The Next Frontier for Community Outreach
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In this image, Chipi introduces her webpage, The School Bell Blog, to an audience of her high school peers.
Outreach—both campus and community—has become a fundamental component for expanding and sustaining writing centers. According to writing center scholars (Kinkead, 1983; Ede & Lunsford, 2003), collaboration is central to outreach. Both campus and community outreach tends to foster collaboration between educators, educators and administrators, and educators and students. However, there are some important people often left out of the equation when forming community partnerships. Joyce Kinkead and Lisa Ede & Andrea Lunsford’s work describe a dual approach to community outreach:
working with high school teachers to prepare students for college-level writing
publicizing writing center services to the larger community.
The first requires the university and the community to work together to meet a mutual need, the second rests on the idea that the university already knows what the community needs. The former encourages a working relationship with members of the community, the latter is missing collaboration altogether. This absence of collaboration in certain community spaces is what we aim to address here.
Community outreach is often based on the premise that all members of the community speak the same language, have the same writing or similar writing values and goals, and are a fresh slate for writing centers to inform them. Our experiences in the community have proven this premise incorrect. Community members surrounding most of our universities are from all different backgrounds and upbringings, and are equipped with varying knowledge bases informed by their exposure to the world. When working with our community, we need to be intentional about taking these differences into consideration.
A recent request for JWells to give a “Writing Personal Statements” presentation to high school students and their parents has prompted us to ruminate the challenges writing centers face when working with the community and considering their differences. JWells serves as the Presentations Co-Coordinator at her institution’s University Writing Center (UWC). As a part of this role, JWells works with campus and community organizations to expose current and future students to various writing strategies they will use before, during, and after college.
For example, the council for Recruitment and Retention at JWells’ institution recently reached out to her with an invitation to give a “Writing Personal Statements” presentation to high school students. The council for Recruitment and Retention compiles resources and events to help students from underrepresented backgrounds transition to and thrive on campus. The particular event they invited JWells to was their annual “Ready, Set, Go!” college readiness workshop. We felt the opportunity to collaborate with the council met our personal and professional missions to make college accessible for those who wanted to attend. But when the council mentioned parents would be in attendance too, access transitioned from a goal to a concern. Access means something different for parents, especially parents from underrepresented backgrounds. For parents, access in this context is about expanding their knowledge of the languages and systems they were taught to navigate education systems and using this new knowledge to alleviate previous misunderstandings about college access.
Asking JWells to specifically present on personal statements made it apparent the council was attempting to supplement parents with knowledge about the college process so that they could participate in their child’s preparation. Whether parents come from a different education system or their knowledge is simply outdated, parents often lack insider knowledge regarding the American education system and the college application process. Parents’ lack of knowledge can actually change, for better or for worse, the trajectory of their student’s life both on a pragmatic and emotional level. Parents who do not speak English have an even harder time accessing resources about the American education system, and are therefore less able to provide familial guidance, which can inhibit or, at the very least, stagnate this process for their students.
Facilitating a presentation on personal statements in English only is an example of how providing resources can make the process accessible for students and even more inaccessible for parents. Personal statements are essential to the college application process, and are a potential site for familial bondings as the genre requires students to reflect on their lived experiences. Providing parents with resources that actually add to the language barrier can create unconscious distance between the parents and children. Students might feel alone and unsupported because no one around them fully understands what is taking place and parents might feel frustrated seeing their student struggle and not be able to help. Including parents in the college application process, through the provision of accessible resources, provides them deserving fruit to their years of supporting their students and provides students a built-in extension of the work writing centers aim to accomplish.
Not wanting to provide parents with a resource that could possibly contribute to disconnect between parent and child, JWells turned to her mentee Rashel Chipi for advice. Chipi is currently a senior at Coral Reef Senior High and founded the bilingual School Bell Blog that features weekly publications catered specifically to the concerns of her community. Chipi’s outreach work derives from the need to make the college application process more accessible to students and their parents. Her approach to outreach at the high school level heavily relies on direct collaboration and ongoing conversation with peers and their parents.
Chipi is constantly finding a need for new publications on the website that not only outline key processes for a successful college application process and promote local opportunities, but also to debunk several misconceptions about college in the U.S. and its value aside from teaching students skills. In an effort to expand her outreach, Chipi has expanded the focus of School Bell Blog from specifically aiding the Latin community to anyone with decent from a foreign country in her county. Chipi realized that in her own efforts to collaborate, she addressed the community she was most familiar with on an issue that is relevant to countless communities.
Due to time constraints, we weren’t able to apply Chipi’s method of asking parents what resources they wanted or translated and present resources in both English and Spanish. Fortunately, though, we were able to circulate resources from Chipi’s blog to parents who attended JWells’ presentation.
In order for writing centers to replicate the methods used by School Bell Blog to directly aid the community, we suggest involving locals, local organizations, magazines, newspapers, church groups, and other organizations respected by the community in this effort. It’s crucial to find individuals who are immersed locally and understand what the community needs to hear and how to catch their attention. If outreach is to be increased, our efforts to do so must include the communities surrounding our college campuses.
Works Cited
Ede, Lisa and Andrea Lunsford. “Some Millennial Thoughts about the Future of Writing Centers.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 20, no. 2, 2000. https: //www.jstor.org/stable/43442099. Accessed 28 Nov. 2019.
Kinkead, Joyce. “Outreach: The Writing Center, the campus, and the community.” Writing Lab Newsletter, vol. 10, no. 3, 1985. https://wlnjournal.org/archives/v10/10-3.pdf. Accessed 10 Oct. 2019.
Author Bios
Rashel Chipi is a senior at Coral Reef Senior High. In 2018, she founded School Bell Blog to provide students in her county with a resource that delineates the complex American education system in both English and Spanish. This fall she will be attending Yale, where she plans to study the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health to eventually help create a more inclusive, ethical, and culturally sensitive health care system through medical policy.
JWells is a PhD Candidate at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research uses ethnographic and archival methods to investigate the writing practices of marginalized mothers. She is particularly interested in understanding how the relationship between intersectionality, literacy normativity, and justice impact one’s ability to mother. Her current work focuses on the ways in which incarcerated mothers use literacy to perform motherhood while behind bars.