Understanding Engagement
Outreach to external communities is increasingly portrayed as the responsibility of students and faculty alike, with scholars such as bell hooks (2003) lamenting “the loss of feeling of connection and closeness with the world beyond the academy” (p. xv). Such calls led to the recent Carnegie Community Engagement Classification with only 361 of the 4,000 US universities, less than 10%, earning the recognition in 2015. Though the Carnegie classification, first awarded in 2010, signals new interest in honoring an “institutional focus on community engagement,” this sort of outreach and community partnership seems a part of the very DNA of computers and writing as a field.
As evidenced by scholarship focused on community literacy by researchers that include Ellen Cushman, Jeff Grabill, Glynda Hull and so many others, our field has long advocated community engagement projects that privilege “literate lives” (Hawisher and Selfe, 2004) “within the context of region and culture as well as within various personal domains of their lives – work, community, home, and family” (Merrifield, 1997).
One early example of community digital literacy scholarship and outreach is a project beginning in 1997 at the Center for English Studies Technology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The project – focusing on “literacy, computer-mediated communication, and community service learning” (Regan and Zuern, 2000, p. 177) – began with 24 students and 50 community members participating in digital writing and tutoring workshops. “Collaborative learning,” according to authors Alison Regan and John Zuern (2000), “was the feature of our course that received the most praise in student surveys” (p. 194). Many community literacy projects, like the Hawaii example, are tied directly to specific courses and may prioritize the impact on university students.
Lisa Dush (2014), in discussing her graduate-level Digital Storytelling in Organizations course, reports digitally rich community engagement work offers students “a rhetorical approach to media creation” (p. 17) and “a functional competence with particular technologies” (p. 11). Other benefits to students engaged in community literacy work include experience working with clients beyond the classroom, increased cultural awareness of issues and groups often defined by difference, and lived, hands-on learning.
As evidenced by scholarship focused on community literacy by researchers that include Ellen Cushman, Jeff Grabill, Glynda Hull and so many others, our field has long advocated community engagement projects that privilege “literate lives” (Hawisher and Selfe, 2004) “within the context of region and culture as well as within various personal domains of their lives – work, community, home, and family” (Merrifield, 1997).
One early example of community digital literacy scholarship and outreach is a project beginning in 1997 at the Center for English Studies Technology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The project – focusing on “literacy, computer-mediated communication, and community service learning” (Regan and Zuern, 2000, p. 177) – began with 24 students and 50 community members participating in digital writing and tutoring workshops. “Collaborative learning,” according to authors Alison Regan and John Zuern (2000), “was the feature of our course that received the most praise in student surveys” (p. 194). Many community literacy projects, like the Hawaii example, are tied directly to specific courses and may prioritize the impact on university students.
Lisa Dush (2014), in discussing her graduate-level Digital Storytelling in Organizations course, reports digitally rich community engagement work offers students “a rhetorical approach to media creation” (p. 17) and “a functional competence with particular technologies” (p. 11). Other benefits to students engaged in community literacy work include experience working with clients beyond the classroom, increased cultural awareness of issues and groups often defined by difference, and lived, hands-on learning.
Theorizing Engagement
Still other researchers, like Allen Brizee (2014), describe the benefit of community literacy work for “building college-community relationships in face-to-face and digital contexts” (p. 22). Brizee, along with Grabill, Cushman and others, calls for a greater focus on the communities themselves that we engage, insisting “more research is needed on technology use within at-risk communities” (2003, p. 22). Grabill (2003) asserts there is a need for “designing community networks that both recognize the productive power and expertise of community residents as well as allow for productive practices to be developed and used in the future” (p. 131). He offers a “community-based design” (p. 131) framework that, among other things, honors the “layers of expertise possessed and produced by users” (p. 138). Recognizing and incorporating the skills, interests, and talents of the communities we serve is bedrock to the girls’ technology camp work discussed here and to so many models of community engagement and partnership in our field.
Another framework for doing community engagement work involving digital literacies comes from Guiseppe Getto, Ellen Cushman, and Shreelina Ghosh (2011). In a Computers and Composition article, the authors describe three case studies of what they refer to as "community mediation" involving digital composition practices: an informational video at neighborhood center, a digital history installation for the Cherokee Nation, and digital methods for preserving classical Indian dance. The community mediation framework is a model “for theorizing how new media can be composed in a way that honors the local efforts of communities to represent themselves to those both outside and inside of the community” (p. 162). Specifically, this framework:
Another framework for doing community engagement work involving digital literacies comes from Guiseppe Getto, Ellen Cushman, and Shreelina Ghosh (2011). In a Computers and Composition article, the authors describe three case studies of what they refer to as "community mediation" involving digital composition practices: an informational video at neighborhood center, a digital history installation for the Cherokee Nation, and digital methods for preserving classical Indian dance. The community mediation framework is a model “for theorizing how new media can be composed in a way that honors the local efforts of communities to represent themselves to those both outside and inside of the community” (p. 162). Specifically, this framework:
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This approach seems particularly important to work with girls and technologies as girls’ digital practices are often marked with fear, contempt, or outright dismissal but are, in fact, bedrock to girl culture and community. “Our framework,” Getto, Cushman, and Ghosh (2011) report, “is a way of looking at digital compositions and how they can function as both materially and socially-situated objects that represent communities to themselves and to each other and how they can best be used to represent or remediate community practices into digital ones” (p. 164). This awareness of both the communities being served – in our case girl communities located in a variety of geographic and socio-economically defined spaces – and the ways these communities are surveilled and marked is key to work like ours described here.
Sustaining Engagement
Another key to emerging models of community engagement for Getto, Cushman, Ghosh, Grabill and others is the sustainability of such initiatives. Grabill reminds us of the “critical importance of engaging in community-based work that can be sustained over time” (p. 132). Both the community mediation framework and the approach discussed by Brizee offer strategies for outreach that will live and thrive over the long term and perhaps through several iterations. “The model put forward in Brizee’s work “can help computers and composition scholars develop effective and sustained college-community partnerships while also generating funding and publication” (p. 24). The importance of funding sources is echoed by Dush (2014) regarding her own engagement initiatives. “Both of these courses … were supported by internal grants in support of service-learning initiatives,” she recalls (p. 21). Beyond funding, other infrastructures like scholarly rewards for scholarship of engagement, department and university commitments to work with and in communities (Dush, 2014, p. 21), and flexibility of curriculum also are necessary for building sustained community engagement projects. In our experience with the Digital Mirror and Girlhood Remixed camps, another vital infrastructure required for sustainable, productive community engagement is mentorship.
While our field has a history of this sort of work, is it sufficiently recognized in tenure and promotion decisions and as part of faculty workload? Do our grad programs explicitly train future faculty to add community engagement to their already full schedules? And can community engagement be taught, or must it be lived and experienced through mentorship? Identifying a literacy need in your community, designing an intervention or outreach program, lining up partners on and off campus, and designing a network that will support your project long term are all daunting steps in getting a technology-rich writing in/for the community project underway.
This piece is intended as a how-to field guide for conceptualizing, planning, troubleshooting, and documenting community engagement and outreach, specifically as it relates to technofeminist interrogations of gender in digital spaces. Our camps seek not only to interrogate digital practices but also to prepare the next generation of users to inhabit those digital tools and spaces armed with critical questions. While this is certainly not a one-size-fits-all approach to community engagement, we hope our model will encourage and equip faculty and others to engage in community literacy work aimed at equipping the next generation of technofeminists.
While our field has a history of this sort of work, is it sufficiently recognized in tenure and promotion decisions and as part of faculty workload? Do our grad programs explicitly train future faculty to add community engagement to their already full schedules? And can community engagement be taught, or must it be lived and experienced through mentorship? Identifying a literacy need in your community, designing an intervention or outreach program, lining up partners on and off campus, and designing a network that will support your project long term are all daunting steps in getting a technology-rich writing in/for the community project underway.
This piece is intended as a how-to field guide for conceptualizing, planning, troubleshooting, and documenting community engagement and outreach, specifically as it relates to technofeminist interrogations of gender in digital spaces. Our camps seek not only to interrogate digital practices but also to prepare the next generation of users to inhabit those digital tools and spaces armed with critical questions. While this is certainly not a one-size-fits-all approach to community engagement, we hope our model will encourage and equip faculty and others to engage in community literacy work aimed at equipping the next generation of technofeminists.