Theoretical Rationale

The course described here grew around a “writing for the community” (Deans, 2000) assignment that was created using a tactical approach. Tactical community partnerships are, according to Mathieu (2005), “local, specific, responsive, and timely” (p. 114). They assume that the products that come out of such partnerships will be “radically insufficient” in their capacity to address genuine community needs, since they are limited as they are by time and mismatches in goals and expertise. But when expectations are managed properly and the needs of all stakeholders are carefully taken into consideration, they still hope for worthwhile, if limited and often difficult-to-assess, outcomes. A nimble, tactical approach made sense for me, because while sustainable partnerships and programs are often upheld as the ideal for community-based writing, my transient status as a graduate student who would not be teaching the same course in the foreseeable future made true sustainability practically impossible (see Deans, 2013), even if it would have opened up more robust avenues for collaboration.

I had some tactical advantages planning this course in the form of established relationships with members of the nonprofits this course partnered with. I worked with these contacts to sketch out limited projects (projects that could be accomplished in about eight weeks by small groups of untrained students) before the course began. Both community groups identified a need for promotional materials. These materials were “wish list” tasks that there never seemed to be time for that did not have fixed deadlines, but they were timely and responsive. For example, one project described at length in this chapter is a web portal and shareable social media for Project Represent, a newly-inaugurated collaboration between the Neighbor Fund and Quiet Corner Refugee Resettlement. While Project Represent had begun fundraising and providing direct aid already, they didn’t yet have any web presence. These web materials responded to an immediate but specific need to make the new initiative more digitally visible.

The limited and tactical nature of these assignments left space in the course for appropriate scaffolding into and out of the Community Partner Projects. This scaffolding sometimes took the form of readings, mostly taken from the field of writing studies but also including contemporary journalistic texts about translation and immigration issues. Scaffolding also included shorter assignments designed to prepare students for some aspect of the Community Partner Project or reflect on it afterward (see below) as well as low-stakes activities practiced during class meetings or asynchronously outside of these.

Many of these scaffolding activities, discussions, and assignments focused on translation as a unifying theme. There were three main ways we deployed the concept of translation in the class (drawn from Scarpa, 2019):

• Interlingual translation: translating from one language to another. Although students weren’t required to produce content in languages other than English, they were informed that the work they did for the Community Partner Projects would likely need to be translated into Spanish, and so some assignments and activities focused on how to write for translation, or, in the words of Ridolfo and DeVoss (2009) “strategic theorizing for how a text might be recomposed.”
• Intralingual translation: Students acted as translators within one language when they had to transform information about community partners from other documents and conversations into texts for different audiences.
• Intersemiotic translation: Students remediated assignments into new genres for their portfolios; they also had to represent content from their community partner organizations in new ways to work in a different medium.

But there was another way that translation became relevant to learning in this course. Halfway through the semester, the COVID-19 pandemic suspended all in-person class meetings and prompted us to move all classwork, including our work with community partners, exclusively online. From that point on, the norms, practices, and relationships we had constructed together as a class had to be translated to an online medium. I opted to convert most classwork (with the exception of some small group and studio meetings) into an asynchronous format in an attempt to accommodate students’ different technology capabilities and the fact that we no longer shared a common time zone. I had to learn alongside students what it meant to translate material, as many of the activities and timelines I had planned simply no longer worked in the new course format.