CEL, First-Year Writing, and Covid-19: Creating Community Engaged Learning Opportunities in a Pandemic
Rachel Carr, Assistant Professor of English & Natalie Vickous, Director of Civic Engagement and Student Leadership, Lindsey Wilson College
Intended Audience: Faculty at institutions with underserved student populations interested in incorporating CEL opportunities that are accessible to students with in-person service limitations.
ABSTRACT
This article reflects the collaboration between a Writing Studies faculty member and the Director of Civic Engagement to create an opportunity for Community Engaged Learning (CEL) that was accessible for underserved students and achievable during the limitations of the Covid-19 pandemic. We discuss the benefits and challenges of incorporating CEL at ACA institutions, our Covid-compatible CEL design, and thoughts on the future of CEL in Writing Studies courses. This article demonstrates the benefits of cross-campus collaboration to faculty and students in improving both course learning outcomes and community engagement.
In Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement, editors Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser note that colleges and universities are “increasingly invested in engagement with their stakeholder communities and focus greater attention on providing evidence of their accountability to the public” (4). They argue that this focus has significantly impacted writing programs across all types of higher education institutions, as writing programs are “where students make the transition from community to college (in first-year composition) or from college to community (in professional writing) and because these programs are dedicated to developing literacies that are most critically needed in communities” (4). In the years since their collection was published, an emphasis on community engagement and accountability to the local community in higher education has only increased and knowledge of how writing programs incorporate types of community engaged learning (CEL) continues to grow (Diamond Young and Morgan 2). However, much of this body of research represents the work of writing programs at public institutions, research institutions, or elite liberal arts colleges.
This article represents the collaboration between an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Civic Engagement to design an accessible CEL Project for use in Writing Studies II at a small, non-elite, liberal arts college. Our institution, Lindsey Wilson College (LWC), is a rural, primarily white institution (PWI) that belongs to the Appalachian College Association (ACA). Noting these particular demographics is important as our makeup demands a specific type of CEL design. For example, there are practical limitations, such as how serving in person requires that students have access to vehicles and are able to drive significant distances as the community is not walkable. Many of our students also work part-time or full-time to support themselves or their families and cannot dedicate the additional time needed to engage in more traditional methods of CEL. We also must be aware of the needs and limitations of our community, which may not have the capacity or desire to supervise students in one-and-done projects that are often the focus of CEL. Our goal was to design an opportunity that was accessible to students, adaptable between instructors, and high-impact in practice. We are sharing our work to demonstrate a potential CEL design at other ACA institutions, to model adaptable and accessible CEL components in writing programs that do not have a designated Writing Program Administrator (WPA), and to show a method of collaboration between writing programs and Student Services. We also wanted to create a CEL option that was flexible and accessible to students during the restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic, which could then be used beyond the pandemic to engage our growing number of remote or distance-learning students in CEL. Finally, this article also demonstrates the benefits of a partnership between the Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) and first-year writing programs.
Even at small institutions, faculty and staff face significant barriers to collaboration. Because of the divide between faculty and staff, faculty teaching in the freshman writing sequence who want to include CEL are often unaware of existing options for partnership or collaboration with staff, and vice versa. As Writing Studies is both a discipline and a cross-disciplinary skill, the siloing of first-year writing is particularly problematic, as writing faculty are teaching a skill that students in all fields need. This is not only detrimental to Writing Studies faculty working to create writing opportunities that bridge beyond the classroom, but to community partners as well. Norton and Goldblatt note in their conclusion to “Centering Community Literacy: The Art of Locations within Institutions and Neighborhoods” that “Writing program directors and instructors should be leaders in the field of service-learning and community engagement, but in fact few in groups like Campus Compact or Habitat for Humanity know that the field of composition/rhetoric even exists” (48). Writing assignments with CEL components benefit students in connecting their classroom work to their lives outside the classroom, but they are equally beneficial to community partners and Student Services departments that work in civic engagement, another reason we believe collaboration between Civic Engagement offices and Writing Studies programs is important at ACA schools.
Additionally, as CEL opportunities increase across higher education, ensuring that students engage in CEL experiences is important in keeping them professionally competitive post-graduation. ACA institutions are disadvantaged in implementing CEL by specific regional barriers. For example, 60% of LWC students from Kentucky are also from Appalachia and, of those, more than two-thirds are from designated distressed counties and another 30% are from at-risk counties (Lindsey 2020-2021). Of undergraduate students at the institution, 57% are Pell eligible, which is significantly higher than the national rate of 34% eligibility (National Center). Like most tuition-driven, non-elite, small liberal arts colleges, LWC faces challenges with retention from freshman to sophomore year, in addition to retention from freshman to junior year and successful graduation within 8 years. With FR-SO retention rates of 66% in 2019-2020 and again in 2020-2021, it is apparent that freshman-level courses need to successfully engage students both in learning and in feeling connected to the community in which they live at college (Lindsey 2019-2020).
Writing Studies, with its wide reach of students, is an ideal subject in which to integrate CEL and bridge this gap. The findings from George Kuh’s research on high-impact practices, endorsed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, indicate that practices such as CEL and undergraduate research build student engagement in learning and grow retention rates.1 As students become excited about answering critical questions through research and direct experiences with issues they study in the curriculum, they engage more deeply with content and with ongoing efforts to analyze and solve problems in the community. In doing so, they build community in their courses and find a connection to the community that houses the institution. In addition, Kuh’s research found that first-year students who engage in CEL experience deep learning and both personal and practical gains that help them succeed in college and beyond (Kuh). While this does not specifically identify CEL as positively correlated with increased retention rates, it does indicate that CEL increases freshman connection with faculty, fellow students, and the community at large.
While the benefits of CEL for students at ACA institutions are clear, it can be a challenge for first-year writing faculty at these institutions to implement. The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) defines CEL as “scholarly, teaching, or community-development activities that involve collaborations between one or more academic institutions and one or more local, regional, national, or international community group(s) and contribute to the public good” (National Council). CCCC also notes that projects can be time-limited, multi-semester, or long-running. Regardless of the specific design, implementing CEL in Writing Studies is complicated, as Jeff Grabill’s “Infrastructure Outreach and the Engaged Writing Program” shows. The success of a CEL project depends on the collaboration of WPAs, graduate instructors, writing faculty, adjuncts, contract lecturers, support staff, and a writing center. However, LWC, like many ACA institutions, has a small English faculty body. All seven faculty teach a 4-4 load with around half or more of these being freshman composition. Four adjuncts also teach composition. There is no WPA or designated leader of first-year writing, and so CEL is an individual or ad-hoc effort, which means ACA institutions perform a different type of “outreach research” (Grabill 19). In addition to these limitations, CEL is a fairly new formal initiative at the institution, and thus, does not yet have solid expectations or incentives for faculty to participate. While smaller writing programs face the organizational complications that Grabill notes, the primary burden for most ACA faculty will be planning CEL for their individual courses.
Beyond these institutional limitations, the Covid-19 pandemic also presented significant challenges to integrating CEL. Our institution used a hybrid model of classes for the fall 2020 semester and spring 2021 semester. With this model, students attended a synchronous class one day per week and did the rest of their work asynchronously. Students attended class in-person or remotely, making creating a class community difficult as students needed to bond across multiple modalities. Because of Covid-19 safety concerns, students would not be physically working with the local community or completing experiential learning, which ruled out our ability to integrate traditional service-learning into the class.2 We chose CEL over service-learning to remove the experiential expectation from the course and make it accessible to all the students enrolled, whether they were primarily engaging synchronously, asynchronously, in-person, or remotely. As such, our CEL project was a one-semester option to work with the hybrid classroom model our institution used during the pandemic. It was also designed to be easily added to a premade Writing Studies II template that new and adjunct instructors have the option to use if they so choose.
Our CEL option evolved from the existing work of the course. In this Writing Studies II course, students were asked to identify an issue that they were personally invested in and passionate about changing or that affected a community in which they identified as a member, to then research and write about for the entire semester. Their final, research-based essay required students to convince an academic audience to agree with their analysis of the issue and their proposed solution to it. If they decided to complete the CEL component, students then wrote a two-page persuasive letter to a stakeholder they identified as having change-making power within the issue. Students drew from their research (an annotated bibliography and the final essay) to suggest a specific intervention or change within the stakeholder’s power. Students needed to cite data and demonstrate their research in the letter. Students were aware of the CEL component at the start of the course but could decide whether or not to complete it until five weeks before its due date. The Director of Civic Engagement attended four class sessions to work one-on-one with students on suggesting solutions, identifying stakeholders, and professional writing. Students submitted a draft of the letter to both the Director of Civic Engagement and the Professor, received feedback, revised the letter, got approval from both parties again, and then sent the letter to their stakeholder after submitting the final paper. In terms of civic engagement, this project helped students recognize that advocacy is often most effective when carried out by those with a personal investment in the issue at hand. In terms of writing skills, students increased their audience awareness by communicating information and research across different genres. CEL writing assignments ultimately empower students “to understand their place within a complete rhetorical ecology, not just define a specific audience,” as Diamond Young and Morgan state in “The Impact of Critical Community-Engaged Writing on Student Understanding of Audience” (46).
We began the semester with much excitement about participation in CEL, but due to students’ limited mental and physical availability under Covid-19, few ultimately completed the CEL assignment. Every student in the course completed the exit survey, which consisted of five questions on a 1-5 Likert scale, as well as a few reflective short answer prompts. When asked, “How well did you understand the content that you learned in this class?,” all students who completed the CEL option in the course indicated that they understood the content learned in the course “extremely well,” while those who did not complete the CEL component indicated they understood the content “well” or “extremely well.” Similarly, when asked, “How well do you understand how the content of this course relates to your community?,” all CEL participants indicated that they understood “extremely well” the way the course content related to their community. The majority of the CEL participants indicated that they felt “extremely empowered” to make positive change in their community following the assignment, while one participant indicated that they felt “somewhat empowered.” On average, students who participated in the CEL component of this course self-identified at a higher level of content understanding, connecting content to community issues, and feeling empowered to make positive change in their communities than those who did not participate in the CEL project. To qualitatively evaluate this assignment, we turned to the short reflections students wrote about their experience. One student who participated in the CEL option stated, “I overall really enjoyed the opportunity to organize my research and share it with someone who has the ability to foster legal change. I am now more empowered to do other things that will give me the ability to affect change in my own community and world.” Another student, responding to the question of how this assignment affected their understanding of performing academic research and communicating results to stakeholders, stated, “I learned how to go more into depth on these pieces of evidence and how to read between the lines on little things.” These results, while from a small sample and one singular class experience, are promising for the potential impact that future CEL experiences within courses could have on our students.
In April 2021, the CCE partnered with Siena College Research Institute to administer the National Assessment of Service and Community Engagement (NASCE) to our main-campus undergraduate full-time students. Of those surveyed, 37% of student respondents stated that they had participated in at least one service and community-engaged course while at LWC. Of those 37%, 67% stated that they felt the community-engaged portions of their course(s) had been organized and enhanced the meaning of course texts and lectures, and 79% stated that their community-engaged course(s) provided adequate reflection time to understand how their engagement affected their community as well as their personal development. In our course, students were given the opportunity to reflect through in-class conversations while working on the assignment. At the end of the course, students reflected on their completed letters both through face-to-face discussion and through a reflection form to provide different formats for reflection. The NASCE results show us that CEL often provides opportunities for students to apply classroom knowledge to real-world situations, critically reflect on their experiences, and better understand how to continue applying course content outside of the classroom. Finally, 57% of all students surveyed in the NASCE shared that they were less engaged in service and community engagement than they were before the Covid-19 pandemic began in March 2020, which underscores the importance of providing accessible CEL opportunities for students, whether in-person or remote (Siena College).
The NASCE data also demonstrates the value of adding a CEL option to existing assignments. In reflecting on how to improve and grow CEL opportunities in Writing Studies at LWC, we decided that some Writing Studies courses will have a CEL signifier in the course offerings. In these sections, the CEL component will be mandatory, allowing students to self-select whether or not to take a section of the course that is classified as community-engaged. With the signifier, it will be more feasible to build the assignment into class time, requiring less out-of-class time from students who are already managing multiple pulls on their time. This will allow for a shift from extra credit to expected involvement, recognizing the ability of each student in a freshman-level writing course to effect change in their community through research and advocacy.
While the duration and restrictions of the Covid-19 pandemic are unknown, we hope to begin incorporating service-learning alongside CEL projects. In doing so, faculty must consider the barriers that affect the participation of community partners. Staff are already overworked, especially at non-profit organizations, and we cannot ethically ask them to mentor students who will be gone in three months or at the end of the academic year. A key component of impactful and sustainable community engagement is reciprocity, ensuring that both partners and students are benefiting from the community-engaged component built into the course. The CCE at LWC defines CEL as learning that “integrates course objectives and community-based experiences, provides opportunities for student preparation and on-going critical reflection, addresses societal needs identified by a community, [and] produces reciprocal benefits for faculty, students, and community partners” (Vickous). There is a strong focus on reciprocal work, in that community partners should have a stated need met and students should gain a better understanding of the classroom content through real-world experience.
As institutions of higher education grow more aware of their responsibility to produce civically engaged and ethically aware graduates, a focus on building community engagement into every student’s college experience, especially through academic opportunities, carries more weight. As Rose and Weiser state in Going Public, “Public engagement initiatives have the potential to transform our understanding of the ‘service’ role of writing courses from that of ‘serving’ other academic programs to ‘serving’ a much more broadly defined public” (4). From this experience, we would argue that incorporating CEL into freshman composition and writing courses does both, ultimately enriching student understanding of research practices while also putting those practices into action to benefit identified communities or needs.
Footnotes
1 Now known as the American Association of Colleges and Universities.
2 We follow Shamoon and Medeiros’ definition of service-learning as “a type of experiential learning that connects community service to academic coursework by integrating students’ service into the academic curriculum” (178).
Works Cited
Diamond Young, Debra and Rachel Morgan. “The Impact of Critical Community–Engaged Writing on Student Understanding of Audience.” Composition Studies, vol. 48, no. 3, 2020, pp. 35-52.
Grabill, Jeff. “ Infrastructure Outreach and the Engaged Writing Program.” Rose and Weiser, pp. 15-28.
Kuh, George D. “High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter.” Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2018, https://www.aacu.org/sites/default/files/files/LEAP/HIP_tables.pdf
Lindsey Wilson College. “2019-2020 Public Disclosure (updated Summer 2020.).” Lindsey Wilson College, https://www.lindsey.edu/academics/Goals-Student-Achieve.cfm
Lindsey Wilson College. “2020-2021 Public Disclosure (updated Summer 2021).” Lindsey Wilson College, https://www.lindsey.edu/academics/Goals-Student-Achieve.cfm
National Center for Education Statistics. “Trend Generator: Financial Aid: What is the percent of undergraduate students awarded Pell grants?” Institute of Education Sciences, https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/TrendGenerator/app/answer/8/35
National Council of Teachers of English. “CCCC Statement on Community-Engaged Projects in Rhetoric and Composition.” Conference on College Composition and Communication, https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/community-engaged
Norton, Michael H and Eli Goldblatt. “Centering Community Literacy: The Art of Location within Institutions and Neighborhoods.” Rose and Weiser, pp. 29-49.
Rose, Shirley K. and Weiser, Irwin. “Intro.” Rose and Weiser, pp. 1-14.
Rose, Shirley K. and Weiser, Irwin. Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement. E-Book, Utah State University Press, 2010.
Shamoon, Linda and Eileen Medeiros. “Not Politics as Usual: Public Writing as Writing for Engagement. E-Book, Utah State University Press, 2010.
Siena College Research Institute. “NASCE Crosstabulations LWC.” 2021. PDF.
Vickous, Natalie. “Community-Engaged Learning Standards Proposal.” 2020. PDF.
Resources
“Syllabi Archive.” Campus Compact, https://compact.org/resource-type/syllabi/.
