Writing Specialist Confidential: Emily Polk, School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Scientists Writing Specialist
Preface:
The Stanford Writing Specialist program locates lecturers from the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) in a range of departments and programs to support undergraduate writing and the teaching of writing across all four years of study. Funded by the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the Writing Specialist program grew out of the 2012 SUES Committee’s recommendation that experienced writing instructors should serve as “formal writing consultants” in departments and programs across the university.
A big part of my Writing Specialist duties last year was to support the creation of a new WIM (Writing in the Major) course for the Earth Systems Program with the Deputy Director of the Program. He had long envisioned a writing course focused on wilderness discourse, a course that explored the many different ways that people have understood, related to and experienced the wild. I helped him to develop a series of scaffolded assignment sequences that culminated in students writing a final wilderness essay that centered a consideration of audience, purpose and context, but was also informed by the personal interests and experiences of the student.
One of the most rewarding experiences for me was supporting the integration of place-based writing exercises into the syllabus. I knew the Earth Systems Program had their own vehicles, which would simplify transportation logistics. Ultimately we decided on two writing-in-the-field trips: one to Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, (https://jrbp.stanford.edu/) over 1000 acres of wilderness in the eastern foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. According to its website, “The preserve provides a natural laboratory for researchers from all over the world, educational experiences to students and docent-led visitors, and refuge to native plants and animals.” Here students would have a writing experience in a more traditional “wild” setting, in a redwood grove after a hike and a history lesson that grounded them into the place. Our second writing field trip was to Collective Roots, (http://www.collectiveroots.org/) an urban community farm in East Palo Alto, focused on increasing the growing, sharing, and eating of nutritious foods in the city. We thought this trip would offer a more “urban” experience of the wild, and perhaps challenge some students to reconsider their conceptions of wilderness, and wildness.
In addition to getting students to write outside of the classroom, both field based experiences asked them to consider how place informs the content, form, and practice of writing. After several writing prompts that spoke to the specifics of the rural and urban wilderness settings, students were asked to reflect on writing processes, on their own writing habits, and consider the conditions that have shaped our attitudes and emotions about the act writing. It felt important to me to have writing be a pleasurable experience in these contexts—creative and meaningful and directly connected to their lived experiences. I wanted them to understand in a more deeply felt way, how writing is connected to place, how we can use words as bridges between our own ideas and experiences of the world and the world itself.
One benefit of these trips that I did not account for but was grateful to witness was the ways in which the act of collectively writing together outside and sharing that writing, helped to foment a sense of community that was brought back into the classroom, and most certainly compelled students to support each other as they continued the process of developing and revising their final essays.
