29 Local Literacies, Global Connections – Kristie Marcum

Kristie Marcum is an alumna, graduating with a Master’s degree in English in 2022.  Kristie is now employed as the Assistant Director of Career Services and Liaison to the College of Arts and Sciences at Miami University in Oxford, OH.  Professor Kelly Blewett would like to celebrate her piece and said, “Kristie’s project does a fantastic job of imagining a study abroad trip in England that would focus on exploring rural literacy in local and global contexts.”

ENG W270 – “Local Literacies, Global Connections”

Summer 2024, Section XXX, Credit hours: 3

Reflection

The purpose of this project is to design an undergraduate course that combines academic writing and a study abroad experience.  Such a course offers an opportunity for students to develop their worldviews and enhances the educational activities available to them at Indiana University East, which primarily serves Midwest rural communities.  Listed as an English W-270 course, this unique writing course would serve as a general education requirement for undergraduate students, and it offers students a global experience where they can reflect upon rural literacies in a cross-cultural atmosphere.  This course will also introduce both concepts and experiences related to globalization which do not typically appear in English writing courses, especially early-career general education courses.  In doing so, the course will broaden the ways in which globalization is incorporated into the writing curriculum at IUE in general.  In conjunction with departmental faculty and capstone mentors, it is my goal to incorporate a wide range of sociocultural and linguistic experiences to students who would not traditionally have the opportunity to travel abroad.  Additionally, by offering international and intercultural learning to undergraduate students potentially enrolled in a variety of majors, this course will support a call to action from larger educational institutions.

As someone who grew up in Connersville, IN and who has attended IU East for both my undergraduate and graduate work, I know that study abroad is an enticing and valuable adventure, and I am eager to create opportunities for my fellow Red Wolves to experience that.  In this reflection, my goal is to introduce you to the course I designed and to explain my rationale for the choices that I made, from the course learning objectives all the way down to the discussion posts. In designing this course, I began by thinking why study abroad matters to students.

Course Exigence:  Why Study Abroad Matters

Between 2014 and 2019 members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication drafted a policy statement that arose out of the CCCC’s assertion that globalization influences “all members of the discipline, including writing program administrators, teachers, students, and researchers” (681).  In the Strategic Governance Vision Statement, the CCCC declared that they should “provide conditions under which teachers and scholars can discuss, build and practice sustainable, relevant, and ethical model of teaching and learning” (682).  Additionally, the committee asserts that globalization is constantly evolving, and this movement has become apparent in higher education institutions which are specifically interested in recruiting students with a broad range of multiculturalist experiences such as sending students abroad and preparing graduates to enter global societies and workforces.  As for writing teachers, writing programs, and administration, the CCCC explains that globalization allows for “the opportunity to develop alternative perspectives on writing and its study and teaching” (682).  From this context, I take away that the professionals in the field of Writing Studies are invested in globalization and believe that it can and should impact writing instruction.

Closer to home, Indiana University endorses study abroad by promoting and expanding participation in a wide range of disciplines with the intention of enhancing international awareness and understanding on each of its campuses and they believe study abroad programs should be an integral part of an education at IU.  At our regional campus, Indiana University East aligns its campus initiatives with IU’s goals and provides a wide range of study abroad opportunities, many of which do not require prerequisites and they offer scholarships to those students who are interested in participating (overseas.iu.edu/about/mission.html).

Within this national, state, and regional context, the proposed W-270 course would provide a productive and widely appreciated option to students.  Taking this gap of availability into consideration, along with the uniform and structured approach now utilized in most writing course curriculums at IUE, the added global approach to this specialized course “implies less rigidly defined boundaries” and this freedom will allow for more “meshing of cultures, languages, and nationalities” than would be experienced in a traditional classroom setting (CCCC 682).

Given that study abroad is recognized as a valuable experience for students, resources such as University of Kentucky’s online toolkit are widely available for educators. The creators of this toolkit explain that all study abroad experiences are “an effective way to further internationalize curriculums and they provide students with academically engaging and culturally enriching, international experiences” (www.uky.edu/toolkit/).   Their website offers educators a variety of classroom activities that address global citizenship, academic development, and it provides assessment and evaluation worksheets for teachers.  This website has been an invaluable resource while framing this course and the material will aid in the students understanding of global issues revolving around social responsibility, global competence, and global civic engagement.

In addition to supporting the CCCC’s claims and Indiana University’s study abroad mission statement, my primary goal for this course is to further diversify the study abroad opportunities at Indiana University East and to support their undergraduate learning outcomes which include: interacting with others using social awareness and cultural understanding, acquiring knowledge in a broad range of disciplines, applying knowledge creatively and critically, and respectfully engaging with local and global communities.  While even the CCCC admits that more research is needed about composition and writing in international contexts, the committee encourages teachers and researchers to utilize “a variety of methods that foster responsive global exchanges among teachers and scholars of writing” (686).  Moreover, as they maneuver in international spaces, teachers should document and compare how we come to understand universal language and writing.  My goal for this course is to create a writing course that reacts to the CCCC’s charge and provides a foundation for other writing programs and universities to build upon as they seek to embrace globalization in their curriculums.

Course Learning Outcomes and Literacy Studies Theme

The curriculum for this course has been designed to meet the standard learning outcomes of standard ENG W-270 course but it will be unique in that I have included an additional outcome that will focus on the students’ personal experiences with global mindedness and cultural understanding.  The verbiage for the final outcome comes from the University of Kentucky’s Online Toolkit mentioned above.  I chose to add this objective because a core goal of this course is to give students a meaningful study abroad experience.  Therefore, the full set of course learning outcomes will be as follows:

1. Create a thesis-driven, research-supported argument in response to a public or academic conversation.
2. Analyze how other writers pursue lines of inquiry and write persuasive arguments.
3. Apply the iterative writing process – prewriting, drafting, feedback, revision, and reflection – to the creation of a research-supported argument.
4. Conduct appropriate primary and secondary research in support of focused claims and arguments.
5. Support claims, ideas, and arguments using multiple forms of evidence.
6. Document sources using a recognized academic style.
7. Through firsthand experiences abroad, to increase cultural understanding and global mindedness.

The content in the course will be themed around literacy studies.  To introduce students to the course and theme, I’ve written the following course description:

In this class, we will study theory and practice argumentation in everyday life and culture as it relates to literacy both in our local communities and abroad.  In addition to studying strategies for argumentation, we will explore our own neighborhoods and discuss how location impacts how we come to know things.  In the study abroad portion of our course, we will go to England where we will be exploring both rural and urban neighborhoods and we will be analyzing the ways in which our own locations, perspectives, and opportunities are similar to and/or different from those in another country.  The corresponding course activities, including primary and secondary research, will enable us to gain practical experience with argumentation by putting into practice what we learn through our writing projects.  In the final part of the term, we will each create a final reflective paper that will make a claim in regard to how location impacts literacy, and we will include our own experiences and primary research, alongside scholarly sources.

Drawing from Dr. Thomas Evans’  course on rural literacies and given that she is from Preston, a small t own in rural England, it has been determined that England will be the ideal study abroad location.  Additionally, Dr. Evans’ established connections in the area will increase our partnership opportunities.  Fortunately, there is fantastic literacy scholarship that originates in Lancaster and that scholarship, combined with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, makes up the bulk of the required course readings.  I’ve designed the course so that it can be assessed using the final project, the researched argument, just like the other sections of 270 that do not include a study-abroad experience.  The final outcome regarding global mindedness will be measured through the final course reflection, which is due the last week of class. The course will take place over a 10-week period in the summer.

Works Cited

Alsup, Janet, and Lisa Schade Eckert. Literacy Teaching and Learning in Rural Communities: Problematizing Stereotypes, Challenging Myths. Routledge, 2015.

Barton, David, and Mary Hamilton. Local Literacies: Reading and Writing In One Community. London: Routledge, 1998.

“CCCC Statement on Globalization in Writing Studies Pedagogy and Research.” College

Composition and Communication, vol. 70, no. 4, June 2019, pp. 681–690. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.proxyeast.uits.iu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db =mzh&AN=2019872744&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

“Education Abroad Faculty Toolkit.” Welcome to the Education Abroad Faculty Toolkit! | The Education Abroad Faculty Toolkit, 2012, https://www.uky.edu/toolkit/.

Green, Bill, and Michael John Corbett. Rethinking Rural Literacies: Transnational Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Keats, John. “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles by John Keats.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52305/on-seeing-the-elgin-marbles.

Li, Linda Y. “Exploring the Use of Focused Freewriting in Developing Academic Writing.” Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, vol. 4, no. 1, Jan. 2007, pp. 40–53. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.proxyeast.uits.iu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ1105378&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Lindquist, Julie, and Bump Halbritter. “Documenting and Discovering Learning: Reimagining the Work of the Literacy Narrative.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 70, no. 3, Feb. 2019, pp. 413–445. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.proxyeast.uits.iu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2019872110&site=eds-live&scope=site.

“Mission Statement.” Office of Overseas Study, 2022, https://overseas.iu.edu/about/mission.html.

Pahl, Kate, and Jennifer Rowsell. Literacy and Education : Understanding the New Literacy Studies In the Classroom. London: Paul Chapman, 2005.

Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing : Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference,

Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxyeast.uits.iu.edu/lib/iueast-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1365225.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Fountain Press, 1929.