Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love

4. Writing Within and Beyond the Curriculum: No Restraints, Community Publishing, and the Contact Zone

98 4 Writing Within and Beyond the Curriculum No Restraints, Community Publishing, and the Contact Zone Since all men are “political beings,” all are also legislators. . . . Every man, in as much as he is active, i.e., living, contributes to modifying the social environment in which he develops (to modifying certain of its characteristics or preserving others); in other words, he tends to establish “norms,” rules of living or behaviour. One’s circle of activity may be greater or smaller, one’s awareness of one’s own perceptions may be greater or smaller; furthermore, the representation to power may be greater or smaller, and will be put into practice to a greater or lesser extent in its normative systemic expression by the “represented.” —A N T ON IO G R A M S C I , Selections from the Prison Notebooks What about the Writing Student? Each of the previous chapters focused on New City Writing’s ability (or inability) to establish productive partnerships with community and publicschool organizations. In doing so, each proceeded with the implicit sense that students were gaining more than just insight into the machinations of community-based literacy projects. They were also learning something about the nature of writing—of language as a mechanism for generating social change. In addition to community partnerships, New City Writing was thus also attempting to create classrooms that demonstrated how writing can be a tool for effective community advocacy. Particularly within the context of Philadelphia, those of us associated with New City Writing hoped our classrooms might enable students to understand how their own emergent writing abilities might connect with efforts to create a revitalized new city. Writing Within and Beyond the Curriculum | 99 The nature and ability of community-connected courses to generate such insights for students, however, is open to debate. Often discussed under the terms service learning and community-based learning, such courses have been critiqued for failing to produce a collective vision for students and for instead reaffirming individualistic conceptions of social change (Herzberg 1994). Even when such efforts are done well, there is concern that the very nature of university mitigates against their producing actual change in “the streets” (Mathieu 2005). A more limited sense of change—personal or tentative—is often held as the barometer of success (Goldblatt 2007). Although acknowledging these potential limitations, I want to build on the previous chapter’s argument for the value of community publishing to describe an alternative relationship among student, faculty, and community partners. In this alternative , the faculty and students are positioned within a local community’s long-term struggle for political recognition, understanding that the university ’s work is only one element within this effort. In this relationship, the writing course and the student papers generated in it become one moment within a larger effort to produce a collective ethnographic document, a process that unites writing and political alliances for change. In this chapter, then, I want to trace how the collective work of the student writers in our New City Writing classrooms developed from an initial intersection of a student paper with a community publication to the creation of a classroom aligned with local and international efforts for political recognition . In the process, the New City Writing classrooms emerged as spaces where students joined with urban populations in struggles for increased educational , cultural, and economic support. They enabled students to move from a personal engagement with the contact zone to a sense of collaborative action in the public sphere—action directed at producing a crisis in the current systems by which power is distributed. The creation of such classrooms represented a culminating moment in the history of New City Writing. Student Writing and Community Publications A central dilemma of composition’s public turn has been the need to have students produce writing that fits both within and beyond the curriculum . Composition teachers, that is, have taken on the difficult task of both 100 | GR AV Y L A N D continuing to prepare students for academic discourse and accepting the new responsibilities of locating their pedagogical work in the community. As Paula Mathieu (2005) notes, this public turn has meant connecting existing scholarship focused on public writing, popular rhetorics, and political debates to community partnerships and service-learning initiatives. Students continue to write academic essays on Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, but now they do so in the...