WELCOME TO “FIELD STUDIES IN CIVIC ENGAGEMENT”

WRTG 3020 Topics in Writing

Spring Semester 2011

Dr. Rolf Norgaard

Section 038 MW 3:00-4:15 HUMN 160

Course Office Hours and Contact Information:

TR 9:30-11:00 a.m., and by appointment

EnvironmentalDesignBuilding (ENVD), lower level, enter at NW corner, Room 1B64

Mailbox in ENVD, lobby area

Office phone / voice mail: 303-492-3605

E-mail: (M-F)

Home phone: 303-447-9521 (only if pressing)

Brief Course Description

Welcome! “Field Studies in Civic Engagement” is a rhetorically informed upper-division seminar that examines the role and challenges of civic and ethical engagement in higher education. The course explores key scholarly contributions to the topic as a prelude to your own local ethnographic research, which will have you analyze sites of civic engagement on campus and in the local community. The course takes a rhetorical perspective on civic engagement, with a focus on how language works to develop and maintain values and to prompt action. The course is taught as an intensive writing seminar emphasizing critical thinking, revision, oral presentation skills, and strategies for addressing specialized disciplinary and/or discourse communities. The course focuses on collaborative research projects with campus and community civic organizations, resulting in major consulting reports that stress effective communication with multiple stakeholders.

Why is this class a “Core Course”?

This 3000-level writing and rhetoric seminar satisfies upper-division core requirements in various CU-Boulder schools and colleges because it extends rhetorical knowledge and writing skills in ways that draw on theoretical perspectives and address specialized disciplinary and civic communities.

More broadly, this upper-division seminar is part of the statewide “Guaranteed Transfer” pathway of courses. In the context of statewide courses, this course meets the goals of an Advanced Writing Course (GT-CO3):

Rhetorical Knowledge. The course takes a rhetorical perspective on civic engagement in the context of university education. Key rhetorical texts that will guide our discussions include Rolf Norgaard’s Composing Knowledge (Bedford/StMartin’s), a rhetoric/reader that focuses on the use of ethnographic research in the writing process. Because that text discusses academic discourse conventions and their application and adjustment to other discursive spheres, the book fosters metacognitive awareness and skills about writing and rhetoric. Discussions of civic engagement are informed by key theoretical texts by Robert Putnam, Kwame Appiah, Louis Menand, and Paolo Freire, among others. We will also draw on the substantive materials on two nationally recognized rhetoric and composition websites: The Purdue University OWL (on-line writing lab),and the Colorado State University Writing Center and WAC Clearinghouse. For elucidation of rhetorical concepts and specific terms, we’ll work with the nationally recognized website Silva Rhetoricae.

Writing Process. The course offers an opportunity to understand writing from the audience or reader perspective by focusing on the peer review of work in progress. Through this approach, you’ll discover how revision is central to writing as a tool for civic analysis and engagement. You will also have opportunities to integrate various technologies (e.g. PowerPoint, CU-Learn on-line course web site) into your consulting project, and to develop advanced information literacy skills pertinent to your research area.

Conventions. The documents you will write for this course will call upon key genres for academic analysis and professional communication, culminating in a full blown report appropriate for broad dissemination. In the process you will learn about genre conventions appropriate to your field and/or to your audience, about how to draw on specialized vocabularies in ways that still make your work accessible to secondary audiences, and about the role of textual features and document design as persuasive tools.

Effective application. Many of the assignments in the course are geared to real-world audiences—including members of your discipline or profession, stakeholders on campus and the community, and the client and stakeholders for your semester-long design project. In the process, you will become familiar with writing in a disciplinary or specialized rhetorical situation, even as you make your work accessible to secondary audiences in other related fields.

Course Overview and Objectives

This course offers an opportunity to think of yourself as an engaged writer and a producer of knowledge, especially when, for much of your college career, your other courses often positioned you as a consumer of what other people already know. We’ll discuss—and more importantly, enact—what it means to be an engaged writer in college, on our campus, and in your community.

This course will hone your capacities for critical and analytical thinking and creative expression by engaging you directly and reflectively in acts of reading and writing. Our work together is based on the principle that the best way to learn to write is by writing—by engaging frequently and intensively in the arts of composition. My goal in this course is to provide you with ways of composing, and ways of interacting with texts and field sites for research that will enable you to become a more reflective, active, and effective participant in the intellectual and civic life of our campus and our culture. Through your own acts of reading and writing, criticism and research, you will learn first hand the ways that knowledge is composed, beliefs are formed, and values are sustained—and you will learn that your own voice can make a difference.

Our informal topic for the semester will be “Composing (Civic) Knowledge.” Through readings and individualized and team writing projects, this course encourages you to explore the role of language and rhetoric in “composing” what—and how—we “know” about our civic life and our civic engagements. The best courses present not just a topic but respond to a need. The need, in this case, is what I find to be a distinctive and, alas, pervasive misunderstanding about ethical and civic engagement. We might think of it as the pathology behind this course’s pedagogy. Civic engagement is typically seen as some extraordinary activity, performed elsewhere by other, equally extraordinary individuals. Ethical engagement experiences much of the same misunderstanding, but with the added burden of being haunted by the prospect of some ethical lapse or shortcoming. All too rarely is ethical and civic engagement understood as occurring here and now, as being quotidian, even ordinary—in short, as being possible. As a result, any such engagement is deferred. It is seen as idealistic, as something we cannot measure up to in our flawed and all too busy lives. In reality, such engagement deserves to be seen as a part of the ongoing fabric of our community, and as something that needs to be revealed, examined, and celebrated if it is to grow and prosper.

This course responds to this problem by helping you to “excavate” layers of ethical and civic engagement already at work on the CU campus and in the community. A key component of the course is that you will go out “into the field” to conduct ethnographies of the ethical and civic. In the course of this field work, you will uncover the complex, sometimes intractable issues that motivate engagement; you will come to know the people and the communities who are nurtured by this engagement; and you will come to appreciate the sense of agency that, in turn, can prompt you to nurture the seeds of engagement in your own lives. A distinctive and innovative feature of this writing and rhetoric course is that the products of your ethnographic field work will not lie hidden in some file drawer. Instead, you will be contributing to a portfolio or magazine that will be submitted to the Institute for Ethical and Civic Engagement, for possible wider dissemination and fundraising efforts.

We will organize our work during the first six weeks of the semester in a broad arc that touches on three themes:

  • Assessing your lived experience at the intersection of personal, civic, and academic lives.
  • Framing issues in civic engagement through theoretically grounded readings
  • Analyzing how civic issues play in the public press
  • Developing a map of campus civic engagement at CU and in the local community

A variety of short assignments and two formal graded essays will provide you with skills and insights upon which to develop the field project that lies at the center of the course. At the end of the course, you will write a reflective essay that assesses your deepening appreciation for civic engagement and its relationship to writing and rhetoric.

The final ten weeks of the semester will be devoted to a major team project that has you investigate and analyze a particular site or issue of civic engagement. In the course of this project, you will

  • Provide an initial site report and proposal for research
  • Engage in collaborative research
  • Offer a formal oral presentation
  • Write a substantive final report, revised based on an intermediate draft
  • Publish the report to the broader campus community.

The major field project offers you an opportunity to apply general academic writing skills to communication tasks that can involve particular and often highly specialized disciplinary or civic communities.

This course is taught as an intensive writing workshop, augmented as appropriate by technology. We draw on the latest educational technologies, specifically CU-Learn, to support teaching and learning, and we will help you develop skills in critical information literacy so crucial for you as you search for, work with, and evaluate a variety of sources, both print and electronic. The course deals with issues of style, grammar, and organization, not in isolation, but in the context of larger rhetorical and argumentative concerns.

Texts and Materials

Working as a writer in college (and beyond) means working together. Writing is a social and collaborative act. To that end, the principal text in the course will be your own writing, and the principal activity will be sharing our work with each other and encouraging each other as we look forward to that next draft. Please have drafts ready for circulation 24-36 hours prior to class discussion. Drafts are required, but not graded. Please date all drafts. Your participation grade in the course (not to mention the quality of your work) will take a nose dive if you don’t submit and circulate your work on time. If you miss classroom discussion of your work because you do not turn in drafts in advance of class, the quality of your papers will almost certainly suffer. I will not accept final papers that have not been reviewed on a regular basis over the course of the assignment. "First draft" final versions are unacceptable and will receive an F. Late papers will not be accepted (except under extraordinary circumstances).

Required Texts

Rolf Norgaard, Composing Knowledge: Readings for College Writers. Boston: Bedford/St.Martin’s. 2007. (A portion of royalties goes to student scholarship fund.) See day-by-day schedule for specific readings.

A college-level handbook and dictionary of your choice. The handbook will be very useful to you as a writer throughout your college career and beyond, but it is not something we will “cover” in class in any systematic way.

Other readings and course materials will be provided in the form of handouts or by electronic means (see summary of key readings and assignments, below). These readings will include:

Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital” Journal of Democracy 6.1 (1995)

David Berreby, “It Takes a Tribe” (CK p. 53)

Kwame Appiah, excerpt from Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

Paul Loeb, excerpt from Soul of a Citizen: Living with Convictions in a Cynical time

Barry Checkoway, “Renewing the Civic Mission of the American Research University”

John S. O’Connor, “Civic Engagement in Higher Education”

We will refer on an ongoing basis to materials on two nationally recognized rhetoric and composition websites:

  • The Purdue University OWL (on-line writing lab):
  • The Colorado State University Writing Center, which offers an array of “writing resources” and “teaching resources” pertinent to this course:

For elucidation of rhetorical concepts and terms, we’ll refer to the nationally recognized website:

  • Silva Rhetoricae

Attendance and Participation

As writers, we rely on each other as fellow writers and as readers. For this reason, regular attendance and active participation throughout the semester are crucial to this seminar/writing workshop. Students who miss class will be expected to ask classmates for the information and assignments they missed. Students who miss more than three classes can expect their final grade to be lowered by one fraction of a letter (i.e. A to A-) for each absence after the third. Even when excused, more than seven absences can result in a W, IF, or F for the course. Please note this attendance policy. You have, in essence, three “freebies.” Horde them and use them wisely: anticipate that you may feel under the weather one day, or that you may fall madly in love, or that you may need to recover from falling out of love. Class starts at the announced time; tardiness is not acceptable (two late arrivals count as one absence).

Course Delivery and Review of Assignments

Ours is a collaborative classroom. In addition to in-class discussion, we will make intensive use of the class website on CU-Learn. A regular and required assignment is that you pick up (or electronically download) and read papers to be discussed in advance of the class. You must come to class ready to comment on the work of your colleagues and to share in their inquiry. Student presentations on readings and on drafts submitted by classmates will be a regular feature of the workshop. These presentations should be prepared in advance of class and should be well organized, cogent, and to the point. In our “workshops” (as elsewhere in life), the Golden Rule applies well. Do unto other writers as you would have them do unto you. Writers need more than empty praise. They seek an attentive and discerning audience, ready to improve the writing and thinking.

In addition to a number of short assignments and activities, you will develop a major project for this class, one that joins an ongoing conversation about civic engagement, as grounded in your detailed examination of one field site or issue. Frequent drafts and revisions of the project report will be necessary. You will be expected to work on these documents throughout the semester, even on days when your draft may not come up for discussion. You cannot pass this course without successfully completing the short papers and the major project. Be sure to date and save all drafts, and to save your work (including various drafts) on computer files. Always retain a hardcopy of every assignment for your files.

Technology and Information Literacy

This class will draw on multiple technologies, among them websites, PowerPoint, email, and digital library databases. This class will use the course support software “CU-Learn”for general discussion, and for the circulation of drafts. Please check the CU-Learn course website frequently. If you use a non-university e-mail account (e.g. hotmail.com, msn.com), be sure to link it to the university e-mail account. Access to on-line library materials requires that you be identified as a university user (colorado.edu). See the Library web site, for information on remote access and setting proxy servers. It is your responsibility to become familiar with sending and receiving attachments using commonly available software (e.g. Microsoft Word), and for pasting text into the body of an e-mail. For assistance on technical computing matters, contact 735-HELP or 5-4357 for the Information Technology Help-Line.

Special Notes and University Policy Statements

If you qualify for accommodations because of a disability please submit to me a letter from Disability Services in a timely manner so that your needs may be addressed. Disability Services determines accommodations based on documented disabilities. Contact: 303-492-8671, Willard Hall, room 322, If you have a temporary medical condition or injury, see guidelines at

If you speak English as a second language, you should contact me before the third class meeting so that I can better assist you in the course, advise you about special ESL courses, and/or refer you (if needed or desired) to appropriate services on campus.

Campus policy regarding religious observances requires that faculty make every effort to deal reasonably and fairly with all students who, because of religious obligations, have conflicts with scheduled exams, assignments, or required attendance. I am happy to accommodate such students. Contac me well in advance of any conflict.

Plagiarism will not be tolerated; the paper will receive an automatic F, and your case reported, consistent with the procedures of the new Student Honor Code. We’ll discuss a good deal more about learning from and using the words of others during the course. This writing seminar provides an opportunity to understand issues of intellectual property and the appropriate use and citation of sources. All students of the University of Colorado at Boulder are responsible for knowing and adhering to the academic integrity policy of this institution. Violations of this policy may include: cheating, plagiarism, aid of academic dishonesty, fabrication, lying, bribery, and threatening behavior. All incidents of academic misconduct shall be reported to the Honor Code Council (; 303-725-2273). Students who are found to be in violation of the academic integrity policy will be subject to both academic sanctions from the faculty member and non-academic sanctions (including but not limited to university probation, suspension, or expulsion). Other information on the Honor Code can be found at and at