ERIC Number: EJ1120329
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2011
Pages: 19
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-2159-9823
EISSN: N/A
English Departments' Relationships to Community: An Experiment at the Heart of Disciplinary Identity
Duffey, Suellynn
Journal of Public Scholarship in Higher Education, v1 p47-65 2011
English departments is not uniform. Many departments still exist with traditional notions of inquiry and curriculum and ignore community engagement or understand it in narrow ways. For a variety of reasons, writing courses and compositionists more easily than literature scholars and creative writers can embrace current concepts of community engagement. Common in undergraduate writing classes as service-learning, community engagement is less common in graduate courses, where the heart of disciplinary and departmental identity is, by and large, more directly challenged. This article offers an example of one graduate seminar that involved students in community engagement in a relatively traditional English department. This course, "Sites of Writing," engaged literature students in scholarship totally unfamiliar to them and involved them in community inquiry. While the evolution of one discipline does not mirror exactly the evolution of others, significant parallels exist, particularly among scholars interested in community engagement and its close alliance to cultural studies; readers in disciplines besides English will, no doubt, trace patterns in their own disciplines similar to the ones described here.
Descriptors: English Departments, School Community Relationship, Graduate Students, Seminars, Literature, Scholarship, Student Research, Service Learning, Literacy, Writing (Composition), Change Agents
Missouri Campus Compact, Missouri State University. 901 S. National Avenue, Springfield, MO 65897; Tel: 417-836-3104; Fax: 417-836-3105; -e-mail: jpshe@missouristateledu; Web site: http://jpshe.missouristate.edu
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Ohio; Missouri (Saint Louis)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A