Introduction
We’ve been celebrating student writing for four years, but this is the first year we’ve turned our annual event into a digital book! We hope this will be a permanent record of all our reasons to celebrate student work in this most trying of years.
In this book, you will find lots of student writing worth celebrating, from first-year students working in general education courses to graduate students pursuing specialized degrees. You will find many types of writing as well, including a poem, a rhetorical analysis or two, a reflective journal entry, a pedagogy plan, a handful of arguments, a piano piece inspired by a poet, a new website for a local organization, a magazine article, and even a novel in Spanish. At IU East, we are surrounded by writers. And it is a pleasure to celebrate.
In January of this year, we invited teachers to tell us about students’ writing that they wanted to publicly acknowledge, and they responded enthusiastically. We thank the twenty-five faculty who took the time to nominate students for inclusion in this collection—faculty from mathematics, biology, English, criminal justice, education, communication, world languages, marketing, nursing, psychology, and fine arts. Writing is relevant in all these spaces! As you read the introductions to the student writing in Part Two of the book, you will see the words faculty nominators used to describe the writing of their students, words like “unique,” “creative,” “well-researched,” “honest,” “super cool,” “excellent,” “fantastic,” “exceptionally interesting,” “just a joy to read.” These pages make visible the appreciation and affirmation that is often communicated in private educational spaces, such as the margins of papers or an electronic gradebook. We celebrate the connections between teachers and students.
We also celebrate the writing by nursing students enrolled in L230, a course that asks majors to engage in writing, including the project shared here, an evidence-based practice assignment that results in teams presenting solutions to real-world problems. The twelve projects presented explore topics that reflect our current healthcare crisis, including the shortage of nurses, nurse burnout and nurse fatigue, and the lasting impact of Covid-19 on nurses. Each group prepared a 10-minute video specifically for this collection, and I know you will enjoy listening to their thoughtful presentations as much as I have. We thank Professor Carolyn Judd for creating space for her students to take part in this event.
Finally, we celebrate the opportunity to bring thoughtful writers to campus, even if by way of a screen, to have conversations about writing that matter. Our keynote for this event is Frederick Joseph, a writer and activist who has written the invaluable and engaging The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person, a book which hit the New York Times bestseller list in the YA category almost as soon as it was published. Writing—personal writing mobilized to speak to across difference in a fraught cultural moment—has rarely been asked to do so much. We are grateful Fred joined us for the live event on in April and that his keynote can live on in this text for readers to engage well beyond that date.
Many thanks to Dean Daren Snider of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, who believed in this event from the beginning and supported it in a big way. Thanks to my fellow editors, Professor Tanya Perkins and graduate student Kristie Marcum, for helping to organize the many moving pieces of this event and book project. Thanks to the marketing team, who have helped us once again create a virtual space when we could not gather in person. And thanks most of all to the students who continue to write for us, every day, and who make this community possible.