1 Pressbooks and the Community Engaged Composition Classroom
1 Pressbooks and the Community Engaged Composition Classroom
Matthew Hitchman
FOR: CCCC 2024
FROM THE KITCHEN OF: Matthew Hitchman, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
PREP TIME: 1 – 2 Quarters
COOK TIME: Eight weeks
SERVES: 23 students per class
What is this Recipe?
In this community-engaged composition class, students worked together to write and publish a Pressbook for the environmental justice organization 350Seattle to use for educational outreach. This project came out of conversations between myself and organizers with 350Seattle. In particular, they wanted an educational resource that addressed the tension between the need to protect PNW conifer forests as a crucial carbon storage asset and the need for more housing in Seattle. Organizers pointed out that the fetishization of protecting particular trees from being cut down for projects designed to increase housing density can often inadvertently prompt urban sprawl and, by extension, far more clear cutting. A central class text the organization provided students was the FAQ page 350Seattle had generated: 350Seattle Forestry FAQ.
Inspiration for this project came from Jonah Bossewitch, John Frankfurt, Alexander Sherman’s reflections on Robin D. G. Kelley’s wiki his class built. (Wiki Justice, Social Ergonomics, and Ethical Collaborations). In this reflection, the authors point out that his use of open-source, collaborative, public-facing websites helped students not only learn about the history of Black activist movements, but that the collaborative and public-facing aspects of the assignment taught students to history as something ongoing and living. From this inspiration, my goal for the assignment was two-fold: (1) for students was to identify a specific aspect of the forestry and housing discourse they felt was important to understand, research this aspect, and write a “chapter” of an ebook; (2) for students to see themselves as collaborators with a community organization and active participants in a larger conversation happening in the state.
Ingredients and Steps
This project was scaffolded across two quarters and in collaboration with Lauren Ray. There were many smaller tasks involved such as learning to search for images in the public domain, learning about creative commons licensing, deciding on a title for the book, developing a style guide so the chapters looked cohesive, etc. Lauren helped with the tasks students needed to complete such as creating Pressbook accounts, learning the mechanics of editing a page, and creating author bios/information.
- An Annotated Bibliography as a process of topic exploration;
- A Chapter Proposal that emerged from the process of research. After proposals were turned in we looked at all the topics and chapters as a class and tried to identify any gaps or areas that were over-loaded. From this discussion, students decided how to work to attend to these gaps and/or decide to collaborate on chapters (e.g. five students wanted to write about wildfi