Writing with Durham: Personal Experiences & Local Issues in Sociological Perspective
By choosing to attend Duke, not only have you become a Blue Devil, but you have also become a member of the Durham community. As a Blue Devil, you will take academic courses, join campus organizations, and likely cheer wildly at sporting events. Yet, what will your role as a citizen of Durham entail? What does it mean to be a member of the Durham community? An important first step is learning as much as possible about the city of Durham, its history, population, politics, successes and struggles. The next step involves getting engaged in community affairs. In this service-learning writing course you will do both; you will read, write, and talk about social issues in Durham, and you will do so alongside students and teachers at Carter Community School, a charter school just one mile from Duke’s East Campus.
More specifically, in this service-learning course you will serve as a writing tutor for a seventh or eighth grade student at Carter Community School. You will spend one morning each week helping your tutee read, think, and write about issues in Durham. You will support your student by helping him/her with various aspects of his/her writing, including brainstorming, researching, organizing, revising, and editing. Through this collaborative approach you will undoubtedly deepen your understanding of Durham and of the writing process.
As you help your tutee complete writing assignments about local issues, you will simultaneously be using your tutoring interactions, your observations of the middle school classroom, our course texts, and independent research, to examine a local issue of your own choosing. Your written work will take several forms: you will compose reviews of course texts and news articles, you will craft reflective essays, and you will learn to construct bibliographies via library research. These assignments will prepare you for your major writing project, which will progress in three stages. In the first stage, you will develop a research proposal that builds upon your writing about course texts and your tutoring experiences. Next, using this research proposal, you will craft a social-science research paper for an academic audience. At the end of the semester, you will deliver a public presentation that engages community partners and stakeholders.
Note: This course is a service learning course and requires students to volunteer approximately one morning (2 hours) each week in addition to standard class requirements.
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