WRITING NATURE: 
THINKING AND WRITING ABOUT NATURE AND IDENTITY

Community Service Writing:
Providing a Missing Link in the Composition Classroom
by Carolyn Ross

Below you will find an article about Community Service Writing written by Carolyn Ross and published in the Winter 1996 issue of Commons: A Forum for News and Dialogue on Service and Social Change, the quarterly newsletter published by the Haas Center for Public Service.

Several years ago at the Young Rhetoricians Conference in Monterey, I participated with a group of my colleagues from Stanford in a panel presentation about our then quite new Community Service Writing program and our individual experiences with it as composition teachers. During the discussion following the presentation, someone asked me a crucial and disturbing question. It went something like this: Well. All this Community Service Writing stuff sounds very interesting, but how do you relate it to everything else you have to accomplish in a first-year composition course? How do you relate it to the teaching of academic writing?

My answer at the time was at least honest: Not very well... yet. Incorporating Community Service Writing into my classes meant, at the time, more or less tacking it on. The Community Service Writing Project was one of several writing assignments -- but a big one because it was new and complicated and involved so much work on my students' parts and my own. Like a separately bound volume on the shelf, Community Service Writing was propped adjacent to our real goals -- our academic agenda, comprised of course readings and academic writing assignments -- rather than satisfyingly integrated with them.

Community Service Writing felt right, though, because it offered students opportunities to extend and apply the ideas inherent in the course theme -- in the case of my course, ideas about human beings' place in nature -- as well as their practice of writing outside the classroom, to put these to work in the larger community. Working with nonprofit environmental and conservation organizations as various as The San Francisco Zoo, the Wilderness Society, and San Mateo County's Water Conservation Department, students wrote brochures, fact sheets, newsletter articles, research reports, and even educational play scripts for public school children. All of these projects required that students put into practice in various ways writing strategies they were learning in the classroom, but the challenge for me was how, in the most coherent way possible, to develop a clearer link between writing in the "real" world and in the academic one, and how to illuminate relationships between the content and rhetorical lessons provided by course readings and students' experiences and identities as practical writers and as individuals.

Over several years of thinking it over and adapting and refining my teaching methods, I think I have succeeded in a better integration not only of Community Service Writing and academic writing but also of writing and literature, of rhetoric and content, in my composition classes. The new challenge (how to integrate Community Service Writing with academic writing), as it turned out, has forced me to confront more directly an older, a more subtle and pervasive one: how to integrate the content of a theme-based writing course, including the ideas inherent in the theme and the work of "real" writers, the professionals whose writing students read and analyze, with practical writing instruction for first-year college students. Meeting these challenges has required me to question my earlier assumptions of what I was responsible for teaching college writers and has demanded a major shift in perspective. Most fundamentally, I no longer see my students as observers of but rather as participants in an evolving social and rhetorical discourse.

In the old days (this was certainly the case when I was in college), people who taught freshman English tended to teach one kind of content -- literature -- and, although it may have taken various rhetorical forms, essentially one kind of writing -- literary analysis. English departments encouraging this approach were rightly challenged for being too narrow, accused of teaching a captive audience in required courses out of a professional and scholarly bias. Most students in first-year writing classes, after all, do not become literary scholars or even English majors, and a more relevant approach, it was argued, would be to teach students more flexible skills, critical thinking and writing strategies that would apply more widely in their various majors and even to their work in the world. Furthermore, it was argued, the idea driving the new composition theme course would benefit from social relevance.

My arguments in favor of theme-based composition courses, and moreover for linking themes to Community Service Writing, allowing students to write for purposes and occasions outside the university, certainly include but also go beyond the most familiar one: that students, after all, must have something to think and write about in writing courses, and that a specific subject content in a writing course helps focus students' and instructors' interests and attention within a common framework. I think that a focus on theme in a composition course can do a good deal more than all this, if reading and writing assignments encompass a range of kinds of writing and writing occasions. I think that reading and writing within the context of particular themes, with an opportunity to extend and apply both ideas and writing skills through Community Service Writing, offers students opportunities

€ to explore how large issues relate to them personally;

€ to consider how they, personally, come to relate to large issues after thinking critically about them, individually and collaboratively, from a variety of perspectives encountered through readings, shared writing, discussion, and experience in and outside of class;

€ to understand and experience writing as a process of both comprehension and articulation rather than only a product of them;

€ to understand that effective writing, including the various rhetorical strategies it employs, occurs when writers respond appropriately to the context and occasion that inspires the writing, having taken into account audience and purpose (which vary from writing to writing).

In attempts to extend both the content and the rhetoric of my course beyond the traditional boundaries of the classroom, I frequently (but not always) ask students to write for occasions different from traditional academic ones and readers other than me, the instructor. They write for familiar readers, in letters to friends, family, and specific groups in their home communities, and for unfamiliar readers in letters to the editor, which they send to and which are sometimes published in newspapers. There is also a heavy emphasis on peer exchange and review of student writing, so in a very real sense they are writing to and for each other, even in their academic work. This trend is reinforced in a crucial way, of course, in the Community Service Writing Project, in which they write for the practical needs of community non-profit organizations and forums. Bridging traditional voids between the university and the community, between personal and public identities, between disciplines of study, and between theory and practice; extending students' readership beyond a one-way student-instuctor exchange to include peers and readers in the broader community; expanding kinds of and motives for writing beyond literary analysis, theoretical arguments, and writing for grades, to include a variety of writing occasions which demand that students undertake various roles and implement various practical strategies as writers -- all these goals have informed my methods in teaching writing and critical thinking.

In my experience, students explore more deeply and write more effectively about broad social issues or literary themes when they own their subjects with some intimacy, just as they write more convincingly of personal experience or revelation when they are aware of the larger implications of their subjects. I have found in years of working out the knots, of establishing and reinforcing the relatedness of the work we do within the university and the work we do in the world, that Community Service Writing helps provide the missing link for my students: it offers them opportunities to apply what they study and to practice crucial communication skills; it helps them relate their personal and public concerns, and translate thought into action. Whether writing for a Community Service Writing agency or the academic community, most students in my course achieve an enhanced sense of purpose in writing and a clearer picture of who their readers are and how they want to affect those readers through their writing. By the time they are finished with the class, few students have trouble relating the personal and public dimensions of the course theme, or the thematic content of the course to the study of rhetoric.

The most fundamental premise for me in teaching a thematically based composition course in which Community Service Writing helps to unite theme and rhetoric is that students are more than students -- that is, more than novices who study ideas and rhetoric from the sidelines. Rather they are active participants, real writers who contribute in real ways to a complex and ongoing social discourse.

Carolyn Ross is a Lecturer in the English Department's Program in Writing and Critical Thinking . Her book Writing Nature, published by St. Martin's Press in 1995, is a combined reader-rhetoric, an anthology of American writing about nature and the environment featuring practical instruction for writers. An expanded version of this article originally appeared in Notes in the Margins, a publication of the Program in Writing and Critical Thinking at Stanford University.