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 wildfires, so they decided to collaborate on a single section and divvy up different aspects of the chapter among themselves).
- Mini-Presentations to start building class knowledge of what each student was writing about in order to foster cross-referencing.
- Page Creation and a Reflection of their rationale behind their page. This was a chance for students to articulate how their chapter fit among the other chapters in the book.
- Some Auxiliary Pressbooks Tasks; these ended up being numerous enough that I made a collection of tasks a single formal assignment.
- Publication of The Chapter itself.
The evidence of what happened or what people made
The Pressbook that was produced: https://uw.pressbooks.pub/nwforestryresearch/
Adjusting the Recipe for Next Time
Accessibility was an ongoing practice! Things like creating alt-text, captions, accessible formatting conventions, high contrast text and images took work from the students. While the concept and importance of accessibility was introduced early on, the work of maintaining this practice took more on-going work than I initially anticipated.
The dynamic of community engagement and student led research can generate unexpected difficulties! 350Seattle had a clear perspective on this issue which didn’t always align with student interest. Because the assignment was designed to allow students to choose their own topic of interest, a lot of time was spent in class discussing and negotiating how to make sure we are meeting the needs of the community organization while also making this a project students could self-direct.
Community organizations don’t function on the quarter system! Classroom projects are not always as nimble as organizers are able to be, and this book turned out to be a bigger project than I anticipated. While we took approximately eight weeks to put together the Pressbook, my conversations with 350Seattle and the community engagement center at UW had taken place at the start of the previous quarter in order to give me enough time to be assigned a class, develop the materials, and work with the class to produce an Pressbook. This means that from the naming of the exigency and the publication of the resource slightly more than 20 weeks had passed. Meanwhile, the terrain of organizing had shifted some as staffing and organizational needs shifted. By the time the book was published, it was circulated by 350Seattle but it is not clear how useful of a resource it ended up being.