Interview with Catharine Wright

An Interview about Civic Engagement, Technolgy and Educational Models

Catharine Wright taught writing at the University of Michigan and the State University of New York at Cortland before joining the writing program at Middlebury College. She earned her BA in literature at Middlebury and an MFA in writing from the University of Michigan. Publications include a non-fiction book, Vermonters At Their Craft, as well as stories, essays, and articles in literary and special interest magazines such as Negative Capability, Phoebe, Studio Potter, Zen Bow, and The New Mexican. Her courses explore diverse ways of thinking and writing about self and other; a range of genres and the process of writing; and the various roles of a writer. Two of her courses, Writing for Social Change, and Story and Ritual, feature online student discourse about social issues and Multi Media service learning projects

On Civic Engagement
by Catharine Wright

Civic means to be a citizen—of a community or a nation/state. And engagement is to become involved, to participate. So civic engagement is to become involved as a member of a community or a nation. In terms of studying abroad, whether we’re talking about students from the U.S. studying abroad or students from other countries coming to the U.S., civic engagement means two things, I think: 1) becoming actively involved in the community that one has traveled to, arrived at, rather than just being a spectator, and sharing with that community in a way that meets defined needs, rather than just being a consumer of the culture, and 2) by virtue of the connection that one creates, inside oneself and within the communities that one comes from and arrives at, one works to create global citizenry, to build a sense of “civility” shall we say across cultures and geographical and political landscapes. This kind of civility, as we know, can be very different from what “civilizations,” or political bodies, have been known to engage in. Meaning that the former English Empire and the current American Empire, so to speak, have generally not been “civil” to other cultures. So it is educational for American students in particular to engage in community based learning abroad. And I think that many students are interested in this.

One of the students from the service learning Story and Ritual seminar, a young man, is taking time off from school next year to engage in service work in India, and another student, an international student from Norway, is staying [in Middlebury, VT] this summer to work at ACCAG, the Addison County Community Action Group, as an intern. Two other students from the class, both international students, have applied for and received funding from [Middlebury College] to host a symposium on human rights in the fall of 2007. The idea for this, I believe, came in part from a peace conference they attended last spring, and their funding to attend that conference came from Middlebury College's Alliance for Civic Engagement. So civic engagement and community leadership can be closely interconnected, although they don’t have to be. But oftentimes I think that happens.

Of course in any good leadership you need the support people, and that’s where I see myself, and other students in the class. One student from the seminar signed up for Habitat for Humanity during her spring break, and said it was one of the most satisfying experiences she ever had. On returning to campus, having used her hands in connection with her spirit, she felt that her head was clear and that she was ready to return to schoolwork. There is definitely a spiritual component to service learning, or community based learning, in that it fulfills our need to express our interconnection with other living beings, our mutually dependency on this earth. Academic study without some grounding in community life or without some response to local or global problems just can’t fill that need the same way. And in these times that we live in, I think that we all feel that need, whether we’re conscious of it or not. If we don’t respond to our need to respond, we express our confusion in some distorted way, like substance abuse or hostility or violence towards others, or excessive, self absorbed consumerism.

The way that service learning classes work is as follows. The faculty member generally establishes a “partnership” with a non-profit organization prior to enrollment for the class. In other words, it is part of the course preparation to identify those “community partners.” In my case, I formed alliances with four community partners, one of which was an on-campus student run organization called Women and Global Peace, an organization spearheaded by Zora Safi and Goretti Namuli and others. These students came out of Middlebury College Assistant Professor of Writing Hector Vila’s first-year seminar called Voices Along the Way, and were already thinking about their education in broader terms than just acing tests. Zora’s purpose, here, for example, as a student who is supported by the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women, is to educate herself so that she can give back to her country. She is already committed to a life of service, and you can feel this when you talk to her. She is driven, she is focused on international issues and processes, she takes criticism easily, because not everything for her is so personal—it’s about something larger. So she wants feedback in order to do her work, and she uses it, and is incredibly productive.

I was not like that as an undergraduate. I was much more sensitive to criticism and I wanted to feel a sense of larger purpose and was frustrated not to have a focus for that. So I left school after my sophomore year and traveled abroad on my own. I wanted to go to many countries, including Israel and an African country, not just European countries, and at that time Middlebury didn’t have the breadth of programs available that they have now. I went on my own, backpacking, starting in England and working my way south. I spent a month in Israel, learning about Judaism and Islam, and had made my way to the Red Sea, where I was going to cross over into Egypt, when my father had a life threatening accident and I went home to help care for him. I never made it to Africa but that trip was enormously educational for me because during it I realized how unproductive I was as a traveler without a program or a purpose beyond my self-education. It was an important trip for me, but just for me. I vowed that the next time I went abroad it would be with a sense of purpose. So when my then husband was studying ecosystems in graduate school at Cornell, we decided to go to Central America to be involved in community reforestation projects. In Costa Rica he worked with local landowners and non profits to document how they interacted with the forest over time, and it was a study that had practical uses. He brought that method back to Addison County and started the Clayplain Forest Project, which I am using as my next community partner for this fall’s installation of Story and Ritual.

The purpose of the seminar is to examine the roles of stories and rituals in our lives—stories and rituals that build community and identity in positive ways, and destructive roles, too, in that stories can be used to obstruct the truth, to support norms in seemingly invisible ways. We also look at how landscapes hold stories and rituals, how landscapes and narratives are interconnected, and how both are intertwined with our social, political and spiritual identity. So within the context of the course, service learning creates a way to activate that social, political and spiritual inquiry. The learning process is both active and reflective (Cress, 83-84). And the readings support the reflection, help provide context and vocabulary to discuss these ideas.

In terms of specific projects and multi media, the community partners latched onto the idea of multi media once I put it out there. They don’t have access to the equipment and labs and instruction that we do, so it’s an easy way for us within the college community to share resources with non-profits while challenging ourselves to use the technology responsibly. By this I mean that once we have these powerful tools in our hands—images, soundtracks, software to combine them—we have to think about what kind of discourse we’re entering into, what perspectives we represent, what kind of attitudes and assumptions and biases we bring with us, and who our audiences are—how are they going to “read” our work? How does a writer position his/her self to tell the truth? What is the truth? Having a diverse class is enormously helpful in that respect. International as well as domestic students can bring in perspectives that some American students have not thought deeply about. Putting students in groups gets them interacting in more intimate ways—having to blend perspectives and ideas, to collaborate, to create community in the classroom, in their work. So the community building is happening inside the classroom as well as between the class and the community. And International and Study Abroad programs make the collaboration more global, more about global citizenship. This is evident in the student created video, Not Just Numbers, that was inspired by the need that our community partner, Women and Global Peace, defined: to create a film that educates others about global violence against women. WGP gave Story and Ritual students that task so that the organization could have the materials to educate and mobilize people around this issue. The students who made the video were themselves a diverse group: one from India, one a first generation Indian American, and two from the Midwest, one from a very small town in Kansas. They were all passionate about the issue: they chose it. And they all brought their unique knowledge bases and skills with them and combined what they knew and the learning goals of the class with WGP’s mission. So that film is very much a collaboration, among the Women and Global Peace organization, the seminar, and the four students who created it, building on the backs of organizations that collect information about women in war zones, women in the U.S., and drawing on the women who bravely articulate their stories from war zones or situations of domestic abuse in countries like the U.S.

The technology itself is not what the learning is about. But it’s an important vehicle. It’s a tool, like language is a tool, and it can be used for purposes that are enlightening, or not. In ways that help us see and understand more about ourselves and others, or not. Of course the business of understanding ourselves and others is what travel abroad is all about, and this intersects nicely with civic engagement and global citizenship. That is something that higher education very much needs to be investing in: we can’t afford to be in an ivory tower, to not engage in the world, not at this point in time.

Works Cited:
Christine Cress, Peter Collier, Vicki Reitenauer. Learning Through Serving. Stylus Publishing. Virginia. 2005.