TY - JOUR
T1 - English Departments' Relationships to Community: An Experiment at the Heart of Disciplinary Identity.
AU - Duffey, Suellynn
N1 - 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.
PY - 2011/1/1
Y1 - 2011/1/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1120329
M3 - Article
VL - 1
JO - Journal of Public Scholarship in Higher Education
JF - Journal of Public Scholarship in Higher Education
ER -