Stanford’s Community Writing Project

January 18,2008

The Community Writing Project (CWP) within the Program in Writing and Rhetoric began in 1988, and is one of the oldest national service-learning programs in writing and rhetoric. CWP students research and produce written, spoken, visual and / or multimedia projects that directly benefit area nonprofit or governmental agencies with which they work. These projects give students opportunities to work outside an academic setting in rhetorical situations of practical consequence. Ultimately their work will reach audiences beyond their teachers and serve tangible purposes for community audiences and for the students themselves.

The Community Writing Project has worked with over 250 Bay Area community nonprofits, linking PWR students with organizations needing help with research, writing, and speaking tasks. While students benefit educationally from their participation in the Community Writing Project, participating agencies benefit in tangible ways as well. Since so many nonprofit organizations are critically underfunded and understaffed, CWP students make a substantial contribution to helping agencies fulfill their missions.

According to Nancy Buffington, the coordinator of CWP, the next year will see some important new developments in the program. This coming winter quarter 2008 features two new CWP course offerings: “Indecision 2008: The Rhetoric of Politics,” taught by Patti Hanlon-Baker, and “Dude Look Like a Lady: The Performance of Gender,” taught by Clyde Moneyhun. Sangeeta Mediratta is offering her popular course, “Dirty Pretty Things: Objects, Objectification, and Cultural Meanings,” for the second time as a CWP section. These and other instructors are already developing courses with innovative new approaches to community partnerships, which will be unveiled in 2008-09 for the program’s 20 th anniversary.

To learn more about the Community Writing Project, visit its website at http://ual.stanford.edu/AP/univ_req/PWR/CWP.html.

Kristi Wilson Speaks on the Stanford Film Lab

November 19, 2007

The Stanford Film Lab is a faculty-student group supported by the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) and the Hume Writing Center (HWC). Primarily focused on undergraduate research, multimedia literacy, community outreach, interdisciplinarity, and collaboration, the Film Lab aims to help students explore and conceptualize documentary projects.

Last year saw the Film Lab’s first student documentary film festival. The featured films grew out of projects developed for PWR 2, Stanford’s sophomore-level required course emphasizing oral and multimedia presentations of research-based arguments; the films covered a range of topics, including Scientology and popular culture, homosexuality and Catholicism among the Stanford student population, Facebook and campus life, online gambling and college students, and more. This year, The Film Lab plans to organize its second student documentary film festival.

The Film Lab helps build a sense of community joining PWR, the HWC, and other departments and programs on campus by hosting Film Lab events that have broad, interdisciplinary appeal. In addition to the student film festival, The Film Lab also hosts symposiums and screenings.

According to Kristi Wilson, director of The Film Lab, the Lab has been a place where students can show their work as part of the student film festival and where students can meet PWR and other faculty who work on documentary film. PWR instructor Cheryl Greene and Wilson have both hosted talks and screenings in The Film Lab. Cheryl Greene screened the 1963 short documentary The House is Black by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad and discussed the film with audiences. Similarly, Kristi Wilson offered a short lecture entitled “Documenting Race in the U.S. from a Foreign Perspective,” which accompanied a screening of some of the short documentaries of Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez.

In addition to promoting multimedia literacy, contact between PWR students and their faculty who work on documentary film, and the growth of PWR research work in the context of documentary film, The Film Lab will continue to sponsor events that bring students together with filmmakers and local film production companies.

Links to recent articles

[Stanford's Community Writing Project]

[Kristi Wilson Speaks on the Stanford Film Lab]

[Kimberly Moekle Speaks on the New Interdisciplinary Project with Earth Sciences]

Kimberly Moekle Speaks on a New Interdisciplinary Project with Earth Sciences

November 19, 2007

In collaboration with the Earth Sciences Department, Nancy Peterson, and Nobel laureate Terry Root, PWR instructor Kimberly Moekle has helped spearhead a new interdisciplinary graduate seminar entitled “Going Green: Research, Writing and Reporting to the Public.” One of the goals of the course is to create a Stanford-generated advice column to answer questions from the public about the sustainable use of natural resources.

Moekle describes her role in the course as “guiding graduate students through the translation of their research into formats for two very distinct audiences.” Specifically, the project requires that writers communicate clearly with both the lay public through a mainstream media column and a more technically literate audience via content on a Stanford website. The Hume Writing Center has also contributed to the project, thanks to director Clyde Moneyhun, who has provided workshops for the class addressing issues of audience and genre.

Moekle hopes that more connections such as the one between PWR and the Department of Earth Sciences will help raise visibility for the humanities’ role in shaping action, awareness, and future interdisciplinary projects in the field of sustainability. Such work connects with Moekle’s own work on environmental rhetoric in PWR, as well as her forthcoming essay on the controversial Cape Wind Project in Nantucket Sound, to be published in an anthology entitled, Writing the Earth: Rhetorics and Literacies of Sustainability.

Stanford Daily, November 13, 2007
By Salone Kapur

Freshman and sophomore Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) students held a videoconference yesterday morning with students at Sweden’s Orebro University and Uppsala University. Students in Alyssa O’Brien’s “Cross Cultural Rhetoric” and Christine Alfano’s “Cultural Interfaces” spoke with the Swedish students as part of the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric Project, which was piloted last year.

In yesterday’s videoconference, groups of three Stanford students communicated in intimate groups with three Swedish students, aided by an interactive whiteboard and an instant message chat.

In addition to fostering cultural understanding and learning, the project carried significance in the realm of international relations... (Read the full Daily article on the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric Project).

Visit the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric Project website