What to Expect

Writing 150

In the Writing 150 Community Engagement course, students partner with one of several organizations addressing a variety of social issues in the Los Angeles area, namely education inequity, homelessness, and incarceration. Students may also work with community partners of their own choosing with advance discussion and clearance from the professor. Community engagement does not have to conform to direct forms of service or service to a community that is somehow new or separate from the communities that students already belong to. Activism and serving one’s home communities are valid forms of engagement that still require intentionality and reflection when navigating power. Students who wish to propose alternatives carefully consider the needs of their communities, the people they wish to engage, and the long-term sustainability/outcomes of those efforts. There are virtual, in-person, and hybrid options, depending on the partnership.

Over the course of the semester, students dedicate 12 hours outside of class to their partnerships (depending on the partnership, this time could be spent tutoring, participating in writing workshops, making calls to a new friend who is housing insecure, delivering water on Skid Row, etc.). Additionally, students complete a Community Writing Project. The Community Writing Project is selected, defined, and refined over the course of the semester with input from the community partner. This project is intended as a deliverable to the community partner—a written work that can be used by them in a meaningful way and may take many different forms (a publication, a grant application, content for their website, and so forth).

Writing 340

In the Writing 340 Community Engagement course, USC students partner with community groups to identify local problems and to use rhetorical tools for solving these problems. USC students must have completed any Writing 150 course prior to taking this course. The 340 course is aimed for students interested in writing with and about the community surrounding USC, developing research projects based on community issues and partnering with community organizations to produce multimedia projects designed to reach a public audience. This is an alternatively structured course in terms of contexts of learning and design of assignment modules. Working in teams of 3-5 students, students partner with community groups to develop research proposals and to produce a collaborative multimedia documentary. This entails multiple visits to these sites over the course of the semester, as well as a considerable amount of time both in class and out learning the basic theory and practice of visual storytelling.

Writing 320

Writing 320 Inside-Out Writing Workshop: Examining the Self and Society Via the Essay is offered in conjunction with the USC Dornsife Prison Education Project. This class aims to create opportunities for USC students and incarcerated students to learn from each other in a rigorous and collaborative virtual environment. This course focuses on autobiographical writing; each week, students are tasked with drafting nonfiction narrative pieces that not only tell their life story but root it in a social context. Over the course of the semester, all students and instructors try to understand themselves and our society through reading and writing, with an emphasis on writing as a process of discovery. Writing between USC and students incarcerated at the California Institution for Women (CIW) is exchanged weekly via electronic correspondence. The course culminates in creating and publishing an anthology that features a revised chapter of autobiographical writing from each student.

USC students must have completed any Writing 150 course prior to taking this course. For the first two weeks of the semester, USC students and the students at the correctional facility meet separately to review the Inside-Out practices and policies and prepare for the collaborative meetings to follow. USC students enrolled in the course receive clearance to the correctional facility for the duration of the semester, and are transported to and from the facility by the course instructors. After initial clearance, the course meets weekly at the correctional facility.