CONSTELLATING CULTURAL RHETORICS, FIRST YEAR WRITING, AND SERVICE- LEARNING: A STORY OF TEACHING AND LEARNING By Sarah E Prielipp A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Rhetoric and Writing—Doctor of Philosophy 2018 CONSTELLATING CULTURAL RHETORICS, FIRST YEAR WRITING, AND SERVICE- LEARNING: A STORY OF TEACHING AND LEARNING ABSTRACT By Sarah E Prielipp This dissertation examines the relationships among cultural rhetorics theory and methods, first year writing, and service-learning by showing the ways these theories and pedagogies constellate, or build, new things from their intersections and relationality. The author argues that “story is theory is practice” and demonstrates how this can work in first year writing through a cultural rhetorics-informed service-learning pedagogy. The author explains that this story of teaching and learning – both hers and her students – builds theory through sharing their stories of practice in their writing classroom. This theory/story/practice shows us how relationality, accountability, and reciprocity help develop habits of mind that may transfer to other situations to become active, engaged citizens for social justice. Chapter one develops Wilson’s Indigenous research paradigm as a theoretical framework for the author’s teaching and research by explaining her research paradigm for this project and discussing the literature that she draws on throughout this project. Chapter two further explains how she defines and uses service-learning by providing two case studies from the FYW courses she taught at Michigan State University in the 2016-2017 academic year. Chapter three begins to constellate cultural rhetorics theory and methods, first year writing, and service-learning using Wilson’s Indigenous research paradigm as a framework. The “half” chapters are her students’ voices, their stories in their words; these student selections help to show how they are practicing habits of mind throughout the course in their writing. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Since I am drawing on Indigenous scholars, it seems only right to acknowledge my ancestors and their role in helping me get to where I am today. While the men in my life have also been supportive and encouraging, I come from a line of strong women who always believed that I could do anything, and I would like to honor their impact in my teaching and learning journey. I will begin with my paternal grandmother, Wilma Pearl Smith. Thank you for investing in my education as I was growing up. She told me, “Be a leader, not a follower.” Your wisdom has impacted several generations of Smith women. I hope to continue your legacy as I follow your advice. Thank you to my maternal grandmother, Ernestine Ruth Gilbert, for being an important part of my childhood. I spent many summer vacations with you and you always encouraged me to play and learn and grow without judgment or censure. You helped me become confident and strong. Thank you to my mother, Terry Marie Smith, for believing in me even when you weren’t here. Remembering your pride in my academic achievements pushed me through some difficult times. You raised me to believe that I could do anything. Thank you to my husband, Timothy, and to my children -- George, Meredith, Ted, and Vivian -- who loved me when I needed their support the most. I undertook this degree with my husband’s encouragement, and I have done this for our family, for my children, for my students, and for the generations that I will not live to know. iv Thank you, also, to my academic family -- the mentors, peers, and students who guided me through this project with words of support and encouragement, discussions, teaching, mentoring, and collaborating. I especially thank my committee -- Trixie Long Smith, Malea Powell, Stuart Blythe, and R. Candace Epps-Robertson -- and my cohort - - Phil Bratta, John Gagnon, Maria Novotny, Ronisha Browdy, Victor del Hierro, and Laura Gonzalez -- as well as the many professors and doctoral and Master’s students I had the privilege of studying with these last few years. I also want to thank MSU Instructional Librarian, Emilia Marcyk-Taylor, for her teaching partnership. Finally, thank you to my WRA 101 students at MSU, not only the students who participated in my research but all the students before and after you who continue to challenge me to be the best teacher I can be. All of you are part of this story. v TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................................. viii INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: FRAMING ......................................................................................................... 5 My Path to Teaching (and Learning) ................................................................................... 5 Theoretical Framework and Methodology ........................................................................... 9 Ontology: What is real? ......................................................................................................10 Epistemology: How do we know what is real? ....................................................................11 Methodology: How do we learn more about reality? ...........................................................12 Axiology: What is worth knowing?, and, What ethics or morals guide our knowledge- seeking? ............................................................................................................................13 What should we teach in FYW ...........................................................................................13 Why should we teach these things in FYW? ......................................................................21 How should we teach FYW? ..............................................................................................24 Research Methods .............................................................................................................27 Relationality and Accountability .........................................................................................32 To My Colleagues ..............................................................................................................33 CHAPTER 1.5: NASSER’S STORY.......................................................................................34 Transcript of Nasser’s Learning Narrative ..........................................................................34 CHAPTER 2: THIS IS OUR STORY: A CASE STUDY OF SERVICE-LEARNING IN FYW AT MSU ......................................................................................................................................38 FYW Curriculum at MSU ....................................................................................................38 Story: Theory, Practice, Service-Learning ..........................................................................39 Pilot Project (Fall Semester): Spaces and Places ..............................................................41 Learning Narrative .............................................................................................................43 Fieldworking Cultural Analysis and Remix .........................................................................44 Final Reflections ................................................................................................................45 Disciplinary and Professional Literacy: An Outlier ..............................................................46 Spring Semester: Facing College .......................................................................................46 What I Learned From the Data ...........................................................................................48 Learning Narrative: Data ....................................................................................................48 SMART Goals: Prewriting for Learning Narrative ...............................................................51 Fieldworking Cultural Analysis: Data ..................................................................................54 Remix: Data .......................................................................................................................61 Final Reflections: Data .......................................................................................................65 Your Story ..........................................................................................................................69 CHAPTER 2.5: CHRISTINE’S STORY ..................................................................................70 Fieldworking Cultural Analysis: Diasporic Asians ...............................................................71 vi CHAPTER 3: CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS ............................................................82 Positionality as Research Paradigm ...................................................................................82 Significance and Future Research .....................................................................................85 Expectations ......................................................................................................................85 Students’ Expectations ......................................................................................................88 Relationality of Projects .....................................................................................................90 Being Relational and Accountable .....................................................................................95 Relationality to Space and Place........................................................................................98 Metacognition as a Process ............................................................................................. 101 My Growth ....................................................................................................................... 102 Students’ Growth ............................................................................................................. 103 Story as Critical Service-learning ..................................................................................... 105 Research Limitations ....................................................................................................... 109 Implications for Future Study ........................................................................................... 110 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 112 CHAPTER 3.5: NICHOLAS HARDING’S STORY ................................................................ 114 Ahmad’s Story (as told to and written by Nicholas Harding) ............................................. 114 APPENDICES ..................................................................................................................... 118 Appendix A ...................................................................................................................... 119 Appendix B ...................................................................................................................... 121 Appendix C ...................................................................................................................... 124 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................... 125 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Habits of Mind in Major Assignments, WRA 101 ………………..…………..48 viii INTRODUCTION This project is a story. A story of teaching and learning in a few of my First Year Writing classes at Michigan State University. I offer this story because, as King writes, “Story is all we are.” Our lives are built by stories which form our paradigm, our way of being and thinking in the world (Wilson). Story is theory (Maracle). This dissertation takes risks and plays with the genre, just like I invite my students to do with their writing and learning in my classes. My students’ voices – their stories – intermingle with the literature, my ideas, and excerpts from my teaching reflections and research. I use this process because it demonstrates relationality, accountability, and reciprocity. This work is messy and recursive: it circles around and weaves together story, theory, and practice because story is theory is practice. So I will begin with a piece of my story of teaching. This excerpt is from my fieldworking1 journal where I recorded notes, observations, and responded to the prompts from our course textbook as I undertook this mini-ethnographic study of my First Year Writing (FYW) classrooms at Michigan State University (MSU). In this prompt, my students and I wrote about some of our roles, then we chose one role to consider more in-depth. I wrote about my role as an educator. I did not begin my “adult” or professional life as an educator. I first pursued my Master’s of Library and Information Science and was a librarian for several years before moving into full-time teaching in higher education. It was only after teaching for a while that I decided to go back to 1 Fieldworking refers to ethnographic research, one of my students’ projects (Fieldworking Cultural Analysis, or FCA), and a textbook by Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater. In this instance, I am referring to the practice of ethnographic research. When I am referring to the textbook, the title will be italicized. Fieldworking will be used for the research method, and FCA will be used when referring to the project/assignment. 1 school -- as an older, nontraditional student with a family and while continuing to teach. This excerpt shares some of my thoughts and feelings about my role as an educator. Why am I an educator?2 This is a question I think about sometimes. My husband has asked me this in the past, because he believes I could make more money doing something else -- writing or research -- and would feel less stressed. He’s probably right. But I don’t know that I want to do “something else.” Every time I think about doing something alt-ac, I feel a deep pang of regret -- concern that I wouldn’t get to work with students. (And, honestly, sometimes that sounds wonderful, too.) But mostly, I feel that I would be missing out on something important if I wasn’t teaching. Maybe this feeling is something only other teachers can understand and appreciate. It’s a hard feeling for me to describe, to put into words. I feel a connection with my students that goes beyond the relationship we form in those 16 weeks together. When I hear or read about something they go on to do after our time together, I feel a sense of pride because that’s “my student,” even though I’m not part of these later accomplishments. I teach because I believe teachers have an important role in our society, and because I enjoy it. hooks writes that “the pleasure of teaching is an act of resistance countering the overwhelming boredom, uninterest, and apathy that so often characterize [. . .] the classroom experience” (10). And I hope that my classrooms are enjoyable, exciting, engaging places to learn. Teachers help develop critical thinkers and lifelong learners, which hooks also suggests is an act of resistance for some students (5). 2 Writing in italics is from my teaching journal that I kept throughout the course, and they are responses to the Fieldworking Cultural Analysis prompts that my students also wrote for their own projects. 2 Teachers impact the world through the relationships we build and the ways we help our students learn to be accountable to those relationships. Teachers help change the world -- one lesson, one student, at a time. Wilson writes, “[K]nowledge in itself is not seen as the ultimate goal, rather the goal is the change that this knowledge may help to bring about” (37). The changes that can happen are why I teach, and they also affect what and how I teach my First Year Writing classes. The project that follows explores the relationships among cultural rhetorics, first year writing, and service-learning. It stems from my desire to be a better teacher, to find those pedagogies that help students learn most effectively so that we see “change.” These changes may be growth in their own learning goals, or they may be in a larger social and cultural context. My lens and framework for research and pedagogy is Shawn Wilson’s Indigenous research paradigm. Cultural rhetorics theory informs my methodology, which also affects my pedagogy because story (methodology) is theory is practice (pedagogy) (Powell; Maracle). My pedagogy draws on work by Downs and Wardle, Adler-Kassner, Mitchell, Deans, Howe, hooks, Freire, Wilhelm, Eyler and Giles, and others as I constellate cultural rhetorics, first year writing, and service-learning in order to show how their intersections build another way of thinking about teaching and learning in first year writing -- a pedagogy centered on story which we practice through service-learning to develop habits of mind that help us improve our writing while creating transferable skills for lifelong learning. These scholars, and others, offer pedagogical practices for first-year writing and research on service-learning, and their ideas have helped to shape 3 my own pedagogy and the ways I have incorporated service-learning in my FYW courses. As Wilson explains, “[R]esearch is ceremony. And so is life. Everything that we do shares in the ongoing creation of the universe” (138). I am proud to be an educator and researcher who recognizes and values the ceremony of teaching and learning. A Note to My Readers Throughout my time in the Rhetoric and Writing doctoral program at Michigan State University, I have been drawn to several Indigenous scholars but the work of Shawn Wilson has especially stood out to me. To honor this relation, I am borrowing his method of writing to develop my own relationship with my readers: letters to my audience. “what's your story? i'm still thinking [sic]” -- Oluwadamilare 4 CHAPTER 1: FRAMING Dear colleagues, I write this chapter to you because we share a profession, and I hope we share similar concerns, regardless of our discipline. This chapter will situate my story of teaching and learning within the Rhetoric and Writing discipline while also inviting you to think about your own positionality: How would you respond to the research questions posed here? What is your story and how does it affect your research paradigm? This first chapter explains my theoretical framework and connects theory to practice by showing how theory and practice are relational, accountable, and reciprocal. It begins with a story of my own relationship to teaching and learning so that we might begin to establish a relationship and to establish my position. My Path to Teaching (and Learning) I found my way to teaching in a circuitous route. In fact, it was the one profession I didn’t want to pursue, because my mom wanted me to. My mom grew up in a time when women who went to college were either nurses or teachers, and she had always wanted to be a teacher herself, but did not go to college. So, when I was an undergraduate, she always encouraged me to be a teacher, and I actively resisted this suggestion, even while pursuing both a Bachelor’s and Master’s in English, non- teaching of course. I started working on a Master’s in Information and Library Science and began teaching as adjunct faculty at a community college. And then I discovered that I liked teaching. Even once I began working full-time in libraries, I continued to teach one or two classes each semester as adjunct faculty. When an opportunity to 5 move into teaching full-time -- and leave my much loved library -- arose, I accepted the position and began my teaching (and learning) journey. My mom intuited something I had to discover on my own -- I love teaching, working with students to help them pursue their learning goals, connecting ideas and people, building relationships. The work of first-year writing is about much more than teaching rote writing skills and other lore of good writing (North). Truthfully, most of our first-year college students know this lore of “good” writing (five paragraph essays, traditional argument model, critique, etc.) because this lore, these “rules of good writing,” have been impressed upon them throughout their K-12 education. This prior knowledge and experience affects their transfer, too. Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak write, [W]hen students come to college directly from high school, they bring with them some school-supported writing practices and understandings: an ability to create a text with beginnings, middles, and endings; and a nascent sense of genre, but one that is uninformed about the role of genre in shaping discourse. (37) Wilhelm et. al. further caution that “learning should go beyond academic knowledge and the skills that they [students] need in the school setting” (43). At best, we can help our students hone these skills and maybe offer some tools for improving their writing. But some of the best (and most important) tools I think we can offer are helping them to build relationships among ideas, people, courses, professions, majors because these relationships, or constellations, are where learning and growth happen. For example, I can explain how a writing concept will be important to them now and in the future, but until they connect that concept for themselves through experience, students often ignore the learning and just memorize the concept without really understanding it. 6 In his learning narrative audio selfie, Mario, a student from my spring semester, talked about the importance of relationships with his teachers. He said, My relationship with my teachers have been very, very good. I have gotten into some very quality conversations with them. [. . .] In my sophomore year, I realized that teachers are people, too. ‘Cause when you just grow up you always think that teachers are not human beings. They can’t show emotion. They can’t do any of this. And so it was sort of awesome seeing that switch of teachers are humans just like me. They still have issues. They still have fails, trials, tribulations success, triumphs, and so sort of seeing how that all went into play was very nice, and I had more teachers than peers with quality relationships that I still talk to today. He explained that it was his high school English teacher who helped him see this switch by helping him connect to the course concepts and regain his love for literature and writing. Through her support and encouragement -- their relationship -- he pursued AP English and saw success in future English classes. When I started my doctoral program, I was teaching at a tribal college, and many of my students talked about the ways that education allowed them to make positive changes in their families and to be role models for future generations. Their desire to use education for relationality and accountability inspired me. I came into this doctoral program with a desire to be a better writing teacher, and I believed that the way to be better was to understand theory to articulate how, why, and what should be taught in First Year Writing courses. I wanted to make a difference in my institution and to help my students make a difference in their families and in their communities. As I progressed through the coursework, I found myself quickly drawn to Cultural Rhetorics and Indigenous theory. As I read Wilson, Powell, Riley-Mukavetz, Maracle, Smith, King, and others, I felt a sense of community and belonging that I didn’t always find in other theorists. I was finally able to articulate my own belief in the power of narrative and how stories are important to knowledge-sharing and knowledge-making 7 through a theoretical lens. These relationships--with the theory, with my students, with my beliefs, with these scholars--only deepened as I began to prepare this project. The pedagogical questions that follow push our discipline to improve teaching and learning, and they have guided my research and classroom praxis as well. I am always thinking about what, how, and why we should teach certain ideas and in certain ways. I engage in conversations with colleagues and participate in professional development with a mind towards improved teaching and learning as my end goal. These questions are also the basis of this dissertation: ● What should we teach in First Year Writing?. ● Why should we teach these things in FYW? ● How should we teach FYW? Or, what pedagogical practices are best for teaching these things, particularly using Cultural Rhetorics theory and methods? And Deans adds this question to the conversation: “What kinds of writers do we hope that our composition courses will encourage?” (51). These are recurrent questions in the Rhetoric and Composition discipline and in teaching and learning scholarship more generally. This research hopes to add to the discussion and to constellate relationships with this discipline, FYW, and Cultural Rhetorics theory to build another model of service-learning. FYW is often a required course, and many students seem to feel like it is irrelevant to them. This research project will suggest ways that we, as FYW instructors and administrators, can develop practices which help students find the relationality among our courses, learning outcomes, and students’ realities. 8 Theoretical Framework and Methodology This project, and my teaching, uses Shawn Wilson’s Indigenous research paradigm as a framework. His model helps me to see how my guiding questions are constellated, and I have a deeper understanding of how my story also affects my response to these questions. Wilson’s model (ontology, epistemology, methodology, and axiology) demonstrates reciprocity, relationality, and accountability. He argues that our beliefs and values and research are relational, meaning they are not a linear equation but a reciprocal process that goes back and forth. As I think about my ontology and epistemology, I am able to determine my methodology and axiology for teaching -- or, how do I practice what I believe in this space and place? For example, if I believe that knowledge is created and made through multiple stories, then how do I teach story? How do I teach openness? This connection from theory to practice is the link between Wilson, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and National Writing Project’s (NWP) “Framework” which includes habits of mind, and service-learning, because story is theory is practice (Powell; Maracle). Wilson’s framework led me to service-learning, because this pedagogy can offer authentic, relevant writing experiences which help students develop the CWPA, NCTE, and NWP’s Habits of Mind of Curiosity, Openness, Engagement, Creativity, Persistence, Responsibility, Flexibility, and Metacognition. The authors3 of the Framework argue that this Framework, which includes these habits of mind, is essential to being successful in postsecondary education (and in life), and that these habits can 3 The complete list of contributors to the Framework can be viewed on the WPA website here: http://wpacouncil.org/framework/taskforce. 9 be cultivated in FYW courses. In other words, the habits of mind are part of the “what” we should be teaching and helping students develop in FYW because these habits help students learn to reflect and think critically about a variety of situations in writing (and in their lives more generally) so they can create or find meaning for themselves, so they are open to their own stories and the stories of others. This meaning-making is learning, according to Mezirow. Wilhelm et. al. further maintain that these habits, which they refer to as a dynamic or growth mindset, are an integral outcome of service-learning. Ontology: What is real? Wilson explains that ontology explains our “theory of the nature of existence, or the nature of reality” (33). In other words, it is our answer to “what is real.” Some may suggest that there is one Truth, or one reality, but Indigenous ontology maintains multiple truths. Practitioners of Indigenous ontology don’t believe that we are all seeking the one Truth, but that “reality is in the relationship with the truth [...] reality is relationships” (Wilson 73). The connections we make with others and with knowledge or ideas becomes our reality. Since we have multiple relationships -- with people, with things, with knowledge and ideas -- we have multiple realities. I find that this ontology also fits with habits of mind, particularly curiosity, openness, and responsibility. When we are curious about our world, we want to know more, and knowing more means that we may find ideas which appear contradictory to our own ideas or even to each other. But, if we are working from an ontology that there is more truth, it is more likely that we will acknowledge these contradictions and differences and either find how they constellate with our ideas and with each other, or be comfortable with their opposition. 10 This comfort with multiple viewpoints or truths shows that we are developing openness, and Wingeier-Reyo suggests that service-learning is particularly pertinent to helping students develop and practice openness as they work with others. Eyler and Giles agree that service-learning can lead to “deeper [learning] than merely acquiring and spitting back a series of facts about a subject; it engaged our students’ hearts as well as their heads and helped them understand the complexity of what they were studying” (xiv). Service-learning helps students start to feel responsible for and to take ownership of their ideas and the relationships that form as we work through new knowledge. This comfort is also a developmental stage that not all students will reach in one fifteen week course, their undergraduate degree experience, or even in their lifetimes (Meyer and Land; Adler-Kassner, Majewski, and Koshnick). Epistemology: How do we know what is real? Epistemology is “how we come to have knowledge, or how we know that we know something” (Wilson 33). Like Wilson, Powell, Maracle, and King, I believe that our stories from our lived experiences shape our reality. We know what we know because our bodies, minds, and spirits have experienced them and our relationship with these experiences has shown us what is real and true for us. Within an Indigenous ontology, this, of course, means that there are multiple truths because every person has to find their own truth about how the world works through their own experiences and relationships. At the heart of this project’s case study and my teaching is a desire to tell stories, to archive and share multiple truths about a selected topic to invoke conversation and change in colonized spaces, because I believe that stories are how we know, or, as 11 King writes, “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (155). Furthermore, our everyday lives and experiences shape our reality. As De Certeau explains, our everyday lives are an act of composing, of writing and telling the stories in the places and spaces we occupy. We not only are acted upon in those places and spaces, but we create meaning through the ways we choose to interact, or the tactics we use to navigate these places and spaces. He writes, “The story does not express a practice. It does not limit itself to telling about a movement. It makes it” (De Certeau 81). Our stories are how we make meaning of our realities. We develop our realities, or our theories, through our practiced stories. Stories are not just fictional tales; Wilson defines different types of stories. The highest level of stories are sacred stories, which have very specific rules and traditions for the tellers and the listeners. The next level are moral or “lesson” stories that may change by the teller but the lesson remains the same. The last level are personal stories -- stories of our experiences that can be used to “help counsel or teach” (Wilson 98). These stories invite their audience to consider how we can make space for those who have been traditionally marginalized and oppressed in institutions of higher education. Methodology: How do we learn more about reality? Methodology describes the ways we discover knowledge, and it is impacted by one’s ontology and epistemology. For me, we learn through lived experience, and we can learn from others’ lived experiences by being open to hearing their stories. Story is how we express reality. In the classroom, this means that I encourage listening to and telling stories, and that I seek pedagogies which generate stories such as oral history and critical service-learning. 12 Axiology: What is worth knowing?, and, What ethics or morals guide our knowledge-seeking? Once we understand what knowledge is worth seeking (ontology and epistemology), we can think about how the ways we seek this knowledge (methodology) might affect the things (communities, ideas, classrooms, etc.) that we study. Wilson writes that an Indigenous axiology must have relational accountability, or respect, responsibility, and reciprocity (77). Our research should be personal and always building respectful relationships. We have to understand our roles and responsibilities -- to ourselves, to the communities we work with, to our institutions (Wilhelm et. al.). These layers of service are important to Wilhelm et. al., as they explain that service begins with ourselves and can move outward to our communities and institutions, but always we have to remain accountable to the ways in which our research strengthens relationships. Howe et. al. add that students may be at different stages of development, and a multi-tiered approach to service-learning can help students where they are while also helping them reach more advanced stages of personal and intellectual development. What should we teach in FYW Depending on the institution, FYW may be a “writing across the curriculum” (WAC) course or it may focus as a “writing as discipline.” These, of course, are not the only purposes of FYW and some institutions may blend the two foci. Although they may have different purposes 96% of respondents to the National Census of Writing 2013 survey stated that their schools required FYW in some form, suggesting that many U.S. institutions seem to be in agreement that writing is an essential skill to develop in our 13 students (and ourselves). However, these different institutional purposes affect what we teach in our writing classes. Downs and Wardle address this question in their article on re-envisioning FYW courses. They argue that the work of FYW is not to teach universal writing skills but that these classes should introduce students to writing as discipline, just like any other discipline-focused course. They point out that there has been a long-held assumption that writing skills transfer -- across genres, situations, audiences -- i.e. across the curriculum, but they maintain that this assumption has not been proven, nor should we expect it to happen because the rhetorical situation is crucial to writing. In Downs and Wardle’s work, transfer is explained as the expectation that certain threshold concepts will carry over from one course to the next successive course or level; these threshold concepts are the building blocks of disciplinary knowledge that are needed at each level to understand more advanced concepts (Meyer and Land).4 Downs and Wardle suggest that writing is situational, which means that some skills do not transfer as the threshold concepts for writing vary based on the situation of any particular piece. As Downs and Wardle explain, “With scant research-based information about how to best help students write successfully in other courses, [FYW] teachers do not know whether choosing genre A over genre B will be of service to students who must write genre B or genre C later on” (557). As writing instructors and program administrators, we cannot possibly predict all students’ future writing needs in one or 4 Like service-learning itself, transfer and threshold concepts are much more complicated and complex than I am presenting here, as I am working from a specific definition and in a specific way. There are multiple definitions of transfer and threshold concepts and ways to think about these terms in various situations. For more nuanced explanations of transfer and threshold concepts, see Moore or Moore and Anson. 14 two FYW courses, nor should we try to. Instead, writing courses should consider these questions: “How does writing work? How do people use writing? What are problems related to writing and reading and how can they be solved?” (Downs and Wardle 558). The answers that students discover may transfer across disciplines as they begin to think about and reflect on how writing is used in various contexts. These three components lead to transfer of writing skills, according to Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak: rhetorical situation through disciplinary language, reflection on processes, and development of their own theory of writing (56-58). Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak researched several FYW curriculum models, including Downs and Wardle’s, and concluded that transfer happens through reflection and metacognition and is also contingent on numerous other factors such as prior and concurrent knowledge (138-139). This transfer does not refer to specific writing tasks or “declarative and procedural knowledge [but] instead about writing knowledge and writing practice” (34). Furthermore, transfer happens through explicit instruction that makes the connections clear among writing knowledge, writing practice, and possible future writing situations so students can build their own processes and frameworks (Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak 138-139). Ashley, a student from my spring semester, believes that our course (which did not focus on argument and “traditional” writing lore) allowed her to develop her creativity and critical thinking which improved her writing. In her reflection, she explained, My goal for the semester was to work on my creativity. I wanted my writing to reach below the surface and force me to think more deeply. Reflecting back I think I made good progress on my goal. I have grown more comfortable with my writing and have focused a lot on the content and details of my work. I have tried to make my writing less formulaic and instead have tried to make it more relaxed and centered on the topic and the details. I have worked to make my thoughts 15 more unique and original and to think outside of the box. All in all, I know there is always more room for improvement but I am happy with my progress thus far. Like Downs and Wardle and Yancey, Roberston, and Taczak suggest, I agree that we can’t teach every writing situation to every student, so we have to help them understand rhetorical situations in context so they can form their own responses to future writing tasks like Ashley learned in our course together. But, if we are not going to focus on mechanics and writing “skills” that transfer across the curriculum, what do we teach? Preston proposes a project-based classroom: Instead of focusing on proficiency and mastery, those supporting the project- based curriculum are interested in providing opportunities for students to take up their histories and acquired literacies and to recognize writing as relevant to the literacy learning moments that occupy their everyday lives—the reading and writing that individuals encounter at home, in the workplace, in their personal lives, and across the university. (42) Mackenzie, a student from my fall semester, described how her fieldworking project helped her practice relevant writing, The practice boxes also taught me to look at normal everyday things like your job or your surroundings and think about a bigger picture or broader perspective. By doing this I allowed my writing to have more depth because I can share it from multiple perspectives. Box 6 specifically taught me this. I had to look at the same tree for a week straight and write about the changes I saw. This was a tree I normally would have dismissed because I was walking to class or had my head down in my phone, but because of box 6 I was able to appreciate the different colors I saw each day. Box 6 gave me a different perspective on this tree. Project-based writing classes, another version of service-learning classes, hope to give students meaningful, relevant opportunities to practice writing, or, as Preston explains, “the writing that happens in the context of these larger projects is writing that is inherently relevant, situated, and contingent” (44). Project-based writing forces the writer to think about rhetorical situations in a realistic, timely manner, and, as Wingeier- Royo suggests, this practice in civic engagement (service-learning) in the classroom will 16 hopefully transfer to their present and future lives (109). Bacon concurs. She maintains that writing in a composition class teaches students how to write for a writing class: “When composition classes are designed exclusively to help students write acceptable academic essays, students may not be so much initiated as indoctrinated into the academic discourse community” (606). She then argues for providing multiple opportunities and situations for our students to practice rhetorical choices -- academic and nonacademic, in and out of the classroom. An effective way to create these opportunities is through service-learning, although Petraglia cautions us to understand the implications and limitations of “authentic” or “real world” learning pedagogies when he suggests that classroom projects and assignments are never truly authentic for any pedagogy. The Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and National Writing Project (NWP) developed a “Framework” for teaching writing, and that framework posits habits of mind that students should develop throughout college and beyond to become active learners rather than passive recipients of “Knowledge.” The eight habits of mind are: curiosity, openness, engagement, creativity, persistence, responsibility, flexibility, and metacognition. These habits of mind can (and should) be taught in all disciplines at all levels, but the focus of this “Framework” suggests methods for incorporating the habits in writing courses, specifically through developing rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking, writing processes, conventions, and multimodal/multi-genre writing. Habits of mind are not skills that writers should learn; rather, they are ways of thinking and questioning that promote 17 learning, and they are learned through authentic, meaningful writing activities where students can practice them. The CWPA, NCTE, and NWP maintain that “writing activities and assignments should be designed with genuine purposes and audiences in mind [...] in order to foster flexibility and rhetorical versatility” (“Framework” 3). While they do not outright propose project-based writing tasks, their call for authentic writing activities are supported through a project-based writing curriculum, and critical service-learning adds another layer for students to interact and develop these habits of mind. However, not all writing program administrators support these habits of mind as a focus for teaching writing. Gross and Alexander critique the entire “Framework” and especially the habits of mind, arguing that they promote a positive psychology that ignores other pedagogies such as queer and critical pedagogies. Johnson concurs as she writes that “habits of mind revive questions about the ethics of teaching virtue and the corresponding problem of exclusion” (534). Gross and Alexander explain that the “Framework” presents these habits of mind without considering their cultural and historical contexts in a critical way, and, furthermore, the habits are not “testable” (measurable) and have, at best, a causal relationship between the habits and the recommended outcomes for FYW. Their final critique is that this “Framework” ignores negative emotions and the role of failure in learning, which they argue can actually be detrimental to students’ success. Gross and Alexander write, To be fair, the Framework is an attempt to be responsive to the needs of both our students and the institutions responsible for educating them. It tries to cut the difference between promoting democratic habits of mind, on one hand, and an educational culture that demands quantifiable results, on the other. (291) 18 But I don’t think these habits need to be measured through formal assessments, although Johnson points out that “with a national landscape characterized by quantifiable outcomes and large scale assessment, our commitment to the Framework may be shaped in unsatisfying or even detrimental ways” (534). We can’t and shouldn’t assess the habits formally, but we can foster learning environments where our students can practice them in ways that are meaningful to them. In other words, I do not evaluate my students on these habits of mind as part of their grade for the course – formal assessment and measurement – but I do encourage students to think about where they are throughout the course for personal reflection and development. Gross and Alexander and Johnson seem to be suggesting that our evaluative culture will push assessing these habits of mind with formal, quantifiable measurements, which is neither the purpose of the habits of mind nor an assessment practice I espouse. Furthermore, service-learning allows students to experience and practice difficulty and failure in real-world situations, because as Wilhelm et. al. acknowledge, “difficulty is an integral part of the learning process, and it helps develop the dynamic mindset and the future possibilities that come with this habit of mind” (35). But Gross and Alexander suggest that the “Framework” and habits of mind do not consider learning through failure, and Petraglia maintains that the classroom is not “real-world” situations, i.e. workplace. However, we can push back against his argument when we acknowledge that the classroom is our students’ (and our own) real world at that moment (Smith-Long). Furthermore, this argument places a work-focus on the classroom. 19 Halberstam explains that failure is both queer and anticolonial because it actively resists capitalism by “refus[ing] the choices offered” (88; 91). They describe this refusal, this failure to accept capitalism (colonialism) as decolonizing, which Mignolo defines as “[building] a world in which many worlds [will] coexist,” while still acknowledging that we are operating under colonial practices (Mignolo 54; Halberstam; Freire; Smith; Powell et. al.). In other words, what may be seen as a failure to accept colonialism by making anticapitalist choices is decolonial. Developing the habits of mind through service- learning in FYW can help students learn to practice decolonalism by helping them learn to question, discover, and share knowledge through a variety of modes and genres. Although service-learning has a history of being a colonizing activity, when students work with and by communities, this pedagogy has the opportunity to be decolonizing by visibilizing colonized institutions and systems, which I will explain more through the case studies in Chapter 2 (Eby; Cruz and Giles; Monberg; Mignolo). I ask my students to write learning goals around the habits of mind at the beginning of the semester, and I ask them to define what that habit means to them and to think about ways that they would use to “measure” whether or not they are practicing this habit. Johnson also suggests that thinking about the habits as practices rather than outcomes helps alleviate the unmeasurability of these habits, and she writes, “answering the problem of exclusion begins by assigning students the agency to develop particular habits of mind or to refuse this kind of growth” (536). In other words, we have to let students decide which habits they think are important to them and let them decide how they can practice them. By asking students to define their own “measure of success,” students can choose to actively resist colonialism and capitalism, 20 even though many students initially fall back on a specific grade or overall GPA as their tool for measurement. Their choice shows how ingrained colonial grading practices are for many students. However, throughout the semester, they revise and change their learning goals, and at the end of the semester, they reflect on their learning and how that affects their writing. Adler-Kassner, Majewski, and Koshnick also suggest that the “Framework’s” habits are not “all-purpose” across disciplines, but rather they are learned in specific contexts for specific purposes (Gross and Alexander 277; Adler-Kassner, Majewski, and Koshnick). However, their example shows how these habits cross disciplines, and this interdisciplinarity of the “Framework” and habits of mind are exactly why I think they are important work in FYW. They allow students to find connections among all the things they are learning, to transfer knowledge from a FYW course to their own disciplines and learning goals. Students discover the relationality of ideas and concepts and see how they constellate to make new knowledge. What Adler-Kassner, Majewski, and Koshnick see as a critique, I see as a strength of this set of ways of thinking and learning. Why should we teach these things in FYW? Just like Wilson’s research model suggests, my response to these research questions is relational and reciprocal. I find that answers overlap and connect because it is difficult to separate the epistemology from the ontology from the methodology and the axiology. If the “what” of FYW is transferable habits of mind, or ways of thinking about learning and knowledge-making, then the “why” is “the belief that what is important about writing is not its capacity to assess and establish a peculiar kind of proficiency, 21 but rather writing’s relevancy and its capacity for constructing culture” (Preston 43). As the “Framework” explains, “writing development takes place over time as students encounter different contexts, tasks, audiences, and purposes,” so it seems unreasonable to expect students to have high levels of mastery or proficiency after just fifteen weeks. However, we can help students begin to understand their own positionality and cultural constructions. Thomas King explains that “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (153). Our stories -- the things we tell ourselves are true and right and just; the beliefs we hold; our values -- are created by our environment, and they form our positionality. King offers two stories of creation, one Indigenous and one Christian, and he explains that both stories are “essentially the same” (23). And yet, they present very different theological viewpoints, and, depending on which story or truth we embrace, our own views of the world are affected. Do we believe in a world in which creation is a solitary, individual act, or a world in which creation is a shared activity; a world that begins in harmony and slides toward chaos or a world that begins in chaos and moves toward harmony; a world marked by competition or a world determined by co-operation? (King 24-25) The ways we think about the world, the stories we tell ourselves, affect the ways we interact within this world. When students are invited to think and write about their own cultural constructions, they practice metacognition, which will also hopefully encourage curiosity, openness, responsibility, flexibility, and creativity. These habits become the “threshold concepts” which transfer to other areas of learning. Meyer and Land describe these “threshold concepts” as “portals” or “conceptual gateways” that both allow the student to understand disciplinary concepts but also to be “transformed” (19). In other 22 words, these threshold concepts allow the student to participate in the discipline with deeper understanding because they have crossed these “thresholds” to practice “disciplinary thinking” (Meyer and Land 20). When students cross thresholds, they develop and grow in their disciplinary knowledge and participation, and this growth can be seen as stages of liminality which Adler-Kassner, Majewski, and Koshnick explain more fully. The first stage is preliminal, and this is when learners are first introduced to concepts; then they move into a liminal stage where learners see their relationality to the concepts and “enact that knowledge”; and finally, learners go into a postliminal stage where learners are “transformed, ‘beginning to think’ like a member of the field or area in which the concept is situated, participating in the concepts within the disciplinary/epistemic communities where they are situated” (Meyer and Land; Adler- Kassner, Majewski, and Koshnick). Students do not move into the higher stages of learning until they develop relationships with ideas, people, courses, professions, majors. When they build these relationships, they are able to use their knowledge in meaningful ways, and they become part of the disciplinary community. These stages are transformative because they ask learners to question their own cultural constructions, to examine their assumption about truths. While we may not be able to help students move through all these stages of learning in one or two semesters of FYW, we can help them learn about the habits of mind which can help them become postliminal in their various disciplines, and service-learning is particularly well-suited to helping students practice liminality when the projects are relevant and meaningful to our students. Or, as Wilson writes, “knowledge in itself is not seen as the ultimate goal, rather the goal is the change that this knowledge may help to bring about” (37). We 23 should teach habits of mind rather than discrete writing skills because these ideas may bring about change in the learner and in the ways they think about and operate in their communities. How should we teach FYW? The previous questions ask practitioners to think about their epistemology and ontology, this question requires us to think about our methodology and axiology, which are, of course, relational and reciprocal with our truths and ways of knowing. Determining pedagogy for FYW is influenced by our institutions to some degree and our own beliefs about writing. In Chapter 1 of his work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire posits that a pedagogy of the oppressed must be formed with, not for, the oppressed (33). He explains how it is difficult to work within the colonized, or oppressor’s, systems of power without becoming part of that system. Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed is the foundation for hooks’s engaged pedagogy, which she developed while studying with him. She writes, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” -- which is both a claim and a call to action (hooks 12). Her engaged pedagogy calls teachers to build classes with their students, not for them. hooks argues for an engaged pedagogy where students and professors take risks together, make learning meaningful, and “[address] the connection between what they are learning and their overall life experiences” (19). An engaged pedagogy is active and reciprocal: the teacher and students are working together to make meaning that is relevant and authentic. Rather than being passive receivers of information, students become part of the discipline through participation and creation. Wilhelm et. al. explain, 24 “When students are moved in this way from learning information, from ‘playing guess what the teachers already know,’ they move toward participating as an agent and activist in ongoing conversations that require their input and service,” which is exactly what Freire suggests in his pedagogy of the oppressed, and this underlies hooks’s engaged pedagogy as well (34). We must always be encouraging and providing opportunities for our students to be critical thinkers and to practice habits of mind through our teaching. As my partner is wont to say, “It’s not all about you”; teaching is about learning by students and the teacher. De Certeau’s ideas of place and space and the value of everyday life have also impacted my pedagogy. He describes places as the more physical places where everyday living takes place, and spaces are multi-dimensional, intersectional: “space is a practiced place” (117). As I explain to my students, places are the physical places we occupy and spaces are the areas where we create or find meaning in these places. Admittedly, this oversimplifies De Certeau’s ideas, but it also makes it more accessible to FYW students as we talk about how they create space for themselves in our classroom and in the institution (i.e. places). This space is how and where the students become “agents and activists.” Additionally, De Certeau helps me connect my pedagogy to Cultural Rhetorics theory and methods. Powell et. al. write that “cultural rhetorics scholars investigate and understand meaning-making as it is situated in specific cultural communities,” and they define cultural communities as “any place/space where groups organize under a set of shared beliefs and practices.” They explain that, like De Certeau, they see culture as “practices that accumulate over time and in relationship to specific places,” or the everyday 25 practices of life that we undertake to find and create meaning for ourselves and those around us. Cultural rhetorics theory asks to us think about the ways we construct culture, and, when we take it a step further, how we can decolonize those places and spaces to delink them from colonialism and to remake them. For me, using an engaged pedagogy that seeks to involve students in decisions and meaning-making is one way to decolonize my classrooms to help students “move from a culture of reception to a culture of meaning production” (Wilhelm et. al. 45). This decolonization is important because classrooms, institutions, are places of colonized power in what, why, and how they teach, so I deliberately implement praxis that empowers students and teachers (hooks 21). Wilhelm et. al. adds, “Recognizing our students as innovative agents of change makes teaching an act of empowerment and love” (1). This empowerment and love are part of decolonizing pedagogy. One praxis that my students and I have embraced is service-learning.5 Furco states that there are more than 200 definitions of service-learning, so it is important to define how I view service-learning and what it means in my classrooms (69). Mitchell proposes a definition for critical service-learning: “Critical service-learning programs encourage students to see themselves as agents of social change, and use the experience of service to address and respond to injustice in communities” (51). This definition goes beyond volunteerism and begins to address some critiques of service- learning that the praxis sustains a “them-us,” colonized viewpoint of service. Eyler and 5 To read more about the history of service learning, I recommend Deans; Adler-Kassner, Crooks, and Watters; Baca; and Eyler and Giles. These works provide overviews of service-learning, case studies, and ways to implement service-learning. 26 Giles also posit that “the essence of effective service-learning is in moving students beyond charity to active, committed citizenship” (132). As Wilhelm et. al. adds: Service that deepens, enriches, and applies the work of the curriculum; that abets the engagement and learning of reading, composing, speaking and listening, language, deep conceptual and strategic development and understanding; but also leads us into the world in ways that make us better people while fulfilling the larger purposes of education that should always be front and center. (3) This is critical service-learning--when the projects tie to course outcomes to bring about social change in colonized systems, or when we work to decolonize the systems that have oppressed us through learning and activism. In Chapter 2, I will describe two case studies of how I have implemented critical service-learning in my FYW courses. Research Methods These case studies will explore how service-learning can be a decolonizing act when using cultural rhetorics theory to inform and guide critical service-learning. They focus on how service-learning creates relationality and accountability to oneself, to one’s peers, and to one’s community (Wilson; Powell, et. al.; King; Mitchell; Wilhelm et. al.). My method for this study is qualitative research of students’ coursework who participated in my FYW courses’ service-learning projects in the 2016-2017 academic year at Michigan State University. During the 2016-2017 academic year, I taught four sections of my FYW at MSU with a critical service-learning pedagogy. Per IRB, students completed consent forms in the first week of the course to give permission to study coursework, which were kept in a sealed envelope in our department’s office until the end of each semester. Per the IRB consent form (Appendix A), students voluntarily agreed to participate in the research project by allowing their coursework to be analyzed, and they were allowed to 27 choose how they wanted their work attributed. Some chose to use first names, some chose both first and last names, and others elected to use a pseudonym of their choice while still others just wanted to be referred to as “a student.” Students could also select whether they wanted to continue to contribute to the research through future interviews, which are not included in this project but offer some implications for continued research. This voluntary consent not only meets IRB requirements, but it also allows me to be relational and accountable in my research. Wilson cites Judy Atkinson’s 2001 presentation at the Indigenous Voices Conference, and summarizes her points about ethical research (59). Ultimately, research from an Indigenous paradigm is respectful, non-judgmental, reflective, self-aware, and involves listening to others and to oneself. While this research project is not focusing on Indigenous peoples, in drawing on Indigenous scholars, I must respect this relationship by practicing research with respect for the process and those who have guided me. Ninety-three students, or 86% of the 108 students enrolled in my courses, gave permission to analyze their coursework from these four sections; one section was from fall 2017 and three sections were from spring 2018. The fall 2017 course served as my pilot study, so I only used one of my three FYW courses to test the assignments. During the winter break, I revised assignments and worked to make stronger connections based on feedback from student evaluations and my own observations, which I will discuss in Chapter 2. This coursework included prewriting activities, journal entries, final projects, reflections, and classroom discussions. I analyzed these course assignments throughout the writing process, notes from class discussions, and my own teaching 28 reflections to examine how the service-learning projects impacted my students’ learning and development of the Habits of Mind, which are the categories for coding and analyzing the data from classwork. I was interested in seeing how the students practiced habits of mind, explicitly and implicitly, in their writing and throughout the process. For each assignment, I pored over their writing to see which habits they mentioned explicitly and which habits were represented implicitly. For example, in the final reflections, I noted whether the habit was implied or if the student had directly referred to the habit of mind by name. I also coded whether the student wrote that they had “achieved” the habit or if they felt it was still a work in progress. Some types of implicit coding varied for the habits but included things like being open to other’s ideas (openness), working in groups or teamwork (engagement), taking ownership of their role and involvement with their writing (responsibility), or discussing rhetorical choices (flexibility). As I was coding data, I kept notes by project where I copied and pasted students’ works, making comments about how and why I coded it with certain habits of mind. In my notes, I also included examples of students’ work which seemed to deliberately go against specific habits of mind in order to think about the ways that students might demonstrate wobble or how they may be choosing to “fail” in these habits of mind. While writing, I referred to the notes, my comments, and the coded data to find work which demonstrated (or not, as the case may be) certain habits of mind. The data presented here are from a wide spectrum of my students’ work, and there are pieces not included, which have implications for future study. 29 I tried to focus on the students’ writing and process rather than what the assignment should do. For example, the Remix is designed to be a highly creative multimodal project, but I only marked “creative” if the student specifically mentioned that they tried to be “creative” in their reflections about the process of the project. I will talk more about what I felt each assignment should teach in Chapter 2. By focusing on the students’ work, I hoped to show what the students learned rather than what I tried to teach. I have also included notes from my own fieldworking project, and I will use some of the prompts from Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research by Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater’s textbook to respond to the work throughout this dissertation (see Appendix B). In chapter two, I explain the fieldworking cultural analysis (FCA) project more in depth, but in essence, students undertake a mini-ethnographic study of a subculture they choose. Since I was asking my students to complete this research project, I also did this project along with them (hooks). My subculture was my FYW classrooms. In the following excerpt, I am including my response to Box 4 which I wrote while my students responded to this prompt in class; my subculture is my students and my fieldsite is our classroom. In Box 4 (see Appendix B), students use prewriting strategies -- mapping, freewriting, brainstorming, listmaking, etc. -- to write about what they already know about their subculture, begin to examine their own positionality, and start to identify some research questions or things they want to find out about this subculture (Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater 61-62). These notes show how I am a participant- observer and help to describe my participants, i.e., my students. 30 This is our sixth week together so I feel like I am beginning to know these students. I am an insider as the instructor, but that also makes me an outsider because of my positionality. I have university-given power in this classroom -- that means that they are only willing to share so much. And my students are always aware of the power dynamic in our interactions. Friendly but not friends. I always come back to this article I read in a composition class during my Master’s degree whose author I cannot recall. What I know about my subculture: Students -- 18 to 19 years old, a mix of males and females. Mostly white, probably middle class. A few international students. Privileged even if they don’t accept or acknowledge it yet. I did not collect demographic data on my students as my focus was on what the students were writing and discussing in our classes. However, 2016 data about MSU students overall shows that there were 7,950 freshmen for the 2016-2017 academic year, and approximately one-half of these students are male and one-half of the students are female. Almost 25% of these students identified with at least one minority group, and nearly 10% were first-generation college students. Although these numbers do not necessarily represent the courses I taught during that academic year, gender, race, and first-generation college vs. “legacy” students were some of the topics that we discussed as a result of the service-learning focus for our courses. Furthermore, some students self-disclosed racial and ethnic identification, sexual orientation, hobbies, and gender preferences in their projects, reflections, and journals, which I had listed for my Box 1 (see Appendix B) response about the subcultures in my field site (Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater 5-6). These topics were very important to some of the students, and they 31 continued to think about and write about issues and concerns throughout the semester as they explored finding their own spaces in this place. In designing assignments, I tried to focus all of MSU’s FYW curriculum around my courses’ theme and service-learning project: finding one’s space in this place. Our projects operated on Wilhelm et. al.’s levels of service to self, peers, and institution. MSU’s FYW Curriculum has three learning outcomes, which I will explain more fully in Chapter two: inquiry, discovery, and communication. To reach these outcomes, students are typically given five major assignments: learning narrative, cultural artifact, disciplinary and professional literacy, remix, and reflective learning projects. Although this shared curriculum has the same goals, the products of these assignments varies by instructor as the descriptions are open, and I will describe how I implemented these assignments in my class projects in Chapter 2 as part of the case studies. Only four of the projects focused specifically around our service-learning project; the disciplinary literacies project was an outlier which I was not able to fully connect to our theme. Overall, MSU’s FYW curriculum seems to implement aspects of Downs and Wardle’s Writing about Writing curriculum while also incorporating some components of Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak’s teaching for transfer curriculum. It is a curriculum focused on reflection about one’s own learning -- past, present, and future. Relationality and Accountability Teaching and learning are relational and accountable activities. We form relationships with each other, with ideas, with places, and we hold ourselves accountable to these relationships through reflection, grades, and even student evaluations. As Wilson demonstrates, our worldview is embedded in all aspects of our 32 pedagogy from what we teach, to why we teach those things, to how we teach them. In The Truth About Stories, Thomas King tells the story of how the earth is floating on a turtle’s back. When asked how many turtles, he says, “No one knows for sure [...] but it’s turtles all the way down” (1-2). In other words, we are all related and we are always building on those relationships -- turtle upon turtle upon turtle. In my FYW courses, we are building our own relationships with writing and learning turtle upon turtle upon turtle. To My Colleagues Thank you for being open to my story of teaching and learning and to my research paradigm. I hope this Indigenous research framework helps you to reflect on your own teaching and learning and to consider the ways that your pedagogy is helping develop lifelong learners. Our teaching is relational, reciprocal, and accountable, and I believe that we -- you and me -- are responsible for helping our students be successful in our courses, in our institutions, in our communities, and in our world. As Maracle argues, story is theory, and, in a class lecture, Powell explains that theory is practice – which suggests that story is also a practice – and it is a practice that guides what, why, and how we teach. Story is the theory and the practice that I bring to my teaching, my writing, and my research. P.S. “College: the experiential learning to adulthood.” – Anna 33 CHAPTER 1.5: NASSER’S STORY This chapter is a transcription of Nasser’s Learning Narrative Audio Selfie.6 In his project, Nasser considers how high school prepared him for college. I share his project here because he talks about how his high school education taught him the banking concept of learning (Freire), and how that is changing now that he is in college. He has developed a deeper curiosity about his discipline, which he feels will help him be more engaged and responsible for his learning. Transcript of Nasser’s Learning Narrative7 I personally enjoy learning outside of school. It's not that I think that I would learn more outside of school, it's that I like to be driven by my curiosity in order to learn things. When I'm in school, I'm often pressured by consequences to do my homework and that really lowers my motivation to get things done and have a pleasure in solving problems and learning new things. I do tend to learn more in school, however, because school is a very fast-paced environment. When at home learning things, it's as fast as you can fit learning into your schedule. And while in school, there isn't much free time, I guess. Teachers are usually 6 Listen to Nasser’s Audio Selfie here: https://archive.storycorps.org/interviews/learning-narrative-nasser- mohammed/?start=239202 7 Metadata: Creator: Nasser. Transcribed: Prielipp, Sarah, on 31 May 2018. Publisher: StoryCorps Title: Learning Narrative Date: 9 February 2017 Language: English Format: Digital, audio Time: 00:05:24:15 Subject: Learning, WRA 101, Education, High School, Higher Education Description: Nasser interviews himself about his path to higher education and how curiosity has guided his learning. Source: https://archive.storycorps.org/interviews/learning-narrative-nasser-mohammed/?start=239202 34 just putting as much material into you as they can and you will end up learning more things in school than at home. I found my college major while I was in high school. I had really enjoyed biology and chemistry, and I'd also wanted a major that would be very broad so if I made a decision changing my major, I could change it very quickly and easily without much consequences. I chose to minor in Environmental Sustainability because it brought me to the Residential Initiative on the Study of the Environment, or RISE as it's known at MSU, and it has been a really wonderful experience. I chose to minor in Mathematics because I truly enjoy the beauty of solving problems. I really do want to do that, something of that sort, in the future, solving problems with equations and trying to go into deep thinking about problems using math. I started to enjoy the field of mathematics because I had just basically began to put more effort into it. In high school, math is made very boring and I didn't see anything above what was in front of me, deeper than what was in front of me. That is, the equations looked very boring and I was wondering how people could do this for the rest of their lives, but with a bit of deep thinking, they do have very big implications, and the problems and solutions are really interesting. [indecipherable] Well, it often involves a lot of deep thinking or speaking with a professor or someone else in the class who's very interested. That can be very motivating and it can show people sometimes that school subjects are not just to earn so-and-so credits, so-and-so grade. It's a real thing that's in the world and people have spent their lives learning about it. There's a lot more than what's on the surface. 35 When I'm learning science and math in school, when I was learning these, at least, in high school, what interested me the most was in chemistry class I had once, after finishing the curriculum, a special unit was given to us, teaching us about the applications of all the chemistry which we had learned over the course of the year into human physiology and medicine, and that really interested me. It showed me that chemistry was not just the study of very meaningless things that chemistry was actually a very important thing. It was really interesting the entire way through but to see that it could be applied to so many things was very interesting to me. My greatest accomplishment was probably finally putting effort into math and understanding it. That was very interesting for me. I put a lot of effort into it and I was extremely happy finding out that math was just a system made by humans for humans and it couldn't possibly be difficult. And it wasn't for people who had a special mathematical mind, as is said so often. I did face obstacles on my way to MSU. In fact, my grades were only mediocre. This was due to a lot of lack of effort in many classes which I wasn't so interested in, and I'm very lucky to have attended this university, and I plan to make the best of my time here. If my degree is granted to me in Biochemistry or some other degree in science, that would grant me the ability to do science for the rest of my life. I would like to learn as much as possible about the systems of living and nonliving things. So this would probably involve me working in a lab and writing down anything that I've learned throughout the day about nature. 36 The most important thing for a student to remember, to me, if there's anything I've learned on my learning experience, it's that students should remember that there is no subject designated to a single certain type of person. There are no mathematical minds and no minds for chemistry or minds for English or minds for history. These are just . . . the people with the most curiosity in a subject will always end up doing just a little bit better, and I think it is very important to look deeper into your subject so that you'll become interested in them. 37 CHAPTER 2: THIS IS OUR STORY: A CASE STUDY OF SERVICE-LEARNING IN FYW AT MSU Dear students, This chapter is written to, for, and, in many cases, by you, because this is the story of our FYW classes at MSU. I hope this chapter honors your work and represents your learning authentically. In order to do this, I will draw on your own words and try to describe what happened in our classes with honesty and respect. Thank you for undertaking this learning journey with me. This chapter will explain our institutional curriculum, the shared learning outcomes, and assignments for our course as well as present the coded data from these assignments. I will consider what these data mean in Chapter 3. FYW Curriculum at MSU FYW at MSU is taken by thousands of students each semester, and approximately 162 of those students find their way into my classrooms every academic year. Like Downs and Wardle recommend, MSU’s FYW curriculum hopes to teach rhetorical moves that will help students create meaning and knowledge throughout their academic careers. To meet this overarching goal, there are three learning outcomes: Inquiry, Discovery, and Communication. These outcomes are explained as: ● inquiry: a recursive process of posing, following, and addressing questions. ● discovery: learning--that is, making new knowledge through processes of inquiry. ● communication: purposeful engagement of the self and others through the products of inquiry and discovery. (Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures ) 38 These outcomes are to be learned through five assignments which are taught in WRA 101 courses in various ways. While each of these five assignments can be taught as individual units, or separately, I choose to connect them and to use each assignment to build upon each other because I want my students to see the relationality and accountability in the trajectory of the coursework. However, constellating these assignments has not always worked in the ways which I anticipated, and I will discuss that in more detail in the case studies section. Story: Theory, Practice, Service-Learning Story is my research (and pedagogical) paradigm. My ontology and epistemology says lived experiences, our stories, are real. Wilson writes, “[S]tories allow us to see others’ life experiences through our own eyes. This information may then be internalized in a way that is difficult for abstract discussions to achieve” (17). Because I believe that lived experiences are truth, I practice story in my classroom and in my research. “[T]he practice of story is integral to doing cultural rhetorics. The way we say it—if you're not practicing story, you're doing it wrong” (Powell, et. al.). Cultural rhetorics values and studies the ways groups or communities create meaning and make space for themselves. In other words, our own stories are truth and reality. The ways we experiences the world and our places within it, the things we make and do, our own beliefs and values -- these things affect the way we see the world and how we operate in this world. Students who see the world as open to them and their ideas are more likely to anticipate positive outcomes from their learning experiences, and the reverse is true as well. 39 In her learning narrative, Dajheonna shared her story of being let down by adults and how that affected her. A wealthy sponsor befriended the student in high school and helped her organize a fashion show; then, the donor withdrew her support at the last minute, causing the fashion show to be cancelled. Dajheonna wrote, This situation taught me a life changing experience. You [cannot] expect things to work out in your divine order, [i]t isn’t the way life works. Things do not always happen in the order you want them to. I learned to put different scenarios in my head to prepare myself for failure. Everything may seem very well and prepared but you never know until the challenge arrives. I also really learned, as a leader, not to believe in other people’s vision more than I believed in myself. This experience affected Dajheonna’s worldview; she presented herself as somewhat cynical and seemed to demand proof throughout the course that I cared about her and her work. Her story was one of disappointment, and she seemed to carry that with her. She later wrote in her FCA, “I have gone back and read through a few of my days and it’s so surprising to see how I was lacking hope and everything that I wanted to work out is falling all into place. I lacked a lot of confidence in my life and didn’t think I was going to make it this far.” Dajheonna did not see the world as “open” to her, and she anticipated negative outcomes as a result of her past experiences. But what exactly do we mean by “story”? Wilson explains that there are three types of stories: sacred stories, legends with morals and lessons, and stories of lived experience (97-98). While the first type of story has very structured rules on who may tell them, when, where, and how they may be told, legends are more open but the lessons of these stories remain the same. However, stories of lived experience -- while often told by elders -- are the type of stories that I teach and share in my classes because they give agency to and empower all participants. As we open ourselves to the stories of those around us, we develop openness and curiosity about our world. Wilson 40 explains, “Stories allow listeners to draw their own conclusions and to gain life lessons from a more personal perspective” (17). This personal connection helps students to feel engaged in their learning. Stories make us relational and accountable. This theory of story as a meaning-making and meaning-sharing practice is central to my teaching and the coursework. We watch stories, we read stories, we ask questions about stories, we write stories. I want my students to feel empowered by their lived experiences and to know that their stories are true and real. In the spring semester, we were fortunate to have Dr. Wilson speak at MSU, and several of my students attended the lecture. After attending the talk, students responded to a prompt in our textbook to share their thoughts. Roberto wrote, “What surprised me about the whole presentation was a lack of hard evidence, a majority had to do with stories and indigenous history. I understand that [it’s] also valid just was not use to not seeing numbers.” I include this quote here because Roberto’s response to this talk is typical of a Western, colonized view, and it shows where he is at that moment (Smith; DeLoria). But, here is Roberto’s six-word story reflection at the end of the semester: “[Everyone’s] story is different than yours.” Through coursework, discussions, and readings, Roberto had begun to internalize the importance of story to our reality and as truth. Pilot Project (Fall Semester): Spaces and Places My pilot project started by thinking about De Certeau’s spaces and places and Wilhelm et. al.’s ideas of how students can give back to their institutions, their peers, and themselves. While service-learning typically has an identified partner, these partners are often selected by the instructor and are centered around the instructor’s 41 personal interests. I deliberately chose to let students find their own partners so that they would be personally vested in the projects. In their FCA project, Eric Alexander, a student from my fall pilot project, wrote about the importance of their relationship with their partner: One of my fixed positions that may affect how I view and write things is that I already have a closer relationship or rather an attachment to one of the librarians, Emilia. I feel that this above anything else will have the greatest effect on how I write my study and what I ultimately observe. By choosing their own partners, it also allowed students to create projects for communities that they were involved in and to draw on existing relationships and to develop new ones (Monberg). Each semester, these service-learning projects focused on communities, relationship-building, and meaning-making through hearing and telling stories because these practices are important to a cultural rhetorics methodology. These partners also allowed students to practice Wilhelm et. al.’s layers of service. Wilhelm et. al. explain that service-learning begins with service to self by developing a dynamic mindset, or the habits of mind, through reflection and “an immediate functional value to their learning that was personal and that led to personal competence, action, and function in the world” (30). This personal connection helps students “not only [know] that they are affected by this issue, but also [know] that they can participate in better understanding and addressing the issue” (Wilhelm et. al. 31). Once students have a personal connection, they can start to move out into service to peers, service to institutions (schools), service to community, and then service to the environment and global community. Each of these layers of service can happen within one project, or an instructor might focus on the first layers of service as it may be more developmentally appropriate for their students (Wilhelm et. al.; Howe et. al.). 42 In the following sections, I will explain each assignment from the classes in my case studies. These descriptions will begin to show what the students were asked to do. Learning Narrative Students began the semester by writing a personal learning narrative from an activity or organization they had been involved with such as Girl Scouts, faith-based organizations, hobbies, sports, music, etc. Then, they were asked to develop a brief elevator pitch to propose their group or interest as a “partner” for their future projects in small groups. This learning narrative was meant to be an opportunity for students to reflect on the groups and organizations from their lives that had an impact on their learning. I did not have expectations for what habits of mind or lessons students might write about or connect with at this point of the semester, but I had hoped that students would then be able to identify similar groups at MSU to continue to research for their service-learning projects. The project itself seemed designed to think about responsibility and engagement for one’s learning. In the spring, I focused this project on our service-learning theme of Facing College (see Spring Semester below), so the Learning Narrative asked students to tell a story about their path to college in an Audio Selfie using the StoryCorps app. In the Audio Selfie,8 students created a narrative arc about how they chose their college or major, influential people in their college decisions, or about their learning goals more generally by interviewing themselves. 8 While most students chose to keep their Audio Selfie’s private, some students shared theirs publicly, and they can be listened to at this link: https://archive.storycorps.org/communities/audio-selfies-learning- narratives-from-first-year-writing/ 43 Fieldworking Cultural Analysis and Remix The second project for both semesters was Fieldworking Cultural Analysis where they were asked to perform primary ethnographic research about the organization they had selected as their partner. Kistler argues that ethnography enhances service- learning pedagogy as students learn more about their community partners cultural backgrounds and can better understand the implications of their service to these communities. She acknowledges ethnography’s colonial beginning but explains that the intent of ethnographic research should not be for one’s own benefit. Rather, ethnographic research allows students to be more engaged with the community and to see how culture informs one’s perspective and worldview. I also anticipated students to show curiosity, openness, and metacognition. For our class, students proposed various groups and organizations and split into small groups to individually observe and research these subcultures. Each group was supposed to research their organization using a series of prompts from our textbook (see Appendix B). In the fall semester, I don’t think that I was clear about the expectation of the prompts and research, though, as many students wrote about a variety of topics rather than focusing on their group’s subculture. I was much clearer about this expectation in the spring semester, and more students focused on their subculture. Overall, 28% of students in both semesters did not focus on their subculture. This proposal and research led to a remix project, or a communication-oriented product that would meet a need for their chosen partner in the fall semester, and which I anticipated would allow students to demonstrate creativity, openness, engagement, persistence, and flexibility. The remix project was the service component of their 44 service-learning because the final product was intended to provide a “service” to their partner. At this point, I also presented a more colonized view of service-learning in which the students would “serve” their partners. My view of service-learning expanded with continued research, and my own definition of what it was and how I would incorporate it in my classes developed through this pilot project. I will explain the spring semester remix project in the Spring Semester section below as there were significant changes. Final Reflections The final project was their final learning reflections where I asked students to tell a story about what they had learned about writing, learning, literacy, or college both in the course and in their other spaces and places throughout the semester. In the fall, students mostly wrote academic essays which shared their learning goals (for the first time) and reflected on what they had learned, although my assignment description did not limit students to this genre nor did I expect most students to choose it. Only a few students chose to do vlogs and podcasts for their final reflections. In the spring, to better fit the conversation and discussion component of the Facing Project, students responded to a series of short prompts in writing, and we held in-class discussions about the prompts, about their learning, and about issues that pertained to them as college students or that they learned about through their service-learning. These prompts were based on MSU’s Center for Service-Learning and Civic Engagement’s Reflection Circles. Some of the issues we discussed included access, affordability, student-athletes, grades, race and ethnicity, and tolerance and acceptance. I had 45 anticipated this assignment developing metacognition, openness, engagement, persistence, flexibility, creativity, curiosity, and responsibility. Disciplinary and Professional Literacy: An Outlier The outlying project was the Disciplinary and Professional Literacy (DPL) project, where students explored the literacy practices of their planned major or future profession through an annotated bibliography and online group discussions during both semesters. While these DPL reading groups helped develop relationships among class members, the work was not directly related to the service-learning partners or projects. However, one student from this pilot project did connect his group’s project to his discipline. His group had designed a flyer to promote their organizational partner, and he wrote that this project allowed him to draw on his marketing knowledge from the DPL and his business classes. Another student from this same pilot project sample, Devin Witcher, also talked about the DPL in his final reflection and noted that this project “helped me to better understand other people’s points of view.” Overall, I did not code or analyze these projects either semester, though, because they were not designed to fit into the service-learning component of the course. Spring Semester: Facing College During the fall semester, another instructor and I received a grant through Michigan Campus Compact to participate in the Facing Project. The grant covered our training with the Facing Project founders, web server to house our projects digitally,9 and support throughout our grant period. The Facing Project is a nonprofit organization that helps communities organize storytelling projects. They teach participants how to 9 Both of our classes’ Facing College narratives and my class’s Remix video projects are housed on this website: http://msu.facingproject.com/blog/. Projects without video are not from my courses. 46 identify a local issue, interview storytellers, and then write their storytellers’ narratives to share with a larger audience through a public performance. As part of the grant, our theme was Facing College, which seemed like an appropriate theme for helping students think about their place in this institutional space, because, as Wilhelm et. al. write, [S]chools are rich potential sites for community, for collaboration and research. [. . .] [they] function as a microcosm of the larger community and society, allowing students to develop habits of mind and engage in literacy practices that they can transfer to their participation as democratic citizens. (59) My students researched various organizations and groups on campus through secondary and primary research like my pilot project, but this time, their Remix project took the narratives they wrote from their interviews with their storytellers/participants and made digital stories, or movies, from these narratives which we shared on our Facing Project website and at MSU’s First Year Writing Conference. Like my pilot project, I once again did not select partners for our projects, although I feel that we were implicit partners with Facing Project and MSU’s Center for Service-learning and Civic Engagement. My students were also implicit (and perhaps explicit) partners because the project was about the experiences of their peers from the organizations and groups they belonged to. In the spring semester, we were once again writing by the communities rather than for or with the communities as students continued to explore the spaces and places, their own communities or subcultures, where they could create meaning for themselves (Monberg; De Certeau). Their service-learning project was, ultimately, cultural rhetorics-oriented with a focus on communities, meaning making, and story. 47 What I Learned From the Data In this section, I will present the data from each project and begin to analyze what the data suggest. Table 1: Habits of Mind in Major Assignments, WRA 101 Learning Narrative FCA Remix Reflection Curiosity Openness Engagement Creativity Persistence Responsibility Flexibility Metacognition 9 12 14 3 21 25 40 34 29 26 63 29 3 3 44 10 17 2 53 10 27 8 60 28 3 0 50 4 9 14 16 5 *Note: Numbers do not add up to the total number of participants because some students’ work was no longer available, some students’ work did not demonstrate any habits of mind, and some students’ work demonstrated more than one habit of mind. Learning Narrative: Data While there were slight variations in the specific assignments each semester, the objectives of the assignments remained the same per the department FYW curriculum, and my goals for the projects were the same. The learning narrative was intended to help students acknowledge their own ontology and epistemology. By describing a time when they had learned something, whether in a formal or informal setting, they began to think about “what is real” and “how do you know.” They were able to define learning and to draw on their own lived experiences, their own stories, or learning. While the habits of mind were a newer concept to most of my students with this first assignment, their work demonstrated ways they have practiced these habits throughout their previous formal and informal learning experiences. For me, this focus on habits of mind, or “life lessons,” is an important component of the learning narrative; I 48 want students to think about the ways we learn in and out of the classroom, and how these learning experiences shape who we are now and in the future. Even with this framing around the assignment, 35% of my students still wrote about formal educational experiences to reflect about their learning, and another 15% wrote about sports, which were often part of their high school education. Some of these school-focused narratives were about a specific teacher or coach who was influential or a class that was a struggle; others talked about how their past education had prepared them for college overall. Perhaps as expected for their developmental stages, 24% of students wrote about their families and the lessons they learned from specific family members or experiences with their families. Others wrote about music, art, their religious organizations, friends, hobbies, and travel. Interestingly, although the fall prompt specifically stated that students should write about a learning experience in a club or organization, only 5.5% of the students did. Indeed, this requirement was re-negotiated in class by the students because they found this limitation difficult to meet. While I agreed to the negotiation, I was concerned that it would make the connection between this first assignment and the next assignments less clear, which turned out to be an accurate concern as students did not fully understand how this assignment related to their FCA and their remix projects. In the spring semester, I did not require this connection either, but since our remix projects were focused on Facing College, students were asked to think about their own paths to college: their challenges, triumphs, people who helped them, etc. This change in focus helped students see how each project was scaffolded more clearly because it allowed 49 them to start with themselves and move those ideas out beyond themselves in subsequent assignments (Wilhelm et. al.; Land and Meyer). Many of these learning narratives demonstrated how students had practiced engagement, responsibility, openness, and persistence (see Table 1). The other habits of mind were mentioned or described much less often. Since many students did not use these exact words in their projects, I looked for synonyms and other ways that they implicitly described these habits of mind. For example, students often wrote about stepping outside their own “comfort zone” or “celebrating differences” whether in sports, school, or community service, which I coded as “openness.” Madison wrote in her narrative about volunteering at an international preschool in the Netherlands, “In this moment I realized that there are so many different people with different stories and different social norms. [. . .] Not only was I able to expand my international and intercultural understanding, I was able to celebrate our differences.” Her learning experience helped her become more willing to “consider new ways of being and thinking in the world” by “examin[ing] their own perspectives to find connections with the perspectives of others” -- i.e. openness (“Framework”). She had described a moment when she tried to shake the hand of a Muslim man who was the father of one of the children she was caring for, and he gently explained that this physical contact was not allowed in their religion. It was one of the first times she really had thought about differences in expectations and etiquette. Rachel shared her learning experiences as a figure skater, and she described the engagement and dedication it takes to participate in this sport. She wrote, From both as a skater, and an observer, figure skaters are often seen as “graceful” as they extend their legs in their air and glide on ice. Higher level 50 competitors make the sport seem so effortless as they jump in the air and spin in seemingly impossible positions. That’s how you know they’ve trained and practiced so hard for this that it seems too easy for them. Similar to ballet, no one realizes the amount of hard work, effort and physical training required for a skater. Often times, skaters will practice almost every day of the week for hours in a lesson, out of a lesson, off ice practice, stretching, warm up, working out to build the muscle, building flexibility are all just some of the things competitors do to train for competitions. As graceful a skater may look, don’t forget the amount of strength and power they have to do everything they just did and still look graceful. She is clearly involved (engaged) in her learning experiences as a figure skater and recognizes the commitment she has made to excel. SMART Goals: Prewriting for Learning Narrative As part of this first assignment, students in my spring semester set learning goals based on the habits of mind (we did not do this prewriting assignment in my fall pilot project). We read the “Framework” and talked about what these habits meant and how they practiced them inside and outside our classroom. Using SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) goals, students then chose one or two habits of mind that they wanted to focus on for the semester, explaining how and why they selected that goal. They identified how they would “measure” their goal -- in other words, I asked them to think about how they would know if they had made progress on this goal. Throughout the semester, we revisited these goals for revisions and progress check-ins, and they were asked to reflect on their goals in their final assignment as well. Of the 67 students who submitted the prewriting journal, one-third of the students selected “engagement” as their goal for the semester, which they mostly described as attending class regularly, speaking up in class at least once per class, focusing on homework, establishing study routines, and joining clubs and organizations to be more 51 involved in extracurricular activities. As the learning narrative suggested, nearly this same percentage of students demonstrated engagement in their past learning. Students seem to understand that they need to be actively involved and invested in their learning for that learning to be retained. Of course, as some students wrote, it helps when the course is relevant to them. This relevance does not happen just in the course objectives or outcomes, but also through the content of the course. One student who had identified “engagement” as their learning goal wrote in their final reflection, Some of the other people there [at the First Year Writing Conference] watching who had done a similar project mentioned that [the Facing College project] seemed way more interesting than [theirs] because these [stories] we wrote about were relevant to us and our own lives. The project that these other students did had to be on WW2. I never really thought about this before but I can really agree with this. I was interested in this project because these [stories] were relevant to us. This student felt involved in the content of the assignment. Persistence was another habit which students more frequently chose as their SMART goal. Like engagement, students often defined this habit as attending class regularly, making the Dean’s list or receiving a particular grade for the course and/or their GPA, and keeping interest in the assignments. Meghan wrote, “What persistent means to me is that you keep on going even when things get tough and you want to quit but you don't.” Since this prewriting task was only completed in my spring courses, I think students may have been drawing on their fall semester experiences when they selected this habit as their goal. They often mentioned that they needed to just “work through” the semester to improve their GPA and their attendance habits. This habit was mentioned less frequently in final reflections, but was mentioned more frequently in the remix project and in class journals. It was referred to only a few more times in the 52 learning narrative. Indeed, Spencer Kula’s learning narrative was specifically about learning patience and persistence while fishing with his father. Responsibility was another frequently cited goal for my spring students. Writing things down (taking notes and keeping a planner), doing their homework, managing their time, attending class, and participating in study groups and tutoring centers are some of the actions students were prepared to take to become more responsible learners. While responsibility was a goal for about 14% of these 67 students, this habit of mind was implicitly and explicitly used about 30% of the time in other writing tasks, and often with those same actions identified as making them “responsible learners.” Twelve percent of my participants chose to work on the habit of creativity. Most students who selected this habit to develop more were interested in learning different genres and modes of writing, problem-solving, and inquiry. Ashley wrote, Throughout the semester I hope to spend time working on my creativity. I want to practice thinking more outside of the box, specifically with my [writing]. I want to begin to questions my own thoughts and think deeper about the content. I hope my assignments reach below the surface. I think that the more creative you are the more interesting your writing is. This semester I want to focus less on the formality and professionalism of my writing and more on the unique and personal ideas I have to present to my audience. And Lauren Layden explained, “I do not consider myself a very creative person and for my major I feel like I need to be creative on some level. I can attain that by coming out of my comfort zone and writing about things I might normally not write about and do some extra research on the topics.” Openness was mentioned in only 9% of the written goals, yet this was a commonly referred to trait in most of their other writings. In his FCA reflection, Robert wrote about the fraternity that was his subculture, “I think that being vulnerable and open towards another person and accepting each other for who they are is the real 53 concept of brotherhood.” And Ahmed commented that peer review was one of the activities which most helped him practice openness, which was not his identified goal. He wrote, “And it [peer review] made me think in a totally different way, because with my friends comments I tried to see things through their perspective and [therefore] [broadening] my [horizons] and makes it easier for my brain to think of new things and ideas.” Bryce Gimmarro felt that class discussions and group work in the Disciplinary and Professional Literacy and the Remix projects helped develop his openness: “This class definitely helped me work on that goal because of all the people in the class with different backgrounds and working and communicating with them on a weekly basis.” Curiosity, flexibility, and metacognition were the least mentioned habits that students wanted to develop in the spring 2017 semester. Michelle was the only student who specifically mentioned metacognition in her SMART goal, and she wrote that she wanted “to reflect and better my lifestyle” through personal journaling. Curiosity was paired with creativity as habits to develop, and flexibility was chosen by two students. Ethan N felt flexibility would help him stop procrastinating, and Ryan Bajjani, an international student, wrote, “Thinking flexibly [would] be a good focus this semester, since I tend to [interpret] things as if I were back home where the culture differs greatly and tend to have a point of view from there as well, rather than thinking flexibly about things.” Fieldworking Cultural Analysis: Data Although the assignment description for each semester stated that students should use a single organization to which they belonged or were interested in for the fieldworking cultural analysis project (FCA), 44% of my participants did not focus their 54 projects on any particular organization, and, relatedly, 29% of the projects did not demonstrate, explicitly or implicitly, any of the habits of mind. Their ideas were all over the place, and some did not respond to the selected prompts (see Appendix B). For those who did focus on one organization for these mini-ethnographic studies, the most common topics were sports and ethnically or racially identifying groups. Other focuses included dormitories, religious groups, majors, technology, gender, music and dance, Greek life, volunteering, outdoors, and hobbies. Most of these projects demonstrated more than one habit of mind throughout the project, and sometimes these habits were explicitly mentioned as students observed, reflected, read about, examined their own positionality and privileges within, and participated in the subcultures they chose. The FCA project uses a textbook, Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research, by Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater to guide students through a mini-ethnographic study with a series of prompts or “boxes” that they use to research and reflect upon a subculture (see Appendix B). Kistler argues that ethnography enhances service-learning pedagogy as students learn more about their community partners cultural backgrounds and can better understand the implications of their service to these communities. She acknowledges ethnography’s colonial beginning but explains that the intent of ethnographic research should not be for one’s own benefit. Rather, ethnographic research allows students to be more engaged with the community and to see how culture informs one’s perspective and worldview. Wilhelm et. al. add, Students learn the value of doing research to assume informed positions, recognize and genuinely listen to alternate positions, and make ethical arguments to advocate for changes that can have positive human and environmental consequences in their neighborhoods, communities, and society. These habits of mind are central to effective democratic participation. (74) 55 In these FCA projects, students are participant-observer researchers as they choose organizations to which they may already belong or are interested in joining: They actively participate in the organization while also observing their communities from both emic and etic perspectives. These perspectives allow them to be engaged with the community and to study these communities’ culture and ways of making space for their members. Kistler’s article validates my own beliefs about service-learning and cultural communities, and it has been part of the projects that I assign. Her article helps me to see how to more closely connect this text with our service-learning projects. As Kistler suggests, my students examine their own privilege and positionality as they observe and participate in self-selected communities so they will understand how their cultural background and experiences shape their worldviews. In thinking about their own etic and emic perspectives,10 students have an opportunity to develop many habits of mind throughout the project. Even with this framing, though, some students seem rooted in these colonized systems, which Freire and Smith acknowledge as yet another problem with colonization: it is difficult to act in decolonized ways when we are part of colonization. Mignolo suggests that we have to deliberately de-link our actions and ideas from colonization, but this process is messy and would certainly represent a higher level of liminality. One 10 Emic and etic perspectives are terms used by ethnographic researchers that students learn and practice throughout the course. Emic perspectives are defined as “insider” viewpoints, or points of view of those who belong to the subculture or community (participants), and etic perspective is an “outsider” viewpoint, or points of view of those who do not belong to the subculture or community (the observer/researcher). In our FCA projects, students are often what Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater call a participant-observer because they belong to the communities they are researching. This dual role complicates their perspectives and challenges them to understand their communities from various points of view. We discuss what it means to have different points of view and how these viewpoints, or perspectives, affect our research, writing, beliefs, values, and habits of mind. 56 student demonstrates these difficulties; in describing the philanthropic work of her sorority, Kristal Lalmi wrote, “We do like to party, we do like to have fun, but we also spend a lot of time looking for ways to raise all this money for these people in need.” This focus on serving people in need is one of the common complaints about service- learning because it perpetuates a colonized system of those in power “helping” the oppressed through acts of service and even money (Gilbride-Brown; Shabazz and Cooks; Mitchell). It continues a them-us binary that allows “us” – often the colonizer – to feel pity for the colonized, or marginalized, and even to feel superior through acts of service and donations of goods and money to “improve” their lives. Some iterations of service-learning which focus on volunteerism and raising donations for “them” seem more concerned with maintaining the binary than de-linking. Some ways to begin decolonizing this type of service-learning is to focus on the community partner(s) strengths through asset mapping and working with the community partner rather than for them (Shabazz and Cooks; Sandy and Holland; Garoutte and McCarthy-Gilmore; Deans; Monberg). Gorski adds that critical reflection, which is where he believes the learning happens in service-learning, pushes students to think about the systemic institutions that enable oppression and marginalization, and they need to learn how to change those systems. It isn’t just a quick fix (service or donations) but looking at the root of the problem. However, engagement and openness were the most mentioned habits of mind (see Table 1). For example, Madison expressed engagement through practicing double- entry note-taking. She wrote, What surprised me the most overall was the way I was taking notes at my roommate’s volleyball game. The notes I took were good but combining the 57 personal and informational notes together was the best way to take notes and [it] intrigued me because now I have started using that technique in other classes for my notes. This has come to be very helpful in taking notes. She made connections between the work we were doing in our course and her other courses, then acted upon her new knowledge to improve her note-taking. Zhiqing also showed engagement in writing about their job in one of MSU’s dining halls: “I was a rookie in the dining hall so that others always teach me how to do the work properly. But one day, there was a Chinese girl who are first day working in the dining hall. I taught her many rules she should follow when working here and the feeling of being a teacher is really good.” Like Madison, Zhiqing acted upon their new knowledge and then expressed involvement in their learning by sharing it with others. As I had hoped, this project encouraged openness as expressed in nearly one- third of the projects, although openness has different definitions for these students. Georgia Christodoulou commented, “While me, I am first generation Greek American whose parents are immigrants. [. . .] My overall observation on myself was that I need to let go of my ego and open up to others that aren’t exactly like me. Even in the same culture there are different perspectives.” This student embraces her emic and etic perspectives and acknowledges that she needs to be more open to those within her subculture who aren’t just like her. A student-athlete at MSU, Kelsey Keener also realized the diversity within her subculture through the FCA project. She explained, “As I became a part of the student- athlete community here at MSU I was opened to many diverse and special communities where I have the privilege of learning new customs and cultures.” Both Georgia and Kelsey see openness as diversity and differences in our commonalities whereas Julia Kassel sees openness as being willing to try new things that may be outside her comfort 58 zone. She wrote, “Happiness can lead me to feel confident and go out and try everything I normally would be intimidated to do. I am open to more and more opportunities every day and I have yoga to thank for it.” A third definition of openness was a willingness to change one’s viewpoint to be more accepting of those who may be “different” from themselves. Mackenzie wrote, My previous thoughts and ideas of the workers at my dorm’s [Sparty’s] was completely wrong. These students are some of the hardest working students on campus. Not only do they have to memorize all of the properties of the intermolecular forces in chemistry, they also have to memorize how to make my white caramel swirl drink. That takes effort and dedication. It would seem that this student has developed acceptance and a new respect for those who are serving her, people she previously had looked down upon for working in a service-oriented job. However, openness seems to be limited to the stage at which the student is operating (Meyer and Land; Adler-Kassner, Majewski, and Koshner). Ethan N described how observing his subculture affected his paradigm, The thing that surprised me the most was the fact that doing this simple assignment for a class changed my view on everyday life. It makes me think that there is way more to my everyday life then I originally thought. [. . .] It made me realize that I do a lot of cool stuff that others would be amazed at. I really am blessed with all the opportunities I am provided. And Sarah also explained, “Overall, all of these privileges would make me realize I have a lot more than others and that I can’t assume everyone else might be as lucky.” While both these students show openness to some extent, they are at the first stage of development which is where most freshman are in their learning because they are only “open” insofar as it relates to their experiences and life. Their emic perspective limits 59 them from considering their subculture as outsiders and from considering the colonizing systems which have made them “blessed” and “lucky.” While I would have anticipated students to demonstrate strong curiosity through this project, only 15% implicitly or explicitly discussed curiosity (see Table 1). Overall, students would write that they felt “curious” but they seldom supported this claim with clear evidence that showed how they practiced curiosity. Indeed, Anna Richardson showed how she constrained herself during her interview with a member of her subculture, As an interviewer, I think that I could have done a much better job digging deeper into the subject and asking questions based off of the person's answers. I tended to stick to my original set of questions and not let the interview take me where it may. Rather than practicing curiosity, she seemed to stick closely to her plan and almost felt uncomfortable with allowing curiosity to take her in different directions. Although no students explicitly said they were practicing metacognition in their projects, 17% demonstrated metacognition implicitly (see Table 1). The “Framework” describes metacognition as “the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes and systems used to structure knowledge.” In their writing, students showed metacognition through reflective comments about their own learning processes and biases. For example, Genna wrote, No Albanian students were attending the meeting. Honestly, I had high expectations that I would be able to meet other Albanian students that were interested to learn about different cultures. I was disturbed by my feeling to be around Albanian students, forgetting that my original purpose was to learn about MRULE and other cultures. This was a time when I should have acted beyond my comfort zone and I failed to do that properly. Genna reflected about her own biases and began to think about how her expectations may have limited her participation in the subculture she was researching. 60 Christine also demonstrated deep levels of metacognition. She wrote, I think I focused too much on negative things during my observation, but these situations really stuck out to me so I had to write them down. While taking note of these instances, I realized that they happen all the time. I am always trying to alter myself depending on who I am with in order to fit in. Who am I really? Why do I try to tune myself to the people I am with? I should just be me, but I’ve been doing this for so long I don’t know the real me anymore. Christine’s writing is a deep reflection not only of her research process but also a deeply moving, introspective look at her own exploration of her disconnectedness with her Filipino heritage as a “diasporic Asian.” Overall, her project, demonstrates a high level of metacognition or post-liminality, which I will discuss more in Chapter 2.5. Remix: Data The remix project is meant to provide an opportunity for students to re-imagine and re-conceptualize a previous project through a multimodal composition or project. As Michelle, a student from my spring semester, stated, At the FYW Conference I understood the purpose of our project- to practice writing in different ways. We were able to portray stories and information in a different way than just writing out an essay. We recognized the effect that visuals can give to an audience through emotion as well as how to use this lesson when we are writing out an essay or story. For my FYW classes, I asked students to draw on their FCA projects to create a multimodal project with and for their subcultures in small groups, and they were meant to be the “service” component of our critical service-learning by providing a product which would start conversations about important issues in these subculture (Mitchell). In the fall semester, the only direction was to create a “communication-oriented” product for and with their subculture whereas students in my spring semester classes created their “Facing Project: College” narrative. As participants in the Facing Project: College, students interviewed other members from their subcultures to write a first-person 61 narrative which they presented at MSU’s First Year Writing Conference as digital stories (short videos) in order to participate in a larger conversation about issues around our theme. We continued these conversations in our final in-class projects which I will discuss in the next section. The remix assignment did not go as planned in my fall critical service-learning pilot project. I anticipated meaningful projects which would somehow start a conversation about the various subcultures my students had researched in their FCA projects. But, for the most part, these projects were fairly simple and did not really demonstrate habits of mind beyond engagement with the subculture and some openness. For example, most groups made a flyer or poster to promote an event or fundraiser for their subculture. One group set up a social media site to share pictures with and for the subculture. A group of students who studied the library as their subculture were concerned with helping the library become a place where students felt comfortable and welcomed. For their remix project, they made a set of posters that said, “Welcome to the library.” In class discussions, I had encouraged this group to draw on their members’ stated abilities in filmmaking and acting to make a video about students’ library usage and how to make the space a more welcoming place. In conversations with their main informant from the FCA project, she encouraged them to expand their ideas, too, by explaining that the library already had a marketing team which met the subculture’s graphic needs. But they chose to stick with their original plan: posters. These projects did not meet my expectations for critical service-learning: the projects did not start conversations about the subcultures nor did they always meet the 62 needs of their informants. This failure reflects my teaching more than my students’ learning, however. In trying to practice hooks’s engaged pedagogy by encouraging students to take risks and to participate in the creation of their learning, I neglected to acknowledge their developmental stages, and I did not provide enough context and explanation of what the projects should be to allow my students to be full “agent[s] and activist[s]” in their learning (Howe et. al.; Wilhelm et. al. 34). Since I had already received the grant and attended training for the Facing Project in November of the fall semester, I knew I would be re-imagining the remix project for spring semester during the winter break. The constraints of our participation in this national storytelling project influenced how I re-contextualized the remix assignment. In the spring, in small groups, students selected one of their subcultures from their FCA to conduct an interview with an informant. Then, they wrote a first- person narrative which was peer reviewed by their class members, the informant, and editors from the Facing Project. This peer review process ensured that my students were working with their partners (informants and Facing Project) closely to compose a narrative that captured the informant’s experience authentically and accurately (Monberg). These groups then remixed the written narratives into scripts for digital stories which they recorded and presented to a larger audience. The clearer directions did not seem to inhibit my students’ participation or creation of learning; rather, they seemed to enhance their learning. These re-envisioned remix projects more clearly aligned with Mitchell’s definition of critical service-learning as students saw themselves and their informants’ stories as 63 places for social justice. Nicholas Harding described how he wants their project about a Muslim student to be an agent of social change: I really want this story to make people think. I personally had no idea that anything like the discrimination in Ahmad's story happened on this campus. It really made me think about not only our campus but society as a whole. Even though it is 2017 and we have come so far, we still have a really long way to go until we are rid of racism and discrimination. I hope that people watch our film and think about their own communities they are involved in, and think. Ethan N. believed his group’s story of a refugee student had similar purposes: “I feel like this movie should leave an impact of questioning, and to make people think ‘Why do we ignore the problems over there?’ and kind of inspire them to look into maybe helping refugees.” Rachel also expressed that she hoped their story of a transfer student would be something “that some people can relate to in some way whether they are also transfer students or not.” In this more focused remix assignment, my students were more concerned with telling stories that would have an impact on their audiences and on their informants’ lived experiences. They wanted to make the world just a little bit better for all college students by making more people feel connected to these places. Interestingly, a common theme emerged across all the stories from each of my three sections: students were trying to find their place in this space. These second remix projects demonstrated all of the habits of mind, implicitly and explicitly, as shown in their reflective writings about the projects which encouraged them to think about the process of the project and what they had learned. Reflective prompts (see Appendix C) asked them to think critically about the process which may help explain why students discussed flexibility of rhetorical situation. For example, Minhal explained her role in her group’s project, “Editing the video was similar to writing because I had to structure the video so that it would flow to tell a story.” Another student 64 showed how their group considered visual elements like color to affect the tone of their film: [W]e visioned [sic] a video that begins with a darker not as light or colored scene with the character at the smaller, community college. This color is supposed to represent her opinion and mood regarding her current situation at the college she attends. We will then show her apply to transfer to MSU online. And then once she gets to MSU there will be a drastic change in lighting and color. It will be significantly brighter with much more vivid colors to show her mood as she transitions from a small college to MSU. Justin also discussed making responsible rhetorical choices when he wrote, “There will be some royalty free music playing in the background.” Students seemed particularly cognizant of the rhetorical situation of this multimodal composition, and they expressed this understanding explicitly in their reflections. Final Reflections: Data This final project for our FYW course is a final learning reflection. The prompt itself invites students to practice metacognition, yet only 6% of all the projects actually showed this habit (see Table 1). In the fall semester, students were asked to tell a story about what they had learned about writing, learning, literacy, college, etc. throughout the semester in any mode or genre that they chose to use. Most students turned in academic essays, but a few created podcasts or vlogs. In re-envisioning the spring semester’s projects, I also changed the final reflections and used MSU’s Center for Service-Learning and Civic Engagement’s Reflection Circles model to develop written prompts (see Appendix C) and to lead class discussions about what students had learned throughout the semester. These reflection circles were more focused on critical service-learning and how the projects might lead to social change. 65 Even though the fall prompt was more open, students still expressed personal growth in many of the habits of mind. Colin Slon wrote, I basically tried to leave my comfort zone [. . .] Someone who's not afraid to start a group discussion, someone who's not afraid to take the reins on a group project, someone who doesn't care what his younger, less experienced peers might think of him. [. . .] Not only did this help bring a new perspective to writing and literacy, but I learned so much about myself over the course of the semester. Colin had explained that he felt inspired by my research project (the fall semester class) to try his own class experiment to increase his engagement. Elijah Lentz, also from the fall semester course, wrote, WRA 101 has shown me how important it is to engage myself in any class when in college. I learned if I don’t apply myself in class there isn’t even a point to show up. For example, from the entire class discussions, I was able to see other people's views as I even learned more about myself and where I stand. For him, engagement and openness were constellated; these habits worked together to help him learn more from the course. Julia Verkest also felt that she had learned what it means to be engaged in and responsible for her learning. She wrote, “This class taught me a lot about how to handle other classes I will take in years to come. Instead of just doing what I need to in order to pass, I will try my hardest to really pay attention and have the desire to learn.” The spring semester’s reflection circles began with this written reflection prompt: Post your six word story about our community. This prompt was important to me because I wanted to understand the relationships that students had formed with each other as well as the relationships they had with course concepts. Throughout the course, I had incorporated various icebreakers and relationship-building activities as well as talking and reading articles about classroom communities. In this reflection prompt, I was able to see what struck a chord with students. 66 Here are a few of their six-word stories: ● Emily Lydey: Where collaborative ideas are given life. ● Manekya Sumithrarachchi: Small separate groups, one WRA community. ● Giuseppe: Strangers, 4 months later, best friends. ● Reed: Community: The link between all individuals. ● Trevor Kapp: Group Work and Connectivity Amplifies Learning. Their six-word stories suggest that they had become a community in our course and that they valued these relationships for their own learning. Other prompts for the reflection circles asked students to think about social inequalities in their subcultures and what their responsibilities were in addressing the social inequalities or social issues they may witness in their communities. There were several students who said that they did not see any social injustices in their subculture, and some students also said that they did not feel responsible to addressing social injustice in any situation. For example, Bryce Gimmarro explained, “In my personal experience there wasn't really a lot of inequalities in my group.” However, in a later reflection circle prompt, he wrote, I think that a lot of the social inequalities and issues that we see in the college community are due to people lacking an open mind, and I was one of these people at the beginning of the semester. I'm not saying that I am not that same person anymore, I still am, but I have gotten better at having an open mind and being accepting of other [people’s] views and beliefs. He then specifically cited the Facing Project as one reason why he has developed a more open mind towards others: [T]he facing project that we did helped me to see what other people go through when they are facing college and it was a huge step for me in achieving my goal in being a more open minded person. I enjoyed working with all of these different 67 people and getting to know them and becoming friends with some people that weren't in my typical circle of friends before this class. While he initially expressed a lack of responsibility for social inequalities, he later acknowledges that closed-mindedness may be the reason we don’t see or act upon social inequalities. Developing openness was his SMART goal for the semester and something he feels he has worked on throughout the semester. His response suggests that he is entering a liminal stage of development, albeit with some wobble, which I will explain more in Chapter 3 (Meyer and Land; Fecho). There were also a lot of students who did feel that they needed to be agents of social change. Ali Faraj explained, “As a minority on campus I feel responsible for needing to prove stereotypes wrong.” And Brock St. Peter commented, I feel that I need to speak up when I witness a social inequality. I have always felt this way, but I think this semester and this class really solidified that for me. All throughout the semester we discussed different inequalities that people face and, as we learned in the TED talk, the danger of a single story. We also discussed the privileges that each of us have and how to be mindful of the way your privileges can affect others. Heather McArdle said that she does not feel “directly responsible” for social inequalities, but she feels that we can address them by being ourselves and being open and accepting of others. She wrote, “Another somewhat of a responsibility that I took on was to make other people feel comfortable and accepted in any environment that I was involved in, no matter who it is.” Hannah even directly addressed inequalities in our theme of college: I know education can't be fixed by simply putting money towards the problem, and I know there's a lot of politics wrapped up in education but it is important to try. It's important to continue putting resources and time to fixing our current education system so as a country we can thrive. 68 Kendall also realized that there are social inequalities in higher education. She wrote, It took Luiz’s story for me to realize that many of these places are just not providing their students with the information needed to find a way out, because it is definitely possible. The guidance counselors at my school were always hounding us about applying for these types of things, even if we’re not necessarily eligible, but I don’t think that happens everywhere. This opened my eyes to the fact that this help is not available everywhere, especially in places where going to college isn’t the norm. Nicholas Harding also believed that his group’s remix project directly addresses social inequalities. He explained, I personally feel like I have already done my part in producing Ahmad's story. His story is an account of what it can be like to be a minority on campus and face discrimination. I personally didn't know that stuff like that happened on campus and based on the reactions of others in the reflection circle, it seems that I am not the only one. Everyone that was like me and didn't know about racism on campus will now be informed because, of the facing project I produced. While not every student connected their learning with responsibility for social inequalities -- i.e. critical service-learning -- many did and some even explicitly cited their service-learning projects as the reason for this connection. Dear students, Your Story I hope I have shared your story responsibly and respectfully, acknowledging the reciprocal teaching-learning role we all shared. Thank you for sharing your thoughts in class and in your projects with me and with our readers here. Your ideas continue to impact my teaching and learning, and I appreciate the role each of you played in these case studies and in my future courses. I hope our course continues to impact your teaching and learning as well. P.S. “Started with assignments, lead to perspective.” -- Manekya Sumithrarachchi 69 CHAPTER 2.5: CHRISTINE’S STORY This chapter shares the work of one of my students, Christine, who demonstrated Meyer and Land’s third stage, postliminality, in her Fieldworking Cultural Analysis project. Christine’s mini-ethnography of diasporic Asians demonstrates deep critical thinking about what this subculture is and what it means to be part of it. She brings her etic and emic perspectives to her research. This metacognition of both the community and her process of researching the community suggests that Christine is reaching a postliminal stage -- where learners are “transformed, ‘beginning to think’ like a member of the field or area in which the concept is situated, participating in the concepts within the disciplinary/epistemic communities where they are situated” (Meyer and Land; Adler-Kassner, Majewski, and Koshnick). Christine began exploring her culture in her learning narrative audio selfie when she talked about growing up in the Philippines with her grandparents. Her childhood and her grandmother’s health problems led her to pursue a Biomedical Engineering major because she wants to be able to help people like her grandmother who had fallen. Since access to medical care is difficult in the Philippines, the injury became infected, and her grandmother had to have her leg amputated. Christine hopes to someday engineer prosthetics and develop more accessible healthcare for people like her grandmother: I probably won’t make it on time to help my grandma, but I want to help people like her. Healthcare in the Philippines is so, so expensive and inaccessible, and it’s hard for poorer families and older patients to get the help that they need. I want to develop ways to help them and maybe save others from feeling the same pain as my grandma. 70 Fieldworking Cultural Analysis: Diasporic Asians BOX11 1: Looking at Subcultures The first thing I noticed while writing about my subculture is the red squiggly line underlining my topic: diasporic Asians. Seeing this makes me feel lonely and invalidated, as if I wasn’t already. I guess it’s not a common thing you hear everyday. Nobody really wants to be called diasporic right? The word makes me think of not having a place to call home. I would consider myself a diasporic Asian. I was born and raised in the Philippines and I lived there until I was nine. I moved to Michigan about four years after my mother and I’ve been living here since. I should probably explain what I mean about being a diasporic Asian. I’m not actually sure if it’s the proper term for it, but I’ve heard other people in similar situations use this term. For me, being diasporic essentially describes my feelings of not belonging to any of my cultures. I have lived in America for eight years, yet I still can’t call myself American. I can’t really call myself Filipino either. I know I am both, but it doesn’t feel like it. I feel as if I’m not American enough to be American and I’ve lost touch with my Filipino side so much that I don’t consider myself Filipino enough either. I’m stuck in this limbo between both cultures and feeling inadequate in both. Although I’m constantly aware of these feelings, it gets really bad when I go home to the Philippines. My own grandmother can’t recognize me anymore because I look too “Americanized”. The first time I went home, she didn’t even call me by my name because I didn’t look or act the same anymore. It’s funny that she found me whitewashed, when I could barely interact with my American peers at that time. I can’t really blame her for thinking this way because I did try really 11 See Appendix B for prompts for each “box.” 71 hard to assimilate into American culture when I first moved here. As cruel as it sounds, I rejected my Filipino culture. I was embarrassed of being Filipino and I wanted to quickly fit in and make friends. By doing this, I feel like I’ve lost touch with my Filipino side and I don’t really know how to get back in touch when it’s thousands of miles away from me. I know there are a lot of diasporic Asians out there and I am friends with a few, but each of our experiences are so different. I feel like the only thing we can really connect with is the fact that we don’t feel like we belong to anything. BOX 2: Making the Ordinary Extraordinary One of the things I desperately tried to change when I first moved to America was the way I ate. I know my white stepfather didn’t like our food because he often complained about the smell. My mom doesn’t really know how to cook, but sometimes she would fry up some things I used to eat growing up. Filipinos love rice! We eat everything with it. A lot of our cuisine involves soups and fried foods. My mom would sometimes make my favorite soup Sinigang and fried tilapia. My stepfather always looked disgusted when we ate the fish. I think they only sell fish filleted here so maybe that’s why he reacted this way, but in the Philippines we cook and eat the whole thing, head and eyes included! Growing up, I would watch my aunt pour a plastic bag filled with tilapia in the sink and gut them one by one. It sounds a bit gross but the way she took off the scales with such ease was always so cool to me! My stepfather still makes fun of my mom for eating fish heads and it makes me sad when he does. Filipinos are also known for eating with our hands. Personally, I think it tastes better that way anyways, but he was so appalled by it that I couldn’t eat that way anymore. When he made fun of us for eating with our hands, in my head I would make 72 fun of him for only eating with a fork. I thought that if you were going to use utensils a spoon would be the best choice, but maybe that’s because I was used to eating soup all the time. When I went back to the Philippines I found myself grabbing for a fork instead of using my hands and my cousin commented on how proper I was eating. BOX 3: Engaging the Ethnographic Perspective International Student Association holds annual Valentine's Day ball Ruta Ulcinaite, State News12 1. What cultural information does the article include? The article talks about the Valentine’s ball hosted by the International Students Association (ISA) at MSU. The association aims to improve the relationship between domestic and international students and also provide the international community a platform for representation and solidarity. 2. What kinds of questions might the fieldworker ask to further uncover the culture the article describes? A fieldworker would ask multiple perspectives to further uncover details about the culture. This article focuses on students who are a part of ISA. I think perspectives from domestic and minority students who are not a part of the group would provide further insight on the culture. 3. How would the fieldworker’s questions differ from those of a journalist? Fieldworkers tend to go more in depth in the cultures they are studying compared to journalists. With journalism, you mainly see a subject through the 12 This citation refers to the article the student used to respond to the prompt in Box 3. This prompt asked students to find an article related to their subculture and think about how journalists and fieldworkers would research and write about this topic. 73 journalist’s eyes. On the other hand, fieldworkers gather information about the culture from multiple perspectives. Fieldworkers would probably ask more personal and in depth questions to gather specific details about the culture they are studying. 4. What information would the fieldworker want to gather to answer the question ‘What’s going on here?’ To answer this question, the fieldworker would want to interview the people involved in ISA, including the MSU staff that works with them. If I were the fieldworker, I would also ask some people not in the association to see how much their efforts have impacted the MSU community. 5. What other sources of information might the fieldworker use to penetrate the insider perspective? Since the ISA wants to form stronger bonds between domestic and international students, I would consider this a campus-wide issue. I personally didn’t even know this group existed until I read this article. I wonder how much their activism and outreach spreads around campus. It seems like a pretty big association so I’m very surprised not to know anything about it. 6. Where would she need to go to find those sources? How might she use the Internet? The best way to find these sources would be to look around campus. They could use the Internet to find clubs and staff that may be associated with this group. 74 BOX 6: Double Entry Notes Observation of my behavior with Asian Americans vs. Non-Asian Americans Record Respond I’m trying to sound “more American” when talking to my white friends. I’m eating with my Chinese friend and I put too much pepper on my food. I don’t want them to comment on my accent or make me repeat what I say. I want to prove to them that I can handle spicy food too. A stranger asked if they can use the spare chair in front of me really loudly and slowly. Do they think I don’t understand them? I grew up studying so much English, I don’t think I’m even proficient in my own language. The cashier said hi to my Asian American friend, but didn’t say hi to me. This happens a lot to me. I don’t understand why I can’t get a hello as well! My white friend said the food I was eating smelled like cat food. I’m eating, not you. If you don’t like it then get out of my room. I think I focused too much on negative things during my observation, but these situations really stuck out to me so I had to write them down. While taking note of these instances, I realized that they happen all the time. I am always trying to alter myself depending on who I am with in order to fit in. Who am I really? Why do I try to tune myself to the people I am with? I should just be me, but I’ve been doing this for so long I don’t know the real me anymore. If I continued this observation, I would start a tally of how much I encounter these situations. 75 BOX 8: Questioning Your Fieldnotes 1. What surprised me? i. I first became aware of my subculture sometime during high school. I’ve always known I was rejecting my Filipino culture from the start. Part of it was because I was embarrassed, but my parents enforced a lot of it. I was told I couldn’t speak my language around my stepfather, so eventually I slowly forgot Tagalog. During my junior year of high school, I decided that enough is enough. Why should I be embarrassed of who I am? I’ve been trying to relearn everything I’ve forgotten and I’m discovering new things about my culture every day! Although I am now actively trying to love my Filipino culture, I was surprised to find that there are still times when I feel uncomfortable about it. When I was taking observations, I found myself trying to change my voice and rehearsing what I wanted to say in my head because I was afraid of being misunderstood. 2. What intrigued me? i. The article on the International Students Association really threw me off because I’ve honestly never heard of them. I keep saying how lonely it feels to be a diasporic Asian, but I know there’s lot of us out there, especially on campus! I should really be more involved; maybe I could find others just like me. 76 3. What disturbed me? It’s kind of disturbing how negative almost all of what I’ve written has been so far. I suppose my topic isn’t necessarily a positive experience, but it can’t be all that bad right? I can’t name any right now, but I think I shouldn’t only focus on the negative aspects of being diasporic. BOX 11: Unlearning Our Privilege A privilege I’m very aware of is my lighter skin tone. Filipinos are known to be darker, while I’m very light-skinned. People often think I’m East Asian; I’ve even fooled a few of my international friends on campus. My features are very East Asian apart from my nose, which is distinctly Filipino. Because of this, I have privilege over darker Asians; therefore our experiences can be entirely different from one another. I know some of my friends have been called derogatory terms for their dark skin. It’s interesting to see how across cultures, darker people have always had a harder time. Filipinos are often referred to as the “Blacks/Mexicans of Asia” and South/Southeast Asians are considered to be “less” than East Asians. I don’t have much insight on these experiences since people always think I’m Chinese. I can’t relate to their experiences and I feel bad talking about them because I do not understand the pain it makes them feel. My privilege could affect my fieldwork research because what I write may only apply to light-skinned Asians like me, so my work might focus on only one perspective of this culture. BOX 15: Locating Online Cultures I had a hard time looking for an online community on Asian diaspora. I found some creative networks that aimed to promote Asian American discourse through art 77 and writing, but they held actual meetings instead of talking through forums online. I decided to go on the Asian diaspora tag on the blogging website, Tumblr. I’ve had a blog on this website for a few years now and I met a lot of other diasporic friends on there, so I figured I would check out the tag. I found a variety of media being posted by different users. Some recommended books and movies on the topic and I spotted a couple of Q&A’s on Asian diaspora too. Most of the posts I saw in the tag were about East Asian cultures. One user complained that a lot of media primarily focuses on East Asian Americans, usually Chinese Americans. I also found personal anecdotes from users, which I could personally relate to. One user wrote about being fluent in three languages growing up and only being able to understand one today. They wrote of the seldom Skype calls with her family, wherein she would just sit and smile because she could not understand what they were saying. Although I can still understand my language and dialect pretty well, I have forgotten a lot of the words. I can hold a conversation with someone in my language, but I remember attending church when I went back home and barely understanding the sermon. Someone posted an essay titled “Asian Diaspora: The Perpetual Foreigners,” which highlighted our feelings of not belonging and the racism that evokes these feelings. The user also wrote about being placed in an English as a second language (ESL) class when they first moved to the US, which was something I had to go through as well. Despite being fluent in English, I was placed in an ESL class because I was “fresh off the boat” so of course I wouldn’t know how to speak English! It’s fascinating seeing the similarities between our experiences. It’s funny how diasporic Asians feel like 78 they don’t belong to anything, which in turn creates a subculture that revolves around this very feeling. I found a lot of book recommendations from Asian diasporic authors on this thread, so maybe those would be good resources to look at for more information on this culture. BOX 16: Recalling a Sense of Place I often did a similar exercise in group therapy and the place I always thought of was my bedroom back in the Philippines. I shared the room with my grandma and my mom (before she moved to Michigan). My grandma had a bamboo mat bed, while I had one made with some kind of fancy wood. We had our beds next to each other when it was just the two of us left. When my mom still lived with us, she slept on the floor next to me. She used to use our long couch pillows as her bed and I remember at night I would kneel on the floor with her and pray the rosary. I don’t remember much from when my mom lived with us because I was so young. Much of what I remember of her was when she would make me repeatedly study math in my room. Sometimes she would buy difficult books and read them in secret before giving them to me. The first two “real” books I read were children’s editions of Huckleberry Finn and Little Women. I was always sick growing up, so my grandmother wouldn’t let me go outside and I was often in my room. I would either read or draw and sometimes I would write stories. I remember my mom was so excited because I used the word “suddenly” in one of my stories! She didn’t know how I could possibly know that word, I mean I was like five I don’t know how I knew it either now that I think about it! 79 When my mom left, my grandmother moved her bed next to mine. I used to keep a photo of my mom under my pillow and cried. My grandma would hold my hand and pat my back when I was sad. At night she would turn on her radio and we would listen to the news. Sometimes she would be up late at night counting money or talking to her sisters on the phone. She would sometimes call me to look for her glasses or a pen. If she couldn’t find one she often resorted to using an eyebrow pencil instead. As she did this, I would just lie in bed and stare at our makeshift mosquito net made with old blankets. I would watch bugs fall on the net or listen to the tuko (lizard) make noise on the window. My favorite time of the day was around two or three in the afternoon. With the windows open and the sun shining through the windows, it was the perfect time to nap! Even though it was hot, there would be a cool breeze every now and then. Sometimes I would ask for some buko (coconut) next door and drink the juice. If you get a good coconut, the flesh would be so soft and easy to scrape off with a spoon. My grandma told me the last time I went home that she used to cry for me at night the same way I pined for my mother as a child. Since she doesn’t recognize me as much, I have a hard time talking to her. After receiving multiple surgeries, her memory became even worse, making it even harder to talk to her. My heart feels heavy as I think of her. I want to reconnect with her but I am afraid. I feel guilty for rejecting my culture when I first came to America. Maybe if I didn’t she would remember me as I was before and we would still be close today. BOX 17: Writing a Verbal Snapshot I really enjoyed writing Box 16. I remembered a lot of things that I haven’t thought of in a while. I like how I used Filipino words in the last box. I feel like this gives better 80 insight of what Filipino culture is like. I’ve been mentioning culture this culture that without really explaining what the culture is. I think I’ll go back to Box 2 and add more details to the Filipino food I was talking about. My piece for Box 16 reminds me of the short story Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu because of the way I incorporated small yet descriptive details of life in the Philippines. I think having descriptive sensory details provides a deeper and more touching perspective. I cried while writing my sense of place, I hope I have translated some of that emotion in my writing as well. BOX 19: Finding a Focal Point In the beginning, I said that I feel like diasporic Asians don’t have much in common besides feeling out of place in the cultures they belong in. Throughout the research, I found that we do share a lot of similar experiences, but I still can’t admit it because every person’s story is different. I suppose I’m contradicting myself with this statement. Although each of us has varying experiences with Asian diaspora, many of us do go through similar experiences. A South Asian immigrant will have a different story compared to me who is a citizen, but we probably have both dealt with rejecting our native cultures in favor of assimilating to Western ones. Maybe our similarities aren’t even that serious! Maybe it’s just small things like our grandmothers using old cookie tins as a sewing kit or playing outside even with a Category 3 typhoon on its way. It’s nice knowing that there are other people out there who feel the same way as me. Maybe it’s not so lonely as I thought since we’ve pretty much created our own culture and space. 81 CHAPTER 3: CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS Dear colleagues, I think one of my students, Daniel Woo Seok Do, said it best: “my story, your story, now.” You have heard our story, and now it becomes your story to “[d]o with as you will” (King 29). In this chapter, I will share my thoughts about what this project means to me, to my students, and to the Rhetoric and Composition discipline. I invite you to consider how this work might impact your teaching and to add to this story in ways that work for you and your paradigm. Thank you for becoming part of our story. Positionality as Research Paradigm I am going to start this chapter by responding to one of the prompts that I ask my students to complete in their FCA, Box 1013: Positioning Yourself (Sunstein and Chiseri- Strater 113-115). This prompt forces the researcher-writer to think about their own positionality -- the ways they see the world and how that affects their research. It is important here because it helps to establish my positionality as a teacher and researcher in these case studies (Wilson 36). My ontology is my epistemology is my methodology is my axiology, because the research paradigm is reciprocal, relational, and accountable, too. I am white, middle-aged, female, mother, wife, daughter, middle-class background, college educated, student, cis-gendered, heterosexual. I live in a suburban college community in central Michigan. Despite being a college town, it is a fairly conservative community. The community is also home to a federally recognized Native American tribe and our city sits on lands originally belonging to this tribe. I worked for 13 Box 10 asks writers to explore their positionality and privileges by listing them and thinking about what those positions and privileges mean in relationship to one another and to their research and writing. 82 this tribe for five years, first as a librarian and then as faculty at the tribal college. Now I am a writing teacher in a large research I university. Throughout much of my life, I have been a student -- first in the public school system, then as an undergraduate and graduate student. Five years ago, I returned to graduate school to earn my final degree, a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition. Returning to school wasn’t an easy choice as I knew it would mean a lot of sacrifices for me and my family. I was teaching full-time and I wanted to be better. I knew I could be better, so I returned to school to learn theory that would improve my practice. This desire to be better for my students is what sparked an interest in service- learning. Since I am teaching FYW, choosing my class for the pilot project and then continuing that research in the spring seemed like an obvious choice. My students are my subjects and participants. Our classroom is my fieldsite, and their coursework submissions and discussions are my artifacts. My positionality in this classroom is that of instructor to student, and while I may try to be student-centered in teaching and learning, there is an inherent power dynamic that is bestowed upon my position by the institution. This power dynamic can be difficult to navigate when trying to enact a decolonized, engaged pedagogy. I am most concerned about authenticity and honesty. I want my students to feel comfortable taking risks and being honest about their learning, but I am concerned that the institutional power dynamic limits these things. For example, I hope their reflections show what they have actually learned, but sometimes their writing still seems to be trying to give me “what I want” rather than being true with themselves. For example, as the instructor in this course, it is easy for me to say that grades are not measures of 83 learning, that they are not learning goals, but my data shows that grades are very important measures of learning for my students, and my institution expects me to assess and evaluate my students’ work as well. My institution gives me power over students, and I have to treat that accountability with respect both for my institution and my students. Stepping outside of our own emic view is difficult. Minhal discussed her own struggles with being a neutral observer: I was surprised at how difficult it was for me to distance myself and try to get the perspective of an outsider. When I first read the assignment, I thought that it was going to be really easy to do. When I actually tried it out it was very difficult for me to forget out my own predispositions, experiences, and opinions. I wanted to add my own opinions and experiences into my observations but I had to stop myself. It disturbed me to see how my own predispositions, experiences and opinions affected my perspective. Many of my initial observations and responses were clouded with my own opinions so I wasn’t able to use them but after a few tries I was finally able to separate myself and make observations as a third person. This disturbed me because it means that my predispositions affect many of my interactions and impressions of different things. It is an important skill to be able to separate yourself and consider things from a different perspective. Like Minhal, at times I struggle with maintaining an etic perspective in teaching. As a participant-observer, I am entrenched in the community, but I am also not part of the community through my separate role (one of institutional power) and by my positionality. At times, my expectations do not match the reality of what ends up happening in the classroom. At times, I am disappointed in the disconnect between my expectations and students’ perceptions. But relationality and accountability mean I have to learn to accept the chaos and mess, the reciprocity, in this student-centered engaged pedagogy because this pedagogy can lead to change and growth. An engaged pedagogy is risky for instructor and students because it works to disrupt these power structures by making the classroom an enjoyable, learning- 84 centered place, and service-learning furthers that disruption by giving students agency and voice to learn in a relevant, real-world situation (hooks; Wilhelm et. al.). As hooks proclaims, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (12). But that radical space of possibility depends on the relationships that are strengthened and developed for the instructor and students. Both teacher and students learn and grow. This has been the benefit and the risk of practicing an engaged pedagogy like service-learning because it decolonizes the classroom, the institution, by de-linking traditional educational models with a model that is centered on learning, not power and not in traditional places or spaces. Significance and Future Research Expectations As many teachers know, every class tells its own story -- the way the projects unfold, discussions, personalities. When we begin a course, as the instructor, we have an expectation of how the story will unfold, but that story does not always happen the way we think it will. Here is my story of expectations and, then, reality. Our departmental trajectory of assignments scaffolds learning through Wilhelm et. al.’s stages of development by first starting with one’s own story (learning narrative), then thinking about stories within our cultures (FCA and the disciplinary and professional literacies), and then starting to make connections among these multiple stories (remix). Finally, we come back to the beginning to see how we have grown and learned through this recursive process (final reflection). Every semester, this trajectory and scaffolding seems implicit and explicit, to me if not my students. Every semester, I negotiate with students and practice flexibility and responsibility as we navigate our way through these learning projects, which sometimes means rethinking assignments, taking 85 a more involved role in projects (or stepping back), adjusting deadlines, and selecting learning activities. This navigation reminds me to be relational and accountable in my teaching and learning as I respond to the needs of the students I have in front of me and not the picture or story I may have had in my head. Each of these assignments has the potential to develop any (or all) of the habits of mind at some level. Each assignment invites students to know more about the world (curiosity) through openness to new ideas and stories that might not align perfectly with their own experiences. Students are invited and encouraged to practice creativity through multimodal compositions and in their more traditional academic writing, too, by exploring different points of view and playing with genres. Persistence is important to each of the assignments as we work through a writing process that includes multiple prewriting tasks, drafting, peer review, revising, and publishing/sharing with me and with each other. Since my course’s theme is “college” and “learning,” students are asked to be responsible for their own learning by being engaged in discussions, in collaborative activities, and through citing other’s ideas, even when the citation comes from one of their peers. We practice flexibility by making ourselves aware of the rhetorical situation of each assignment and discussing the choices we are making in these projects. As we examine our own positionality and cultural systems through each project, students are also invited to reflect and make connections among their ideas and others (metacognition). These habits of mind are built into the structure of the course, but what students choose to focus on or what they claim to learn throughout the course does not always reflect this scaffolding and structure, or relationality. 86 One area where I expected students to demonstrate an interest in the Habits of Mind were their SMART goals. The prompt specifically asked them to focus their goal on one of these habits, and yet some students did not write goals about any habit. The following excerpt is in response to Box 814: Questioning Your Fieldnotes (Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater 88). This prompt asks students to reflect about the notes they have taken from their fieldsite and to “check in on [their] research.” Sunstein and Chiseri- Strater recommend using these three questions throughout their fieldworking research to examine their positionality, what they are learning, and how their attitudes and ideas change throughout the project. I had students complete this prompt after visiting and observing their fieldsite twice, and I reflected about their learning goals using this prompt as well. What surprises me is that nearly 14% of my students wrote about goals not related to the habits of mind. Goals ranged from reading more to keeping journals to exercising and eating healthier. I find this surprising because the prompt specifically asked students to address the “Framework’s” Habits of Mind. What intrigues me about these goals is how students used almost the same definitions for these several different habits, particularly engagement, persistence, responsibility, and flexibility. Although we had read the “Framework” and discussed how those habits could be developed in our class and I would refer to the habits of mind in discussions and lectures about assignments, their individual interpretations of them did not always align with WPA’s. 14 This prompt asks writers to look over their notes, research, and data and think about three questions: What surprises me? What intrigues me? What disturbs me? 87 What disturbs me is that students stayed focused on their grade as a measure of learning. Indeed, despite instruction to not use grade as a focus for their goal, 21% of my participants still listed a specific grade as their learning goal. I think this shows how grades are embedded in this colonized institutional system. They are the mark of success and learning, when they don’t really show a student’s learning path at all. Maybe a student missed an assignment and didn’t pass the course, but through that missed assignment, they learned more about responsibility and what it means to be involved in one’s own learning. My notes remind me that there is an artificiality even in our service-learning focused classroom (Petraglia). Students are still participating in these projects for a grade, and that grade matters to them in a variety of ways. Even though I want them to embrace the messiness and discomfort of transformational learning, for many students, the main concern is a good grade (Mezirow; hooks). Students’ Expectations In order to practice reciprocity, I must also consider students’ expectations. I began each semester with discussions about what students expected from the class, and we talked about the ways our course might meet those expectations. They also wrote about expectations for college in one of their journals and in another journal they wrote about one thing they wanted to cover in our class. Most students focused on conventions and grammar as their expectations for the course, and they listed specific conventions and grammar topics for their one thing they wanted to learn: punctuation, citations, and specific genres like poetry, creative fiction, medical school applications, business papers, and resumes. Although they later noted that their initial expectations 88 were not fully met -- we never wrote that long research paper they expected -- they felt that they had learned a lot about writing, research, and the importance of stories. Brock St. Peter wrote, This class didn’t teach me about structured writing like I had expected. Instead I learned different ways to communicate with others and the importance of story telling. Throughout all of our projects there has been a theme of story telling and I think that ties in nicely with social inequalities because telling stories is a good way to bring awareness to these injustices. And another student explained, As for this specific course, being a writing class, I had expected essay after essay, something of which I'm not particularly fond of. However, after being in this class now, I was very pleasantly surprised by the assignments and projects that we have worked on. This class didn't just focus on writing a good essay, it focused on the different ways you can communicate your words not just on paper. It looked at the visual and audio aspects that stories have. Rachel also adds to the conversation: I thought there would be more formal paper writing about a topic and kind of just be like any other writing class where you just write and write papers all the time. But this class has shown me more than that. This class made me [. . .] think more broadly about the world and people not only at this university but just anyone I see and meet. Each of these students had “unmet expectations,” and yet they demonstrated flexibility and openness to thinking about writing as rhetorical and situated rather than as a set of rules or formulas (Downs and Wardle). Julia Verkest said, “If you think about it, writing is more than actually writing or typing words, writing is making your thoughts and ideas heard. Writing is taking the thoughts in your mind and giving insight to others, no matter how you decide to do so.” She grasped the impact of rhetorical situation in her final reflection. Despite their initial expectations being unmet, students learned some of the lessons I had hoped they would learn about writing: writing is situational; we compose in different genres; audience matters; stories are all we are. And they seemed prepared to 89 continue learning about writing and their own disciplines; this lifelong learning is reflected in the habits of mind which the “Framework” claims are “essential for success in college writing.” Relationality of Projects Since the assignments and the course structure are designed to foster habits of mind, I anticipated seeing more students expressing these habits of mind throughout their projects so that most students would have shown most, if not all, of these habits throughout their projects. However, only six students demonstrated, either implicitly or explicitly, every habit in at least one of their major assignments throughout the course. Furthermore, openness was represented in all four coded assignments by one student, and engagement was shown in all four coded assignments by three students. I had expected more students to reach postliminality, which I felt would be shown through more demonstrated habits of mind but particularly metacognition (Meyer and Land; Adler-Kassner, Majewski, and Koshner). Overall, metacognition was only mentioned explicitly or implicitly by 33 different students across assignments. Some of these 33 students practiced or referenced metacognition in multiple assignments from the learning narrative to the final reflections, but I would have anticipated seeing metacognition practiced by a higher number of students in at least one assignment. There are many possible reasons for this disconnect. First, even by the end of the semester, which is when students compose their final reflections and participated in reflection circles, some students were still trying to do “school” and to write what they thought I wanted to read (Freire). They were not willing to think critically by building relationships. Rather, they provided a summary of what we had done throughout the 90 semester. For example, Derek listed some of the course concepts, talked about the project we had done, and made a claim that he had learned how to do these concepts in the class. This traditional way of doing school, a banking system, is so ingrained that many students have a difficult time going beyond their past learning experiences. Often, it seems that students who had the most success in school are the ones who struggle with an engaged pedagogy (hooks). My class, my teaching, often makes some students uncomfortable, and they comment on evaluations and in reflections that they were “never really sure what [I] wanted.” I consider these comments as positive reflections, however, because they suggest that students were being asked to think critically by being engaged and responsible for their learning. I wanted them to practice creativity and flexibility in how their assignments were to be completed rather than giving them a set of directions or a formula to follow. Second, it is possible that students focused only on their learning goals in their final reflections rather than addressing several habits. For example, Kristopher Rygiel’s SMART learning goal was focused on engagement, and he wrote in his reflections that “I was engaged more during this semester than I was for my entire freshman year.” However, he defined engagement as attending class at least 80% of the time, which he had achieved. While I would be inclined to suggest that their goals were prioritized in their reflections, many students did not write or talk about their goals in their reflections at all, and even those who did mention their goals often talked about other habits as well. Kristopher is an example of this situation as well. Although Kristopher briefly mentioned his goal and explained how he met it, he spent more time discussing 91 openness, which was not part of his original SMART learning goal. Indeed, he began his reflection circles with this six word story: “Your writing can change tomorrow's perspective.” He continued exploring openness in some of the later prompts as well: As a student, I think we have the responsibility to open ourselves to new ideas, cultures, and ways of thinking. For most, college is a place where you experience many new things. They challenge your way of thinking and make use different perspectives. You should want to go and see controversial speakers. Every time you throw yourself out there, and challenge your way of thinking and understanding, you learn new things about the world, and more importantly, things about yourself. Although openness was never mentioned in Kristopher’s SMART learning goals, he spends the majority of his time focusing on this habit in his reflection, and he builds stronger relationships between himself and this habit that more closely align with how the “Framework” defines openness. Yet not every student felt that they “met” their goals in our course. For example, Justin said, “My goal was simple, to better involve myself in my education. This required that I talk to my professors more and actively participate. Honestly, in this class I failed my goal, I was too scared to participate, in other classes I feel I made progress, I went to office hours to ask clarifying questions.” I am not sure why he felt scared to participate or what would have helped him to become more engaged in our class, but these feelings may have prevented him from developing relationships that could have improved his engagement. Lauren Layden also noted that she did not meet her goals: My goal at the beginning of semester was to get out of my comfort zone and participate more in class. I don't think I made progress on that because I didn't talk as much as I wanted to, even though I spoke up a few times. I don't know how to fix this because this has been my goal for a very long time now and I still cannot achieve it. To change it, I think I need to start with finding a way of getting over my fear of public speaking first, and then I can start to participate in class more. 92 Like Justin, Lauren claimed to want to be more involved in her own learning by adding to conversations, but she felt limited by her fears. Furthermore, at times students would contradict their own claims, especially in regards to openness and engagement. For example, Matt E wrote, “So in all honesty I do not care at all about the inequalities I just care about the stories of overcoming those inequalities because those are worth writing about.” It seems that Matt E is limited in his understanding of inequalities and cannot quite get out of his own positionality or privileges. He only wants to hear the stories of those who “overcome inequality” and does not want to think about the institutions that perpetuate inequality. So, at first glance, he may seem open to others’ stories but only insofar as they tell a hero’s (colonized) tale. Meghan also seems contradictory about her openness to others’ perspectives. She reflected, We seem to only focus on ourselves and not care about what our fellow peers are involved in. I think that this project really opened up my eyes to see how other people are affected by these daily problems and how much we really are blinded to these situations. Stereotypes are also common with Ahmad and is a struggle he deals with everyday. His religion is also an inequality because it is the one that our government is most referred to. However, she later wrote that she has noticed “social issues” in our class when we had discussions about race and social inequality: I feel like people tend to use race as an excuse and a crutch when they feel less entitled to something or start to feel uncomfortable in these types of situations. I don't think that this is an efficient way to get your point across when you keep bringing everything back to social inequality and race. Like Matt E, Meghan also seems limited by her own positionality and privileges, and she does not want to fully consider others’ stories if they are too focused on institutions of social inequality. 93 Additionally, Daniel shows almost a distinct lack of engagement with his surprise and despair at the amount of work and effort most engineering students he has observed seem to put into their discipline/major. He wrote, I know that I too am an engineer, but I can’t possibly be this dull, can I? Even down to what they were wearing spoke volumes to me. Most of them didn’t care what they had on, no sense of if it made them look [good] or not. More so just if they could study in it or not. The vast majority of them, looked like they had just rolled out of bed, hair still in a mess and nothing but sweats on. He admits that he knows the discipline requires work but he wants to know when they get to have fun, too. Daniel seems to be separating himself from this subculture by expressing his concern that he isn’t “this dull.” He has this emic perspective of being part of the culture because he has declared an engineering major, but his observation shows his etic perspective that he doesn’t really fit in to the subculture that he has observed. This seeming contradiction may be what Fecho calls the “wobble.” He writes, “For wobble, you see, marks a liminal state, a state of transition. Where there is wobble, change is occurring” (Fecho 53). Meyer and Land explain that the liminal state is that first move from being made aware of disciplinary concepts to starting to internalize those concepts by making connections to oneself, and Fecho explains that moving into this liminal stage may be a “wobble” -- it is not going to be a smooth transition. Students may be trying to make connections that are not fully realized or that seem contradictory as they attempt to make sense of these new concepts, what Meyer and Land term the “mimicry” (27). Matt E, Meghan, and Daniel may be moving into a liminal state, wobbling all the way. They are practicing inquiry by questioning their own beliefs and ideas about these habits of mind. They are discovering new ways of being and thinking. And they are communicating these ideas in their work. Their reflections show their growth as they 94 grapple with course concepts and constellating these ideas with their previously held ideas. This wobble seems to be where transformative learning happens. Being Relational and Accountable Teaching requires relationality and accountability -- to our institutions, to our departments, to the curriculum, to our students, to ourselves. As teachers, we are always seeking to balance what happens in our classrooms with what we expect or anticipate and what our institution’s expect and anticipate. My institution expects me to teach three learning objectives in FYW: inquiry, discovery, and communication. And they expect me to teach these shared learning outcomes through five major assignments: learning narrative, cultural analysis, disciplinary and professional literacy, remix, and final reflection. How I get there is determined by me, though. For me, these objectives are best met through an Indigenous paradigm that values story and relationships (cultural rhetorics theory) which we practice through a service-learning assignment trajectory that fosters habits of mind for lifelong learning (transfer). If the work of FYW is to help foster these habits of mind by providing multiple ways for students to interact, express, and practice these habits, I felt that my students had these opportunities through the many stories we shared in a variety of formats. Yet, some students connected with only one or two habits throughout the semester; sometimes this habit was their goal but not always. So, one could ask why students didn’t “learn” all of the habits of mind. I think there are several possible reasons. First, perhaps I could have been more explicit of what I thought they were learning through these assignments. Or maybe I was more explicit about certain habits, 95 like openness and engagement, and did not specify the others enough in my teaching. Maybe I could have more directly connected habits of mind with instruction. Wilson argues that every person must actually build and constellate these relationships for themselves, and another person cannot “judge someone else’s conclusions, or even attempt to make conclusions” -- even though this section does speculate on those conclusions in order to practice relationality and accountability (94). For me, being relational and accountable means I must acknowledge my role as teacher in my students’ learning and accept some responsibility for what they have and have not learned, too, even while “allow[ing] students to assume responsibility for their choices” (hooks 19). This tension is part of being a communal learning community; the responsibility for learning is reciprocal because we are learning from one another. Relationships are not just built person to person, but we also have relationships with ideas, with the land and environment, and with the cosmos (Wilson). While I spend less time focusing on the land and environment and the cosmos -- although these topics do come up at times in class discussions -- I do spend a lot of time helping students build relationships with people in our class and with the ideas. Matt Myers shows how he was able to form relationships to course concepts by choosing a subculture that was relevant to him. He wrote, One focal point that I found throughout my boxes was that I always centered my research based off of interests that I have. All of the [FCA] boxes relate to something that I like or something that I find interesting. I found that while going through all of these of the boxes. I also concluded that while doing anything it is best to relate that thing to something that you enjoy or something that you find interesting in any way. The choices students were empowered to make throughout the course gave them agency and voice in their learning so that they could build relationships with their 96 communities. It allowed them to create their own spaces for learning. And some students, like Matt, recognized and embraced this space. Finally, we have to meet students where they are and remember their developmental stages, too. Some students will not be ready to move into metacognition or to fully accept responsibility for their own learning, while others will be ready. In his learning narrative, Colin Slon talked about what he learned in his senior choir class when a new teacher was hired. At first, he wrote that the students were very excited by the change and expected to do much better in competitions, but after a while, the class returned to their usual practices and did not improve at competitions. He commented, “Then it hit me. Our teacher had changed, but we hadn't. We only got out what we put in.” Colin demonstrates responsibility for his own “failure” to receive higher scores by acknowledging that their choir did not change and grow even though they had a new teacher; they were not putting in the work to improve. This responsibility shows that Colin is moving into a higher stage of development which should also affect his future growth and transfer by reminding him to always put effort into his learning because he is developmentally ready for this responsibility (Meyer and Land; Adler-Kassner, Majewski, and Koshnick). Students need to progress and learn at their own pace, when they are ready, which does not always coincide with the length of a semester. Sometimes the learning happens during this time, and other times that transformative moment may happen later in their lives. By developing habits of mind that prepare them for transformative learning moments throughout their lives, I believe that our FYW course is setting up all students for success. 97 Relationality to Space and Place As I discussed in chapter two, both of these case studies in their different iterations were about story and finding one’s space in this institutional place (De Certeau; Wilhelm et. al.). Teachers play an important role in connecting students with their institutions; they became the face, the voice, of the institution for their students because they worked so closely with their students. FYW classes, which often have lower class sizes than many introductory courses in larger universities, are especially important to helping students build relationships within the institution. At MSU and in many other US universities, almost every student takes FYW courses, and it is often one of the first courses students take in their academic trajectory. Godbee writes, “Identifying and partnering with internal campus collaborators can strengthen and help sustain campus-community partnerships over time, while also changing the educational contexts that block collaborative engagement” (70). In helping students think about the ways they make and find meaning (space) in their institutions (place) through service- learning coursework, I believe that I am helping students feel connected to the university. Furthermore, Wilhlem et. al. maintain, “Learning happens [. . .] when people engage in the significant meaning making practices of the communities in which they participate, including clubs, sports, religious and social organizations, and family or friends” (47). This focus on relationship-building is how I connect my pedagogy with cultural rhetorics theory. In his FCA, Reed explained that he connected with MSU through his fraternity, “Everybody deserves to be a part of a culture as it is important to share traditions and other qualities with a group of people.” And Mark found those connections with others 98 through school sports when he observed, “A central theme found through my studies is that common connections can be made through sports for fans.” Jennifer addressed and lamented this lack of connection in her FCA in one of the on-campus dormitories, too: The only thing in my research that disturbed me was the amount of people who don’t have very many connections if any with other people. There were so many people that I observed and talked to who didn’t really branch out and make any friends in the neighborhood, and that made me very upset and sad for them. Reed, Mark, and Jennifer value the relationships they can have with other students through organizations, sports, and even in the places they live on campus. They suggest that these relationships are how this place becomes a shared space, a communal place for learning. Later in his project, Reed added, When I observed my community during the fieldwork, I had stated that [there] are many subcultures that find themselves to be exclusive. Although this is true, students still come together and interact with one another even though they aren’t necessarily friends. It is quite a unique community as students from all walks of life come together under one university. The cultures of each other allow each individual to diversify himself that much more, which is why the college community is such a great place. Reed has identified both a smaller subculture (his fraternity) and larger culture (MSU) in which he feels connections. His relationships with these cultures are not always as “friends” but a shared purpose connects them. In exploring these cultures through his FCA, Reed was able to think about these connections and to strengthen his own bond with them. Madison Sambor also made connections with the spaces and places where she interacted through this project. She wrote, Personally, I am glad we did the service-learning project rather than a long essay. I like to be challenged and I think that this project challenged us in a 99 different way. Professor Prielipp should continue to use this assignment in future classes because this project not only helps us as students but it helps us integrate into the community. Through this project, I connected and communicated with a group of people that I was unfamiliar with and I couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity. Students not only built relationships with each other and the course ideas, but they also felt more connected to their communities. They had a deeper understanding and awareness of some of the issues in their college community. Whether that deeper understanding leads to future active engagement depends on the student’s personal development (Land and Mayer; Adler, Majewski, and Koshnick). Howe et. al. also acknowledge the importance of scaffolding service-learning by considering students’ developmental stages when designing projects and assignments. It is a scaffold I try to follow in my sequence of assignments where the first few assignments have more structured expectations and genres and students begin to have more choices about their rhetorical situation as they advance through the assignment trajectory. But this scaffolding model is also present in service-learning. Howe et. al. describe a three-phased model for incorporating service-learning in courses. For many first year courses, they recommend an “exposure” model where the instructor takes the primary lead, and students have limited access to the community, often in a one-time capacity. In my class, this exposure phase is practiced in our FCA projects. The second phase is “capacity building.” In this phase, students have a stronger commitment and involvement with the decision-making and the instructor facilitates service-learning, but there is still mostly indirect contact with the community. This second phase is where my case studies operate, particularly through the remix project. The third phase is “responsibility,” and here the instructor is a coach or mentor for service-learning. In this phase, students are initiating and coordinating most of the projects and have a high 100 level of commitment and involvement with the community. While some students may move into the third phase of service-learning in the future, our semester duration limits our ability to be fully committed to our communities. Metacognition as a Process Metacognition is often practiced as reflection in writing courses and in service- learning more generally. The CWPA “Framework” defines metacognition as “the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge.” Most service-learning scholars and practitioners acknowledge the role of reflection in this pedagogy (Eyler and Giles; Deans; Wilhelm et. al.; Adler- Kassner, Crooks, and Watters.). Eyler and Giles maintain, “Learning occurs through a cycle of action and reflection” (8). They also suggest that metacognition includes critical thinking and problem solving, which they argue are central to service-learning pedagogy. Wilhelm et. al. further explains that this reflection is part of service to self. They write, reflection activities create a bridge between service and educational content and allow students to study and interpret service [. . .] reflection provides service to the learning self, which leads to service to other aspects of self as students acquire the habits of mind to be self-aware. (42) Service to self is one of the first levels of service-learning, according to Wilhelm et. al, and this level is where students develop a dynamic mindset, or habits of mind. In order to be able to move into service to others (peers, school, community, and world), students first need to make personal connections to their learning and to their community. In my course, the learning narrative helps students begin to think about their own experiences so they can then “recognize that they are part of something 101 larger” (Wilhelm et. al. 31). They continue to examine and analyze their own relationships to their communities in the FCA project, but this project also helps them start to move their learning into a larger cultural context. Like the students in my case studies, Eyler and Giles found that “service-learning students have identified deeper understanding and application as two of the most important ways that their service-learning differs from traditional coursework” (63-64). The learning itself becomes a “habit” or way of thinking and doing because their knowledge is “actively constructed by the learner” -- openness, engagement, responsibility, persistence, curiosity, creativity, flexibility (Eyler and Giles 64; CWPA). In service-learning, teachers are not depositing information for students to memorize and repeat back to the teachers. In service-learning, students are active agents in their own learning, and teachers are learning alongside their students. My Growth Service-learning has helped me become a better teacher. This pedagogy has provided me with ways to incorporate disciplinary knowledge with real-life rhetorical situations that help us build relationships with each other, with these ideas, and with our communities. Before implementing service-learning, I often taught writing as distinct “units,” and there would rarely be a connection or scaffolding between the units. With service-learning, I am cognizant of how each assignment builds and develops the skills we will need throughout the course. I find that I practice the “Framework’s” habits of mind more through a service- learning pedagogy, too. I feel more curious about my students and their interests, and I ask them more questions through discussions and in journal prompts about their lives. I 102 become more open to the stories they tell. Often, their stories about college are not like mine, and in the spirit of embracing this engaged pedagogy, I share my stories of college, too (hooks 21). I feel engaged in learning more and in crafting creative learning opportunities that will engage my students. I feel responsible for helping my students persist, which also helps sustain my interest. Service-learning is not linear or neat or predictable, so this pedagogy also helps me to be flexible. I reflect more often about the learning process and am constantly adjusting lessons and activities to further learning. This dynamic mindset allows me to continue to learn and grow alongside my students every semester. Students’ Growth Fecho writes, “[W]hen we don’t allow ourselves to engage the lives of our students in a learning process that connects substantively to their experiences -- we miss opportunities to help ourselves and our students to see how the cultures we bring to our learning not only change how we learn but change as we learn” (47). Service- learning can help students connect their experience with their learning in real-world situations that are relevant to them. The projects from these case studies especially enable these connections because they are student-centered and student-selected: we focus on stories of college communities, and students choose the communities or subcultures they want to work with. In reflections circles, this personal relevance was often mentioned as their biggest connection to the course learning goals. These projects helped students build relationships. And this learning happened in nontraditional ways, changing how we learn. 103 As hooks points out, though, there are always “‘resisting’ students who [do] not want to learn new pedagogical processes, who [do] not want to be in a classroom that differ[s] in any way from the norm” (9). In a classroom discussion, Gurnaz Wairach commented that he did not think we had actually done “service-learning” because we never volunteered anywhere. Gurnaz was resistant to changing how we learn because the way we were practicing service-learning did not meet his expectations and definition. However, he later wrote, Even though I briefly touched on the race issues in my previous boxes, I feel like I haven’t talked about it enough. That was the main focal point for me in picking this group. I felt like the with this country being in the vulnerable place that it is right now, it was important for me to step out of my comfort zone and see what people of different cultures think about it and what their thoughts are and how they think we can fix the issue that is present in this country. We may not have done service-learning in the ways he was familiar with from his past experiences, but he found connections that were personal and relevant to him throughout the course all the same. He became engaged in the learning process. Bryce Gimmarro also discussed how service-learning changed him and helped him grow as a learner, “What surprised me? How much this project has made me think about what’s going on around me on a daily basis.” Not only is Bryce expressing openness and curiosity in this FCA response, but he also demonstrates one of the goals of this critical service-learning project. He has opened himself to paying more attention to everyday life and to taking a more active role when he sees social inequality on campus. He continues to explain, “Having these privileges help me to see that other people do not have the same opportunities that I do, and some things can be harder for certain people with different backgrounds.” I do not think Bryce would have made these connections if he had not participated in service-learning because he would not have 104 learned to “pay more attention” by simply completing discrete writing assignments that did not require him to observe, research, and participate in his learning. Story as Critical Service-learning Story is central to my teaching because story is my ontology and my epistemology: we know truth and reality through stories, our lived experiences. Through these stories, we build relationships by constellating our experiences, our truths. In practicing an Indigenous research (and teaching) paradigm, my ontology and epistemology guide my methodology and axiology, so story is how I research and how I teach. I began planning a service-learning focused FYW course while reading Wilhelm et. al. in the Red Cedar Writing Project Summer Institute. As I read more about service- learning, I was drawn to the definitions offered by Wilhelm et. al. and Mitchell. I wanted our service to create social change, to inspire activism, and I knew that stories would be part (or all) of our service because, as Smith writes, “[T]he need to tell our stories remains the powerful imperative of a powerful form of resistance” (35). Service-learning has a history of being a colonizing pedagogy by perpetuating them-us narratives and focusing on those in power serving marginalized populations (Eby; Gilbride-Brown; Gorski; Mitchell; Shabazz and Cooks). Stories help decolonize service-learning by focusing on multiple perspectives rather than how we can “serve” or help others. Stories as service-learning give voice and agency to the community as students work with (and, in these case studies, by) the communities to tell the stories that they want told (Monberg). 105 Another criticism of service-learning is that it lacks academic rigor and has more qualitative than quantitative research to support its efficacy (Kiely; Eyler and Giles; Deans). And I respond, what is wrong with qualitative data? Why is it less valued? Valuing story in my research means that stories, qualitative data, are essential to discussing the impact of these case studies. Students’ stories about learning mean more than quantitative data like grades because what they think about their learning and the ways they process that learning are more likely to have an impact on future learning, on transfer, than the numerical or letter grade they received at the end of a course. While I would like to have seen more than 33 of my participants reach these higher levels of liminality as shown by metacognition in their submitted work, the impact of this course is not limited to these numbers. Here is what my students have to say about service-learning in our class: Alyssa wrote, Another thing about service learning that I like is the fact that it wasn’t traditional service learning. It was something that we could use inside our college community. Something that would maybe our own org or a org that we think highly of. It wasn’t us going out to feed the homeless or collecting money or boys and girls club. Something that everyone does on a regular basis. It was something I actually enjoyed doing and not just doing it because it’ll look good on a resume or because it’ll benefit me, but actually because I wanted to do it. This also help me bond with some members of my group. This is because I actually met people that I had something in common with outside of academic learning. And Student A explained: Before the remix project and the discussions in class about inequalities that exists, I was very unaware of all the things happening around me. After learning that they do in fact exists and doing projects that highlight some of the inequalities I feel like some responsibilities that I have towards these inequalities include speaking about them and letting people know that they do exist. Which is exactly what the facing project did in our class. We were able to tell the [stories] of many different people and backgrounds and show that not everyone has the same privileges or experiences. It's important to know this, because [without] 106 knowing you will also not know about the social issues that exist and there for nothing can be done to fix anything. These students’ learning will continue beyond the course: Ethan N reflected, I was at the Women's March, I was at the Climate March, I was at the Air Port when Trump banned people from certain countries. Doing all of this I was helping give a voice to social inequalities and justices. This class and [its] projects influenced me and made me a better person by making me engage with the community and a school. Hannah wrote, “Looking forward, next year I want to get involved in some kind of sexual violence/safe space program here on campus. A week or two ago they had this Take Back the Night event on campus and it really struck me, especially in a time where MSU community members are facing certain charges.” Manekya Sumithrarachchi added, I will be working for AOP this summer and I want to try to encourage incoming students to learn about the stories of others around them that are different than them, to better learn and understand their situation and difficulties. I think that this could possibly decrease the number of people that judge others. Their reflections show their learning and their commitment to action, to social justice. Freire writes, “On the contrary, reflection -- true reflection -- leads to action” (52). It is this action and question that allow service-learning to be transformational, according to Eyler and Giles (133). And this inquiry is what students participated in during their final reflections: they asked questions about the communities they researched and they talked about college in terms of access (financial and physical), academics, athletics, and race. An overarching theme of all their stories, in both semesters, was fitting in and finding that space in their community for their voice and their ideas, to build those relationships that connected them to their community. Wilhelm et. al. suggest, “When students are activist learners in conversations about school culture, they can move from complaint to commitment” (67). While my pilot project case study did not fully realize this activism like I had hoped, my spring semester Facing College project did invite 107 students to move from “complaint to commitment” as they explored issues around their college communities through writing. The stories they told and shared have the purpose of creating social change by recognizing and valuing others’ perspectives. These students and those they shared their stories with through the First Year Writing Conference and on our Facing Project website will be more aware of these issues, too, and maybe they will also be inspired to move from “complaint to commitment,” to action. These students’ stories, their reflections, are the impact of service-learning that tells stories and builds relationships. These case studies began with service to self and moved into service to peers and school (Wilhelm et. al.). We worked up to Howe et. al.’s second phase of service-learning by giving students more choice and more involvement in their learning throughout the course. Our partners were indirect, but they helped guide us by providing models for telling stories. We learned habits of mind through these stories and these relationships. Maya clarifies, “This class had a strong focus on being a whole rather than just staying in small groups. Every day we were encouraged to have group discussions, talk with someone new, and maintain an open mindset to all the different perspectives each of us brought to the classroom.” And their reflections suggest that this learning will transfer to future writing situations and, perhaps more importantly, their contributions as democratic citizens. This potential exists because these service-learning projects tell stories that build relationships. Wilhelm et. al. explain, If relationship building is the essence of social change, then large and small projects that consciously cultivate joy, love, caring, and the creation of possibilities for the self and others are implicit steps toward transformations of people whose ways of thinking and acting in the world are done in consideration of the greater good. (78) 108 Wilson proclaimed in his talk at MSU, “You are in a relationship with knowledge so you can benefit your community.” In these case studies, building relationships within one’s community is the engagement or critical service-learning. Because the process of the service-learning, the engagement, is the product. Wilhelm et. al. also argue that “the best service-learning projects are, at the core, about relationship building, just as we believe that all teaching and learning are relational and occur in and through relationships” (78). Developing relationships is what FYW and learning should be about, because it is through our relationships to each other, to ideas, to the land and environment, and to the cosmos that we become curious, open, engaged, creative, persistent, responsible, flexible, and reflective. Research Limitations One limitation to this particular research project is a lack of demographic data about my participants. I did not think demographic data was relevant to the projects at the time, but this data could provide some of the relationship building through establishing past connections and experiences (Wilson). He writes, “Shared relationships allow for a strengthening of the new relationship” (Wilson 84). On our first day of class, Jennifer commented that she and her mom had noticed on her course schedule that I had the same last name as her high school basketball coach -- who just happened to be my brother-in-law. While I do not know that this small shared relationship helped her to feel more engaged in the course, it did give us something to chat about occasionally which I think strengthened our relationship. This connection helped her to feel like she “knew” someone in this large institute, even though we had never met before our class. Perhaps I could have made more connections with my 109 students by gathering more demographic data -- albeit maybe not as coincidental as the connection with Jennifer. Another limitation is time. This course is only 15 weeks so it is difficult to measure long-term learning and growth. A longitudinal study would be needed to truly understand how these students transfer knowledge of writing and habits of mind and to learn about how these students have continued to participate in social change. As discussed earlier, my positionality and the institutional power structure are another limitation to engaged pedagogy and service-learning. Although I try to limit the risk of low grades through a process-based approach to grading, final assessments are part of my institutional obligation. These assessments may limit students’ willingness to take bigger risks or to try new ideas. Additionally, students may participate in service- learning throughout the course only because it is built into my course. They are not voluntarily seeking social justice and change to institutional systems, but my class invites them to begin thinking about these things in hopes that one day they might voluntarily work towards social justice. Implications for Future Study There has been a lot of research on community partners -- selecting, researching, working with, benefits -- but this study has the opportunity to provide another definition of community partners. In an interview I had with Kelsey Timmerman, the co-founder of the Facing Project, we discussed his organization’s relationship, or partnership, with ours. He does not see his organization as a direct partner with the communities that participate in the Facing Project; rather, he sees the Facing Project as a model for communities to use to form their own partnerships. This discussion may 110 have implications for institutional-organizational partnerships, or partnerships that draw on organizational models but are not direct community partners. Who are students serving in service-learning? What are the benefits to organizational partners like the Facing Project? As Wilson writes, “It is the forming of healthy and strong relationships that leads us to healthy and strong researchers” (86). It would be relevant to study how those partnerships form when using organizational models such as the Facing Project as indirect partners. Georgia Christodoulou offered another suggestion for continued research and changes to these case studies: The facing college project was one of my favorite assignments we did this semester. While we got the story from the individual and are portraying it from their point of view, I would have liked, in this class to learn more about points of view. For example, how would the individual portrayed the story, how would a different group portray the story, how would a professional portray the story? On a college campus, you often hear stories that go around the campus and you hear so many different sides and I want to learn the effects different types of portrayals has on the original story and what the person thinks of it. Her suggestions would allow us to think about rhetorical situation more in depth and how stories are affected by who tells them and the ways they are told. A longitudinal study of participants from these case studies would also help add to the research and the conversation by tracking transfer across time. How have these students integrated habits of mind in their continued learning? How have these service- learning projects affected their lives? What relationships have they maintained? “Through maintaining accountability to the relationships that have been built, an increased sense of sharing common interests can be established” (Wilson 86). And a longitudinal study would allow us to reconnect and to maintain accountability to these past relationships. 111 Finally, I hope this research helps other FYW instructors think about the ways they can use writing and stories to incorporate service-learning in their own courses. If story is all we are, as King states in every chapter of his book, then we need to teach story -- listening to and telling stories through authentic, relevant situations like those offered through service-learning. When that service-learning is focused on stories, relationships, and communities, we provide more opportunities for our students to develop habits of mind about writing and learning that are more likely to transfer to future academic, professional, and personal situations throughout their lives. Dear colleagues, Conclusion I appreciate your time and attention to our stories -- mine and my students -- throughout this project, and I hope that you have found some pieces to carry with you in your own teaching and learning journey. This story is neither a sacred story nor one with a moral or lesson (Wilson). Rather, this story demonstrates Wilson’s third definition – an experiential story – and, as King proclaims, “Do with it what you will” (89). Smith explains that theory “helps make sense of reality” (38). And Maracle adds that story is theory; theory is practice – which means story is a practice, too, and this story, this dissertation, demonstrates that relationality by putting students’ voices beside scholars as equals. We are working together to build a theory, to tell the story, to share the practice of our experiences with service-learning. I have argued that a student- centered, engaged pedagogy leads to transformational learning through development of habits of mind. In an engaged pedagogy, the teacher and students build the class together; in engaged research, the teacher and students build theory. We – my students 112 and I – are doing that work in this dissertation by keeping their voices, their writing, central to the story, to the theory, to the practice. At the same time, every student and every class has its own story. These multiple truths and realities mean that every story is different – every section, every semester, every year. This story can be retold, but it will never be the same. So what do I hope you take from this story? I am making a case for story as a way of practicing service-learning from a cultural rhetorics lens. I want to show that there are different ways to think about service-learning and offer one way to incorporate it into our classrooms. I want you to think more broadly about what it means to have a partner or ways to “do service.” As I said in the Introduction, I did not start out my professional life as an educator, a teacher, but I have stuck with this career path because I believe in teaching’s power to be an act of resistance when we practice pedagogies that engage and challenge our students (hooks 10). I believe critical service-learning through stories has that power to engage and challenge, and these case studies suggest it as well. When my students do great things in the future, I will feel like I had a part in helping them grow and develop as learners. I leave you with one final lesson from my student: P.S. “Unheard stories become a new perspective.” – Sara 113 CHAPTER 3.5: NICHOLAS HARDING’S STORY In his final reflection during the spring semester, Nicholas (Nick) Harding wrote, “Writing Ahmad's story had a much larger impact on me than I [sic] had originally thought it would. Until I did the interview with him I was completely unaware that discrimination and hate were even present on this campus.” Through his interview with Ahmad, Nick felt he learned openness and responsibility towards others. He continues in his reflection, Ahmad and I talked about this after the interview and he voiced his opinion on how frustrating it is that people will judge him without knowing anything about his beliefs. Although there are a lot of other reasons racism still exists, I feel like this is the most important and easiest to correct. Ahmad's story really made me do a lot of thinking, and I really enjoyed that. This chapter is Nick’s narrative of Ahmad’s story for Facing College, our remix project. Ahmad’s Story (as told to and written by Nicholas Harding)15 Growing up as a Muslim in Dearborn, Michigan, I often struggled with my Identity. In a way, I felt like a minority, despite living in a community with people who were just like myself. While my neighborhood had a large Arab population, there were numerous cultural divides. Many residents in Dearborn immigrated from various Middle Eastern countries over the years resulting in the formation of segregated cliques. Also, the divide between the Shia and Sunni sects kept the primarily Muslim community from being truly united. Even living in the broader United States I often felt like an outsider because of my race and the intolerance I witnessed regularly. When I visited Jordan, the country from which my family immigrated, I also felt like an outsider for being an 15 Watch the digital video of Ahmad’s Story here: https://mediaspace.msu.edu/media/t/1_c84fulpn 114 American. Sadly, I did not feel truly accepted in either my own neighborhood or my country of origin. I found myself ultimately thinking “what am I?” I carried this search for my identity with me in my journey to Michigan State University. My interest in MSU began in high school when I realized I had a desire for independence, but still felt the need to remain close to home. This transition was not as easy as I had imagined it would be. During the first few months of college, I often tried to hang out with the White crowd and hide my Arab identity so I could more easily fit in. While trying to fit in, I held steadfast to my faith. I continued intrinsic practices like going to the mosque even though it was not always easy. Living in Hubbard Hall, the trip to the mosque was quite a hike and the lack of prayer rooms in the dorms made it difficult to find a quiet place to pray. Despite continued obstacles, I managed to maintain my traditions and never became disconnected with my religion. Though initially I had little support when it came to practicing my beliefs, I had a tolerant Christian roommate who welcomed productive dialogues, and I was grateful for him. My Resident Assistant and other students on my floor were also very tolerant of my religion. Unfortunately, not everyone was so tolerant. The first instance of intolerance I experienced was with a group of friends at Bubble Island in East Lansing. I was with a diverse group of friends with a wide range of race and heritage. We were simply hanging out and talking when a group of three White males entered the restaurant and began taunting us. They chanted, “USA”, “USA,” and yelled “Get the F*** out of our country and go back to Saudi Arabia.” This was a really gut wrenching experience for me and it resonated in my thoughts for some time. On another occasion, I was playing in a glow in the dark dodgeball game hosted by a student organization. I was walking off 115 the court after the game as a fellow player made a subtle remark that at first, I didn’t think anything of. He said, “Now it’s time for the real Americans to play”. It later occurred to me that he made this remark to imply I was not a ‘real’ American because of my ethnicity. Other instances included someone pouring a beer in the hood of my sweatshirt, and being rejected for a job when the only explanation provided was because of my beard. The ridicule got to a point that I almost did not want people to know I was Arab. This all changed one day when I found a support system in the Black community. They were friendly, and open to my beliefs. They liked me for who I was. I then began to embrace my Arab identity. To be honest, I stopped giving a shit about what people thought of me. I sought to become more involved in the Muslim and Arab communities on campus. I became a member of the MSA, an organization for Muslim students. I also decided to join the Divine Nine fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha, which is historically black. I am now continuously proud of my roots and beliefs. I wear the Palestinian flag on my hat, and don my stylish Kufi’s with pride. These are the communities that have supported me throughout my journey here at Michigan State, and the ones I continue to want to be a part of. I also felt the impact of being a First-Generation college student. I genuinely did not have anyone to help me make the transition out of high school or prepare for intolerances I might face on campus. Having someone to give me advice on things such as the importance of getting involved in groups that shared my beliefs could have immensely impacted my happiness in the first few years. As a graduating senior, this remains a major regret of mine. 116 With all this being said, I have big aspirations in life after my time at Michigan State comes to an end. The recent election has made me think about the institutions in our country, especially because I will be in Washington D.C. studying public policy. The growing amount of public expression toward the Arab community and recent immigration ban have made me realize that there is a need for Arab people in leadership positions within our government. I aspire to one day fill one of these positions. My dream is to be the U.S. Ambassador to Palestine. I have family that are still living in the Middle East. They got out of the dangerous areas in time but still live under poor conditions, and in the case of my cousin, wrongful imprisonment. There are tons of people like my family who are living in unstable conditions and cannot come to our great country due to recent legislation. Intolerance seems to be growing in this country and my story is a testament to that. My hope for everyone that reads my story is to seek education. Go out and learn about Islam and what it stands for. Be tolerant, or at least be informed. Don’t let the media and public misconceptions lead you to bigotry. As for me, I hope to one day hold a position where I can have an impact on this country. I am a Muslim American of Arab Heritage and I am proud, and although my time as a undergrad student is coming to an end, my story is just beginning. 117 APPENDICES 118 IRB Consent Form Fall 2016/Spring 2017 Appendix A I will be analyzing the coursework from this section of WRA 101 at MSU for my doctoral dissertation research. This research will look at how service-learning is a cultural rhetorics pedagogy and will seek to understand how this practice can strengthen students’ connections to first-year writing coursework, their individual interests, and their institutions. You will not be asked to complete any additional work for this course, and your privacy will be maintained. You may choose to opt out of the research by notifying me in writing that you do not wish to have your class materials included in the research study at any point during the semester without penalty. If you have any questions, you may contact my committee chair, Dr. Trixie Smith at smith1254@msu.edu or 517.432.3610. Please complete the following form to indicate your acknowledgment of this notification and to indicate your interest in continued collaboration on this research. Name: Signature: Date: For coursework, I would like my name to be: Included in full (first and last name) First name only Please use a pseudonym (preferred pseudonym: , if left blank, Sarah Prielipp will select a suitable pseudonym to protect your privacy) 119 As part of this research, I would like to interview students in Spring 2017 about their experiences in this course. This research is voluntary and the subject can withdraw or refuse to answer any particular question without penalty. Please indicate your interest and contact information below as appropriate. No, do not contact me for future collaboration. Yes, I am interested in participating in an interview about my experiences. My preferred contact information is: Email: Phone: Thank you for your consideration, and I am looking forward to working with you this semester! Sarah Prielipp Contact Information: (phone) (email) 120 Fieldworking Cultural Analysis Prompts, or Boxes Appendix B These are summaries of the prompts from Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research by Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater with the changes that I presented to students. I selected several prompts each semester to help students research their selected subculture. While there are 34 prompts or “boxes” in the textbook, I tried to select those prompts which seemed to enhance our service-learning projects by fostering a deeper understanding of the students’ chosen subcultures, or partners. In order to maintain a cultural rhetorics approach, I wanted students to choose subcultures to which they belonged. Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 ● Box 1, p. 5-6 ○ This prompt is a prewriting task that helps students identify subcultures to which they may belong by thinking about some of the details about this subculture including rituals, insider phrases, and behaviors. ● Box 2, p. 13 ○ This task asks students to think about an “insider behavior” and try to describe that behavior for someone who has never experienced it -- an outsider. ● Box 3, p. 18-22 ○ In this prompt, students seek a secondary resource, a newspaper article, about their subculture. 121 ● Box 4, p. 61-62 ○ This prompt shows students different methods for exploratory writing and is used to help them think about some of the subcultures to which they already belong. ● Box 6, p. 78-79 ○ This prompt teaches students how to take double-entry notes for observations, and I add to the prompt by having students observe their subculture at a fieldsite at least once. ● Box 8, p. 88-89 ○ This prompt requires students to look over their notes and articles and to answer three questions: What surprised me?; What intrigued me?; and What disturbed me? ● Box 10, p. 113-115, or Box 11, p. 117-118 ○ Both of these prompts ask students to think about their own positionality and privilege. Students could decide which prompt they preferred to respond to. ● Box 15, p. 158-161 ○ Students were asked to find an online space where their subculture shared news, information, stories, etc. and to think about how this space worked rhetorically. Who are the gatekeepers? Does it appeal to insiders or outsiders? In what ways? ● Box 16, p. 168-170 122 ○ This box asks students to describe a place using sensory details. I specifically asked them to describe their fieldsite or another important place to their subculture that they remembered. ● Box 17, p. 175-178 ○ This box also asks students to describe their fieldsite with sensory details by looking through their notes and analyzing what details they had recorded during their observations. ● Box 19, p. 193-194 ○ In this prompt, I asked students to map their fieldsite -- either with words or as a visual map. 123 Appendix C These are the Reflection Circle prompts which students answered in written journals in the last few weeks of the semester. Students responded to these questions in class and as homework, then we discussed their responses in small groups and as a whole class. Reflection Circle 1 Post your six word story about our community. Reflection Circle 2 Please respond to the following prompt in 200 to 400 words. Tell a story of how you saw social or cultural inequalities in your community service- learning experience -- this can be anything from the project. Why might these inequalities exist? If there are no inequalities obvious to you, what might explain that? Please answer the prompts below in 200-400 words. Reflection Circle 3 After having served for almost a full semester in the college community, what responsibilities (if any) do you have to address the social inequalities or social issues you may be witnessing in the community setting? Second, review your semester goal (in Eli Review). Do you feel you made progress on your goal? Why or why not? How would you change your goal? 124 WORKS CITED 125 WORKS CITED Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED. July 2009. Lecture. 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