The Task

For the next four weeks, you will spend at least one hour per week working with students at 826 Boston as writing tutors. To accommodate this time commitment, we will not be meeting on Mondays for the next four weeks. Please note that this does not mean that your volunteer hours must fall on a Monday – please schedule your volunteer hours whenever works best for you. If you encounter difficulties with signing up for shifts, please let me know and we can work together to figure out how to proceed.

​

During these four weeks of tutoring, you will keep a journal via the class blog. The purpose of this journal is to reflect on your experiences working with students at 826 Boston and how you are making sense of those experiences alongside the concepts we are learning about in class – and vice versa (i.e., how your experiences with 826 students are helping you make sense of course concepts). Your journal will consist of one entry, or blog post, per week, for a total of four entries: three "original" entries, and one entry that respond to one of your peers' blog posts.

​

For the first week, your journal entry should respond to the following questions:

​

• Based on your knowledge of discourse communities from Dan Melzer's text and our class discussions, is 826 Boston a discourse community? Why or why not?

• What do you hope to contribute as a member of the 826 Boston community?

• What do you hope to learn as a member of the 826 Boston community?

​

For the second week, your journal entry should respond to the following questions:

​

• What connections, if any, do you see between the concept of community cultural wealth and Dr. Lyiscott's concept of liberation literacies?

• How do you see different forms of community cultural wealth and language use emerging (or not emerging) in your interactions at 826 Boston?

​

For the third week, you should respond to one of your peers' journal entries by building on something they've said; making new connections; or sharing how your own experiences provide a different perspective. As always, your dialogue with peers should be generous and respectful.

​

For the fourth week, you will reflect on what you have learned throughout the project by carefully considering and responding to all of the following questions:

​

• What have you learned from course texts (e.g. Melzer, Lyiscott, Young) throughout this project?

• What have you learned from your classmates throughout this project?

  • Feel free to reference class discussions and/or build on your third-week response to one of your peers' journal entries here

• What have you learned from your community partners, the students you have worked with at 826 Boston?

• What do you feel has been most transformative for your learning about discourse communities and/or language use? How has your thinking changed since the beginning of the project?

​

The Terms

Length

Each journal entry should be approximately 500-800 words long

​

Format

Journal entries should be posted on the class blog and use MLA citation style

​

Assessment Criteria

In your journal entries, I will be looking for you to do the following:

​

• Provide a focused and coherent response to the given prompt or to your peer's journal entry, as appropriate

• Incorporate knowledge from both course materials and your experiences as a member of the 826 Boston community

• Use key concepts introduced in the course appropriately and prominently in your writing

• Meaningfully reference at least one course text to support your claims (when responding to prompts)

• Be generous in interpreting and responding to your peers' work (when responding to peers' journal entries)