Food Matters: Cultivating a New Plot

In the past, I have always given my first-year writing students the opportunity to focus their semester on a topic of their choosing and then attempted to find corresponding community partners so that their service and topics were as closely related as possible.  I feel strongly about providing opportunities for student choice since, as Donald Murray urges in “All Writing Is Autobiography,” it allows students to focus and develop their own passions and they are therefore more invested in their written work (73).  I am also, however, concerned with the correlation between my students’ service and their topics.  As Nutefall argues in “The Relationship between Service Learning and Research,” “The theme-based approach . . . is based on the ‘assumption that good writing and good research happen when students consider the writing/research process within a particular context, with a particular purpose, and with a particular audience’” (252).  As much as I have tried to connect students with service-learning projects that are meaningfully related to their topics and as hard as I have tried to base our class discussions around readings related to community and service, at times I have still felt a disconnect between students’ writing and their experiences in the community.

Based on these observations and concerns, I have decided to try a different approach in my service-learning classes this semester, initiating a theme-based structure in which all students are writing on similar topics and participating in the same service-learning projects while still attempting to preserve an element of choice in the class.  This has enabled me to choose readings that will be intricately related to both student writing and community involvement. Working with a colleague and the UNCA Key Center, I developed a first-year writing course titled "Food Matters" through which my students can explore the complex issues surrounding food production and accessibility through reading, writing, research, and service in the community.

This semester, my students have been working with the UNCA Student Environmental Center cultivating and maintaining the three community gardens on campus as well as gleaning produce at local farms. So far it's been a rewarding adventure!