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During the Fall 2024 semester, my first-year composition (FYC) students were working on a service-learning (SL) project for Echoes and Reflections (ER), a professional development program that creates educational materials about the Holocaust. Our deliverable was an educational podcast about the Łódź Ghetto, one of the largest and longest-lasting ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe. Social justice was the motivation behind our work, given that Holocaust knowledge continues to decline while white nationalist sentiment is steadily on the rise (Claims Conference, 2018; Southern Poverty Law Center, 2023). In early November, we had begun the script-writing phase of our project when a student approached me with a question. This student had been rehearsing their group’s share of the podcast script and found that part of it sounded odd when verbalized. The script originally referred to the masses of people herded into the Łódź Ghetto as “residents,” and this student wondered if “prisoners” would be more accurate.
This conversation illustrated the kind of self-awareness that FYC instructors long to see from our students. This student was thinking critically about the power of words to convey meaning. Would “residents” minimize the suffering endured by the Nazis’ victims? How would this single word choice affect the audience’s understanding of the Łódź Ghetto? (ER mostly shares their resources with secondary educators, whose students likely do not know much about the Holocaust.) Moreover, this student was reflecting on their and their groupmates’ moral/ethical responsibilities as authors. Put simply, this question of “residents” versus “prisoners” demonstrated understanding of the rhetorical situation. The concern in that moment was not about a grade but, rather, the real-world impact that an act of composition could have— and it is this feeling of responsibility that I strive to instill in my students.
I think a great deal about the connection between composition and justice, how the former can be used in pursuit of the latter, but it is not always easy to make my students see that same connection. Teaching FYC is tough. I say that as someone who has taught the course enough times—seventeen sections in total—that by now, one would think I’d be able to do so in my sleep. But the reality is quite different. This course is a requirement for students, who often regard it as a box to be checked rather than a journey toward honing their unique authorial voices, a perception Duffy (2014) attributes to heavy partitioning between disciplines that “threatens to isolate us within increasingly specialized discourses that have little to say to one another” (p. 213). As someone who teaches at a primarily STEM institution, I know the struggle of trying to engage with students who wonder what value, if any, composition holds for them and their academic/professional goals. Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) can find ourselves deflated by this reality, as these teaching assignments can be invaluable career preparation. We want to feel like the work we do matters, especially in a time when the humanities are increasingly being devalued.
It is therefore surprising that research into the value of service-learning (SL) for writing curricula remains minimal (Iverson, 2019). Such a topic demands more extensive work than what I offer here. Nevertheless, I would like to draw from relevant scholarship and my own teaching experience to argue that service-learning offers a more enriching experience for composition students through “counter-normative pedagogy” (Carnicelli & Boluk, 2017, p. 131) that disrupts the structures and values of education and thus moves students to assume greater agency in their learning. While I also do not have space to explain and justify every detail of my course design, I focus specifically on the ways that SL challenges traditional classroom hierarchy. The result, I argue, is composition that students are more personally invested in and empowered by, which therefore has greater potential to fuel social change.