Keep Writing Weird: A Call for Eco-Administration and Engaged Writing Programs

Influenced by ecological theories of writing, the author proposes a new model for writing curriculum design and community-based projects. The article provides a project of the Writing Initiative for Service and Engagement at the University of Colorado Boulder as an example of programmatic engagement with a community issue using an ecological methodology.

One of the most important questions community writing and rhetoric scholars can ask is how to better produce, teach, and theorize writing to help our communities catalyze change at the behavioral and policy levels. One theoretical strand in rhetoric and writing studies that may get us toward an answer is “ecological writing studies,” which analyzes the complex, dynamic, networked systems within which writing and rhetoric function and the circulation and remix of texts and ideas within those systems (Dobrin; Edbauer; Ridolfo and DeVoss; Seas; Gries).¹ I will suggest here in broad strokes a possible direction for community writing scholars, practitioners, and administrators to explore further. In the second half of the article, I offer an example of a writing program that is using ecological writing theories to drive its curricular design and to facilitate communitywide writing about local food.

Although community writing—which comprises genres such as service-learning, community literacy, community publishing, community-based research, advocacy writing, and ethnography—necessarily studies the public nature of writing and what it does in the world, little scholarship in community writing addresses through ecological methodologies the hyper-networked, collaborative, circulatory, and remixed nature of community-engaged writing that comes out of writing programs as it works toward measurable change within a community. A question that I’d like to begin to unpack here concerns how community writing practitioners can use theories of distributed, networked writing and ecological systems to help create engaged writing curricula and programs.

In his study of ecologies of writing, Sidney Dobrin challenges his readers to reconsider what writing is, reprimanding the field of rhetoric and composition for its “regrettable failure to imagine what comes next” (3). He rightly claims that “there is an (ethical) imperative … that demands that work be pursued that theorizes writing beyond the disciplinary limit-situation” (3). Although he does not specifically connect what he calls “postcomposition” to community writing, I want to make that connection explicitly, though for different ends. I’m going to push back against Dobrin’s provocative declaration that “[t]o move postcomposition requires that administration be abandoned as a useful part of the field” (4). While I appreciate his arguments against some of the bureaucratic strands of WPA scholarship, I want to do here exactly what he argues against—to attempt to ground his theories about complex ecologies in practical application that relates to programmatic and curricular design. In going against his behest to abandon scholarship on administration, however, I actually hope to make an argument more aligned than not with his call to move beyond the logistical, institutional focus of much WPA scholarship, and to think more about how writing curricula function as nodes within larger community writing ecologies.

How can activist rhetoricians and community writing practitioners use the related theories of hyper-networked writing (Dobrin), rhetorical ecologies (Edbauer), contagion of ideas (Seas), rhetorical velocity (Ridolfo and DeVoss), and circulation (Gries) to help us design engaged, ecological writing curricula and programs? If we take seriously these fascinating theories that reconceive the very nature of writing, must we not reconceive, as well, the very nature of how writing programs and curricula are designed, their purposes, and their outputs? When we assess our students’ community-engaged writing or create community-based writing projects, we often fail to account for the very complicated ecologies in which our students’ texts function, circulate, and can be transformed beyond the original authorial intent. Although since the social turn in composition studies, we as a field have embraced the importance that our students write in context, a concept that has helped community writing scholars and practitioners to justify the benefit of engaged writing courses, we often lose track of the students’ writing once it is produced. In other words, in a service-learning course...