various non-profit organizations whose work relates to the course theme. These organizations need writers to complete a variety of writing tasks, possibly including newsletter articles, press releases, interviews, profiles, histories, reports, fact sheets, reviews, proposals, and other projects. After learning more about the organizations and their needs, students are placed -- usually with one or two other students from the class -- with an organization that corresponds with their interests. The writing students produce for their organizations, if it is good enough according to the agencies' standards, will appear in print or be incorporated into important in-house documents. (In the past, a few projects have even been performed.) The CSW Project involves independent work and requires a high degree of reliability on students' parts since it is, essentially, an internship and agencies rely on students to fulfill real writing needs.