Recording Life Stories: A Service Learning Project for the Composition Classroom

We’re here today to share with you a service learning project that we’ve integrated into our advanced composition courses. This project—what we call the Life Story Project—asks students to record interviews with local community members and design exhibits based on their life stories. Students also deposit the interviews and transcripts in an archive at Central Methodist University’s Smiley Memorial Library. We had three goals in mind when we designed this project. First, we wanted to record and preserve the life stories of community members in Central Missouri. Second, we hoped to strengthen the connection between university and community through civic engagement. Last, we wanted to provide students with unique opportunities to develop their communication skills. Today’s presentation will show you how we met those goals, guiding you through the major steps we took in designing and integrating the Life Story Project. We’ll also reflect on some of the challenges we faced along the way. In sharing our project and course materials with you, we hope you’ll be able to design a similar project for your own writing courses.

We’d like to start with some artifacts that our students produced in our advanced writing classes. We have an abstract painting done by a student after he listened to a story of his father’s, a video collage of wedding photos set to period-appropriate music and snippets of voice recordings recreating a moving story of how a local woman fell in love, and a canvas on which students painted icons representing important moments in the life story of a community leader. Likewise, we have a mock sash covered in merit badges created to help tell the story of a former boy scout, a briefcase that opens to show a photo collage representing the law school experiences of a student’s mother, and playing cards inscribed with a local woman’s reminiscences of familial bonding over games of canasta.

Admittedly, these aren’t the kind of artifacts people typically associate with writing courses. Instead of having students simply write essays about a range of topics, we wanted assignments that would put questions about the nature of composition and representation at the fore. In this class, we wanted students to explore what it means to represent ourselves and others. We asked them to parse whether or not representation need be strictly and traditionally textual. And we encouraged them to think about the connections between representation and truth, or representations and truths. What is the meaning in a person’s story about themselves? How can we find that meaning? Is it possible for us to convey it to others? What is lost in translation? What is gained?

With the Life Story Project, students must grapple with these sorts of questions because they’re asked to not only record an interview with a community member but also to create an exhibit that showcases the essential meanings of that story. It is through these meaningful exchanges with the community—the student’s recording of a life story and composing an exhibit for that story—that this oral history project becomes a service learning project. That is to say, in this process, there is a genuine exchange, a collaboration, that is mutually enriching and produces a positive learning experience.

The opening passages from our assignment sheet for the Life Story Project immediately introduces students to the spirit of service learning:

Your major project this semester is to collect the life story of a local community member. What is a life story? A life story is a type of oral history, a recorded interview in which a person reflects on his or her entire life. Or, as Robert Atkinson puts it, “A life story is the story a person chooses to tell about the life he or she has lived, told as completely and honestly as possible, what is remembered of it, and what the teller wants others to know of it, usually as a result of a guided interview by another” (8). Your task this semester...