Kaitlin Clinnin

kaitlinclinnin.org
Institutionalizing Community in Universities and Writing Programs

In this presentation, I plan to discuss the discourses of community currently circulating

within higher education institutions and the institutional practices informed by these
discourses. I present a program from Ohio State as an example of how universities are
attempting to institutionalize the experience of community through co-curricular
programming. Finally, I offer suggestions for how writing programs can partner with
such programs to center student learning and writing.

Part 1: Discourses of Community in Higher Education Institutions

Community is a critical component to the historical mission, the educational methods,

and the societal purpose of higher education institutions. As such, there are many
discourses of community circulating through higher education institutions, and the
various disciplines, departments, and offices within these institutions often produce their
own discourses of community that inform their practices of community. There is often a
disconnect across these institutional locations and their respective discourses of
community, whether this disconnect is due to similar discourses of community working
in parallel or competing discourses of community working at cross-purposes. Although a
full discussion about the discourses of community in higher education would take more
than my allotted time today (read my dissertation!), I want to draw our attention to two
key discourses of community currently circulating in higher education institutions and
the stakes of these discourses.

The first discourse is that the university is and should be a learning community. Higher
education scholars Ernest Boyer and Vincent Tinto respectively argue that institutions
should function as a community in teaching, research, and service. This discourse of
community impacts how colleges and universities educate studentsfor example, using
collaborative learning methods and real world problem-solving.

The second discourse of community is that students should experience a sense of

community in their education. When students feel connected to the social and academic
realms of higher education they are more likely to experience academic success and
graduate. Sense of community is critically important especially to underrepresented
student populations on campus such as students of color, first-generation college
students, LGBTQ students.

These are only two examples of the discourses of community circulating in higher
education institutions. Even in this quick overview, we see the stakes associated with
these discourses for institutional missions and practices. Community is important to
higher education institutions because community is linked to markers of student
success including increased retention, persistence, and graduation rates, student
satisfaction and engagement, academic success, and post-graduation success. Now
that weve identified a few discourses of community and the stakes of these discourses,
 Kaitlin Clinnin
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I want to turn our attention to some of the practices in higher education that are
informed by these discourses.

Part 2: Practices of Community in Higher Education Institutions

The two discourses of community that I mention (the university as a community and
students sense of community) inform institutional practices ranging from the residence
hall to the classroom and beyond. These discourses are perhaps most obviously
present in high-impact educational practices. In the past decade, high-impact
educational practices (HIPs) have received critical attention as institutions search for the
most effective ways to improve learning for changing student populations. High-impact
educational practices are intended to create educational contexts and practices that
help students achieve success on essential collegiate learning outcomes. The high-
impact practices include first-year seminars and experiences, common intellectual
experiences, learning communities, collaborative assignments and projects, writing
intensive courses, undergraduate research, diversity and global learning, service
learning and community-based learning, internships, and capstone courses and
projects.

Although I do not have time to provide an in-depth analysis of high-impact educational

practices (I encourage you to read the Across the Disciplines special issue on high-
impact practices from December 2016), I want to point out how the two discourses of
community previously mentioned are embedded within almost all of the practices. The
discourse of the university as a community appears in several high-impact practices
including first-year seminars and experiences, common intellectual experiences,
learning communities, and collaborative assignments and projects. In these high-impact
practices, students and faculty form intellectual communities with shared purposes and
develop knowledge through collaborative meaning-making. This also relates to the
discourse of sense of community; students make connections with their peers and
faculty, and ideally these relationships make students feel as if they belong to the social
and academic community on campus.

I want to offer one brief example of a campus program informed by these discourses of
community. The Second-Year Transformational Experience Program (or STEP) is a
relatively new program at the Ohio State University. STEP is a learning community for
second-year students. The purpose of STEP is to integrate students into their
disciplinary/major community early in their academic career by developing relationships
with Ohio State faculty, participating in co-curricular professional development, and
completing a signature project. STEP combines several high-impact practices: it is a
learning community that includes common intellectual experiences (achieved through
the required professional development), and the signature project (as the program
capstone) can take on various forms including undergraduate research, diversity/global
learning, service learning and community based learning, internships.
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STEP is particularly interesting because the administrators identify community as one
of the three pillars of the experience and subsequently, they assess community as one
of their program outcomes. The program administrators identify student development
as part of a larger community as one of the goals. However, community in the STEP
program is primarily about the residential aspects of the experience. The STEP
assessment plan for community includes performance indicators like the residence hall
sustainability rating and environmental features such as percentage of green space
combined with student feedback through surveys for sense of belonging, sense of
community, and university satisfaction.

What I find most interesting about STEP is the emphasis on community as one of the
learning communitys program outcomes, but community is focused on the students
residential experience. STEPs practices are informed by discourses of community that I
mentioned earlier, but emphasis on other factors like the environmental features
suggest that there are additional circulating discourses of community. In spite of some
differences, programs like STEP and writing programs share commitments to
community and the student experience, and there are numerous opportunities and
benefits to partnering on community initiatives. Specifically, writing programs should
partner with these similarly oriented stakeholders to shape, intervene, and participate in
institutional discourses and practices of community. This is an opportunity for writing
programs to extend our work, and potentially increase student learning, elevate the role
of writing across campus, and provide strategic benefits to the writing program.

Part 3: Opportunities for Writing Programs

So in closing, I want to suggest a few rationales and ways that writing programs can
partner with community programs on-campus.

The first reason: Partnering with co-curricular and extracurricular community programs
allows writing programs to enter other spaces where writing is happening and engage
with those writers. For example, students in STEP are writing a variety of documents
including reflections, project proposals, budgets, and capstone reports. Writing
programs can provide students with instruction that includes and extends beyond the
first or second-year curriculum. This may be accomplished through designated sections
of the writing program sequence, elective writing courses, or writing workshops. These
texts that students produce (whether reflections, proposals, reports, or ideally a program
portfolio) can be used as assessment artifacts.

Partnering with campus community initiatives presents an opportunity to change the

conversation about community to focus on student learning. Programs like STEP may
be more interested in community in the residential experience, which misses the impact
of community on students academic success. If writing programs partner with programs
like STEP, we can shift the conversation about community to also center student
learning and academic success. Community is then not just about the amount of green
space, but community is also about how the social experience of the residence hall and
classroom contributes to students learning (and more specifically, their writing).
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From a pragmatic perspective, writing programs can benefit from participating in high-
profile campus initiatives. STEP is part of a $396 million initiative at Ohio State to
redefine the student experience. By partnering with initiatives like STEP, writing
programs can offer resources such as linked courses, supplementary workshops, tutors,
in exchange for financial support.

As a way of conclusion, I want offer some suggested questions for the panelists and the
audience that I hope we can take up in the discussion later: What other discourses of
community circulate through higher education or your institutions? How do these
discourses inform institutional, curricular, pedagogical, or extracurricular practices? How
might we (as writing programs and writing instructors) engage other discourses of
community and participate in institutional community practices? What are the
challenges and benefits of such partnerships? How can we focus student learning, and
specifically writing, in our discourses of community?