creative writing for social change

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67 Introduction to Social/Community Change Writing

Amy Minervini

by Amy Minervini

Writing for change is the practice of exploring topics that are meaningful to you, your community, and other stakeholders. You will use rhetorical elements, informative and persuasive skills, and audience analysis to highlight issues and injustices that warrant change. To begin to think about this type of writing, ask yourself a number of questions: What issues in your daily life, in your neighborhood or city, or in the news impact you and others? Why is this particular issue problematic? What changes could be made that would help to be a part of the solution? Who is in charge of making these decisions? What is the best way to reach these individuals or groups? What formats or mediums will be the best way to garner support and effect change? Letter writing — whether to the school board, local officials, newspaper editors, or legislators — is an effective modality to promote actionable change. Service-learning programs and blogging, too, are excellent ways to make a difference in your sphere and in the world.

Key Characteristics

Writing for social change generally exhibits the following:

• Advocates for change through individual, community, or legislative efforts
• Lays out a foundation or a fact pattern that show an injustice has been done or an issue or perspective has been overlooked
• Might engage in brief storytelling or description to help frame an issue or hook the reader/audience
• Incorporates an ethos of restoration and hope
• Awareness of and critique of bias that seeps in
• Acknowledgement of opposing views
• Mindful of intent, medium, audience, and the media (if necessary)

What’s in this Chapter

• Writing Letters to the Editor
• Writing Letters to Elected Officials
• Writing for the Public: Blogging
• Discussion & Writing Prompts

Introduction to Social/Community Change Writing Copyright © 2020 by Amy Minervini is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Write a social change short story or novel

What is the purpose

Like all stories, they  teach the reader a lesson or raise awareness of an issue the author is passionate about.  The author has the power to take their story  in  any direction they choose, as long as the story flows and makes sense.   

Choosing the main character

When first writing up any short story or novel, a character must be the center of it.  With social change, it is important to key in character development to strengthen the moral of the story. For example, if the social change is about police brutality, the main character could have witnessed or experience d an altercation with the police and then wanted to do something about it. Since that life – changing experience, the main character pushed for something they felt passionate about.   

Outlining your story

Next is to create the story outline. Every story is composed of a beginning, middle, and end. This outline doesn’t have to go too much in detail, but it should be descriptive enough th at the story makes sense when you start writing your short story or novel. Going back to the previous example, a simple outline could be that the main character witnesses or experiences an altercation with the police,  they go out and protest and gathers people to join them, and a possible ending to this story could be that someone of higher authority listened to him and made a new law or did something to  stop police brutality in their town. Going into detail about how this unravels will be explored later on.   

Where does the story start?

Like in an essay, you would want to grab the reader’s attention.  Like some novels, they start their work  in media res , meaning they start in the middle of the story. While the story progresses, the reader gets caught up with what happened  before the event. For instance, if you decide to do this approach with the social change concerning police brutality, the  story could start while the main character is involved in some way in the altercation with  the  police. The thoughts of the main character would be indicated and any actions that character is doing about it.  You would also incorporate your “backstory” as to what happened before leading up to this event. Not only is the reader in the loop of wha t is going on currently in the situation, but it gives a creative twist on how to tell your story.   

Finishing your draft

Everything after writing your hook is straightforward. Using your outline as a reference, drafting your short story or novel should be completed. However, there may be bumps along  the road because of writer’s block, but it’s okay! For social change, many people told their stories abou t how they wanted to make a change in society and did something about it. Just getting all your thoughts down on paper is more than enough when writing your first draft.  Writing just the draft of your story may not take a few hours, maybe days ,  or few weeks, but keeping in mind and having at least a beginning, middle, and end of your story is  better than nothing.   

Editing your story

After that initial draft, it is time to go back and edit. Here, you can change how the story goes or how it will end. You, the author, have the power to take your character  in  any direction you choose. For social change, the ma in character should follow a path where  the  action is being taken for something that is affecting society.  As  mentioned previously, the main character can set up  protests and hold events to raise awareness of police brutality ,  and that more should be done by government officials to hold these types of police officers accountable for their actions.  This process of editing can take time as well, but when discussing social change, you may be in a time crunch due to it being a prominent issue that needs attention.   

Get feedback

It is always helpful to receive feedback. It is strongly encouraged. Your work will be released to a large audience ,  so  your work should be  the best it can be. It can be also helpful  to ask someone to look over your work and give  you  ideas on how to improve your story. Having a fresh set of eyes looking at your work will help identify any mistakes you may  have missed or overlooked.   

Wrapping up

The process of writing is not supposed to be linear. After writing your initial draft, you will fall into this cycle of constantly revising and editing your story until you are satisfied. However, it comes to a point where you have to break  that cycle and eventually publish your work. Especially if the work is about a prominent issue and action needs to be taken immediately, then this no time to constantly revise and edit. As long as the message  of social change is being delivered, the short story or novel is ready to be released to the public.  The message of your short story should be clear .   H opefully ,  it is powerful and  inspiring  that others who read it may be inspired to be involved in that change, too.   

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Creative tools for social change

Supporting creative communities.

Moleskine and the Moleskine Foundation have joined forces to create a long-term program to support creative communities worldwide. The program is committed to donating every year thousands of creative tools: notebooks, cahiers, volant, and writing instruments to several non-profit organizations across Europe, Great Britain, the US, Canada, Mexico, and APAC region. This is not only a donation program. It’s a way to build a global community of organizations that share the same vision, amplifying stories, sharing experiences and best practices, building a creative ecosystem, and fostering creativity for social change together. The goal is to support underserved communities globally by offering tangible instruments in which to pour their reflections and thoughts, their inspired moments, doodles and inspirations, in the firm belief that creativity and imagination are key drivers for producing positive social change. Discover the recipients of 2023 below

Quindici19 is an Italian cultural association founded by a group of high school students that, over the years, has become a multicultural space for intergenerational dialogue, where young people can gather, discuss social issues, elaborate solutions and mobilize. They use creativity to find innovative solutions to contemporary problems.

MARZONA STIFTUNG

The Marzona Stiftung also known as the Design Akademie Saaleck is a historic site with a new purpose, a European platform for future-driven conversations with and for designers, and a place to empower passionate innovators in the fields of architecture, design, and craft. It aims to inspire and educate through art and applied arts and architecture and to stimulate emerging talents for the social and environmental challenges for our planet

PLEXO PLATAFORMA CREATIVA

Plexo Plataforma Creativa’s mission is to promote and disseminate contemporary art production as well as artistic research in the state of Chihuahua through pedagogical and curatorial strategies in line with our cultural, political and social reality. It aims to position itself as an organization with innovative pedagogical and curatorial programs that are a national and international reference.

KRAK focuses on engaged discourse while emphasizing the importance of social practice, visual arts, architecture, design, and performance. The framework within which these ideas are achieved is bordered by a strategy of collaboration, social responsibility, and environmental awareness. KRAK wants to position itself as a platform of alternative learning, collaboration, and coexistence with a focus on contemporary art strategies and inventive protocols in the field of contemporary culture.

LA GUARIMBA

La Guarimba is an international film festival and association based in Calabria, Southern Italy. La Guarimba -“safe space” in the Venezuelan indigenous language- is a safe space where marginalized youth and the local community can explore the art of film, learn how to express themselves and explore the incredible potential of Calabria.

REFLEKTOR FOUNDATION

Reflektor Foundation is a mission-driven creative studio based in Sofia that sees art, science, and new media as a way to promote social transformation. The foundation supports marginalized youth against the social injustices they suffer from and advocates for disadvantaged communities’ rights, using creativity as a tool to envision an equal future for all.

IN PLACE OF WAR

In Place of War (IPOW) is a global organization that uses artistic creativity in places of conflict as a tool for positive change. Its vision is to live in a world where creativity conquers conflict.  They enable grassroots change-makers in music, theatre and across the arts to transform cultures of violence and suffering into hope, opportunity and freedom. They work with a network of young change-makers based in their communities, in conflict situations across 26 countries, primarily in UK/USA, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Balkans.

FIBERS (Fashion Innovative Businesses for the Environment, Reformation, and Sustainability) is a fashion organization that aims to train fashion social entrepreneurs, empowering them to grow and scale their businesses that positively impacts the planet, people, and profit. Their mission is to promote a sustainable and ethical fashion industry that empowers entrepreneurs and artisans to create positive social and environmental impact through innovative and profitable enterprises. FIBERS envisions a fashion industry that prioritizes the planet, people, and profit.

LAMA operates in the social and urban innovation field, focusing on sustainable cities and communities. It aims to accompany organizations and places in processes of sustainable transformation through values such as accessibility, responsibility, cooperation and resource regeneration. Its vision is to ensure social, and environmental sustainability and in governance and business models through cooperative enterprise in order to best respond to the challenges of our time.

Media Lab’s vision is to become a model of a new type of University by 2030, making the University of Oviedo one of the most innovative in Europe for its learning methodology. They train interdisciplinary students, favoring new mental thinking models, and making them participate in projects that solve the problems of their cities in order to create a positive impact on society.

ATELIER ANAMORPHOSE

The Atelier Anamorphose offers young people from sensitive neighborhood projects to embellish objects or places into works of art. In collaboration with artists, the association accompanies young people aged 15 to 25 with disabilities and/or social difficulties in integration, inclusion and self-revaluation through the widest possible openness to the outside world. The use of “street art” allows young people to discover professional fields with an attractive purpose.

TEATRO METAPHORA

Teatro Metaphora’s purpose is to develop cultural and educational activities for the benefit of community development. Its objectives are to advance the social and personal competencies of children, youth, and adults through non-formal education principles and to give life-changing skills and experiences to people, with fewer opportunities. It is promoting equal opportunities, inclusion, active citizenship, participation, and the creation of various opportunities.

WATERSPRITE FILM FESTIVAL

Watersprite Film Festival is run by young people for young people and is the largest student film festival in the UK, continuously working to showcase diverse young voices. Their main goal is to make the screen industry more accessible and a more representative and welcoming space for all. They want to empower the next generation by providing opportunities to learn, create and share.

EN LUGAR DE CREACIÓN

En Lugar de Creación carries out artistic and cultural projects for social development in relation to other fields such as education, science, technology, heritage and the environment. They aim to create a supportive educational space that supports gender equality, public health and gender equality through performative arts and music.

CREATIVE VISIONS FOUNDATION

The mission of the Creative Visions Foundation is to empower creative activists worldwide to raise awareness of critical issues and drive positive change through impact storytelling. They aim to create a more caring, just, and sustainable world through creative activism – the power of media, art, and education to drive positive change and the core values of creativity, honesty, teamwork, transparency, inclusion, and joy.

UG DAH TEATAR

Ug Dah Teatar is an independent, professional, contemporary theater troupe and artistic collective that uses modern theater techniques to create engaging art and initiate positive social change locally and globally. Their artistic activities mix theatre, dance, and visual arts to inspire a personal and social transformation.

ROGUE PACK YOUTH THEATRE

Rogue Pack (RP) is a nonprofit youth theatre company that facilitates storytelling theater workshops for underserved youth. Its mission is to create a community where youth transcend social barriers by taking ownership of their stories through theater arts. They help youth write their unique stories and aid them in developing and devising a script through writing and performance workshops.

THE ACADEMY OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC

The ACM’s core mission statements are ‘do what you love’ and ‘learn by doing.’. They work with a wide array of creative students from the widest catchment of financial, geographic, and ability backgrounds and aim in every case to instill a greater level of artistry, capability, and self-belief in every student under their care.

LOCUST PROJECTS

Locust Projects is a non-profit art space based in Florida that aims to create opportunities for visual artists at all career stages, invite risk-taking and experimentation and activate conversations around new art and ideas.

GIVE SOMETHING BACK TO BERLIN

The organization’s mission is to challenge how integration is perceived and depicted. They imagine a world where migrants, refugees, and locals co-create in a spirit of solidarity as they strongly believe that we are stronger together. GSBTB creates a safe(r) space where new and established Berliners work together to foster individual and collective creativity to form a stronger, more open, inclusive society.

FUNDACIÓN IXCANUL

Fundación Ixcanul aims to contribute to creating positive impact and social transformations through film to encourage critical thinking. It seeks to democratize access to audiovisual content that addresses relevant issues such as memory, identity, inequality, racism, or environmental conflicts in Guatemala.

DEPARTMENT OF IMAGINARY AFFAIRS

The mission of Department of Imaginary Affairs is to imagine equitable futures.  Their work is to seek, center, elevate, and amplify the voices, stories, living experiences, perspectives, ideas, and ideally decision-making practices of Newcomers, Immigrants, Refugees, and Youth (especially those who identify as Black, Indigenous and/or People of Colour) in order to co-design more empathetic programs, policies, and services.

CULTURE AND ARTS MANAGERS OF THE PHILIPPINES

Culture and Arts envisions a stigma-free Philippines that is a catalyst for personal and societal transformation, psycho-emotional healing, and artistic development. It aims to create projects and programs that promote behavior change and communication that focus on stigma reduction through the use of the arts and to utilize arts and culture as an advocacy tool to support the members of the community and promote it to the general public.

SOUP AND SOCKS, E.V

Soup and Socks’ vision is a world where everybody can unfold their potential, regardless of background and skill level. Its mission is to engage the refugee community, the Greek host community, and the international community, promoting self-reliance and solidarity in the firm belief that purpose, community, and dignity are essential to building one’s identity.

SCUOLA DI HERAT IN ESILIO

Scuola di Herat’s mission is to create a welcoming and safe space for Afghan artists and students in exile and help to maintain their relationship with their country of origin while providing a sanctuary for artistic expression and cultural exchange. They aim to become a landmark for the world’s travelers, exiled, and refugees, where artists, intellectuals, and students from Afghanistan and beyond can find solace, freedom, and inspiration.

PLACE NETWORK

PLACE accelerates and leverages the innovation newcomers bring to Europe, to bring their perspectives and make their contributions to key economic sectors. By unlocking this new talent and matching it with organizations looking for new players in the areas of business, entrepreneurship, public leadership, and media & arts, they are shifting the perspective of migration from a burden to a unique asset for the development and growth of Europe.

CONCOMITENTES

Concomitentes is a non-profit association that promotes the creation of artworks that engage with their social context. It invites civil society groups to become the citizen-commissioners of artwork and accompanies them through the ensuing process of negotiation.

CLEVELAND PUBLIC THEATRE

The mission of Cleveland Public Theatre is to raise consciousness and nurture compassion through groundbreaking performances and life-changing education programs. They envision a vibrant arts-based environment, created by and for local residents, promoting a sense of belonging and civic engagement for participating artists and attendees. CPT is committed to providing opportunities for creation and education, especially for communities that have been historically excluded from participating in the arts.

Creative Tools for Social Change - 2022 Recipients

• CANVAS Arts Action Programs , Toronto
• Centre for Indigenous Theatre , Toronto
• Platform , Toronto
• SKETCH , Toronto
• ARTE , New York
• Big House Books , Jackson
• Brew & Forge , Greenfield
• NYU Center for Black Visual Culture , New York
• Gray Area , San Francisco
• NYC Salt , New York
• RYSE , Richmond
• The Lower Eastside Girls Club of New York , New York
• Urban Word , New York
• 826NYC , New York
• Comando Colibrí , Mexico City
• Fundacion FLAG , Mexico City
• Girl Up Mexico , Mexico City
• Associazione Milano Mediterranea , Milan
• IntegrART , Treviso
• Officina della Produzione , Milan
• ShowDesk , Milan
• Visual Voices , Nicosia
• Amava Oluntu , Cape Town
• Bag Factory Artists’ Studios , Johannesburg
• Bridges for Music , Cape Town
• Eh!woza , Cape Town
• Free Film Collective , Cape Town

CENTRE FOR INDIGENOUS THEATRE

Centre for Indigenous Theatre supports young and emerging Indigenous creatives to discover their artistic voices through theatre and performing arts . This Toronto- based organization embraces the spirit , energy, and inspiration derived from Indigenous people’s culture, values , and traditions . It encourages the cultural exchange of practices and techniques between Indigenous Nations and communities.

Learn more 

OFFICINA DELLA PRODUZIONE

Officina della Produzione is a Milan- based organization that wants to give voice to those who have no means to express themselves . Focusing on the value of cooperation and active participation , they make audiovisual products and organize art workshops and social events to produce social cohesion , aggregation , and weaving new relationships among young people in the neighborhood .  

Sketch believes that art has the power to transform lives and impact change , envisioning a societal movement in which marginalized young people are empowered to become culture makers. Its work aims to show diverse youth who live homeless ly or in poverty the transformative power of arts and how art can bring consistent societal ch a nge . They offer various artistic and social programs to meet all participants ’ needs , from the most basic to the educational ones .  

FREE FILM COLLECTIVE

Free Film Collective offers film and arts education programs to young aspiring filmmakers, writers, artists , and activists , helping them to develop fundamental professional skills in a country – South Africa – with an extremely high youth unemployment rate.

BAG FACTORY ARTISTS' STUDIOS

Based in Johannesburg, Bag Factory is a non-profit contemporary visual art organization that prepares emerging artists , writers, and curators for their future careers. Bag Factory supports them in the longer term by providing an infrastructure where they can express and develop creative skills, explore and grow . 

RYSE creates safe spaces for youth from marginalized and underserved communities in Richmond, California, that suffer from systemic inequities and discrimination from the institution. RYSE works to address those issues , cultivate healing and build a movement that facilitates the creation of personal, political , and expressive art to shift narratives about youth .  

GIRL UP MEXICO

Girl Up Mexico’s mission is to empower a new generation of women as transformative leaders to advocate for gender equity. With over 250 Clubs across Latin America and the Caribbean, they have trained 3,000 young people of all backgrounds to create tangible change for girls and youth everywhere , giving them a platform to tell their stories and the tools to become gender equity advocates and intersectional activists .  

Art and Resistance Through Education (ARTE) is an NGO based in NYC, inspiring young people to become human rights advocates . The organization engages youth from underserved communities to promote positive social change through visual arts , providing them with tools, skills, and spaces that are too often out of reach .  

IntegrART is an NGO association based in Treviso, Italy fostering social inclusivity of vulnerable subjects through the arts . IntegrART acts as a mobile incubator of the direct connection between the excellencies and the vulnerable people, mainly women, young people, and immigrants , organizing courses , workshops, and projects in schools and settings of cultural gathering s .  

THE LOWER EASTSIDE GIRLS CLUB OF NEW YORK

The Lower Eastside Girls Club supports young women and gender- expansive youth of color throughout NYC in leveraging their inner power to shape a better future for themselves , their community, and the world. Through free, year -round, innovative programming , they connect young people with their passions , celebrate their curiosity , and channel their creative energy to build a just and equitable future filled with “Joy. Power. Possibility .”  

BREW AND FORGE

Brew & Forge’s work stands at the intersection of art and activism . Their initiatives , such as the annual book fair and The Witches & Warriors retreat , aim to raise awareness among young writers and artists on the most pressing social justice issues . Encouraging contamination and dialogue between writers and activists , Brew & Forge upholds the central role literature can play in envisioning a liberated future.

ASSOCIAZIONE MILANO MEDITERRANEA

Associazione Milano Mediterranea is a participatory Art center offering opportunities for art residencies to young artists from the Mediterranean diaspora living in Italy . The organization supports their talents and careers against the stigmatization they suffer from formal institutions.  

BIG HOUSE BOOKS

Big House Books is an NGO based in Jackson, Mississippi, that promotes literacy among inmates in prisons or juveniles’ detentions , in the belief that literacy can be a crucial factor in re- educating and rehabilitating young people currently in correctional facilities in present society.

Learn more  

BRIDGES FOR MUSIC

Bridges for Music considers art an essential agent for social change . That’s why they focus on providing underserved youth with quality arts education , bridging the gap they have to face to become professionals in the creative industry .  

CENTER FOR BLACK VISUAL CULTURE

The Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University researches , documents , and celebrates the cultural and intellectual production of Africa and its Diaspora. It is an interdisciplinary space for students , faculty members , and the external public. It promotes and encourages research and discussion on the contemporary black community’s artistic production.  

VISUAL VOICES

Visual Voices creates spaces where young artists from communities affected by violent conflicts can express their artistic vision and advocate for peace through visual means . They support young creative communities through their artistic journey towards positive social change .  

CANVAS ARTS ACTION PROGRAMS

CANVAS organizes arts-based education , dialogue programs , and workshops for young people to fight gender- based and sexual violence , homophobia , and transphobia . They work in schools, community centers, shelters, and camps , where they encourage empathy and dialogue through art.  

Eh!woza’s work lies between science communication , youth advocacy, community engagement, and technical education . This Cape Town- based organization provides technical and artistic workshops to high school students and young adults. Th anks to these workshops, students learn how to produce documentaries , music, poetry , and music videos that spread knowledge and awareness about HIV and TB, telling the individual , social, and emotional costs of disease s .  

FUNDACIÓN FLAG

FLAG (Fundación Lorena Alejandra Gallardo) is an organization based and working in Mexico City, supporting high- achieving and under- resourced university students in their academic , personal and professional growth during their student experience and the transition to a professional career, helping them to develop their strengths and ambitions .  

NYC SALT’S mission is to empower underserved youth in New York City through an understanding of the visual industry. SALT creates opportunities and pathways to college and career for youth from diverse backgrounds who are dedicated to careers in the arts, by engaging them in a mix of professional photography instruction, college-preparatory workshops, and career exposure.

AMAVA OLUNTU

Amava Oluntu is a South African NGO that firmly believes a renewed sense of community can tackle social inequality . Their communication skills training and networking opportunities aim to support young people to find solutions to the growing challenges in our society, mentoring them to discover their potential and drive positive social change in their communities.  

COMANDO COLIBRÍ

Comando Colibrí’s ultimate purpose is to liberate Mexican girls and women by teaching them how to respond to any kind of violence and fight patriarchal abuses at any level , both physical and spiritual. They focus on empowering women, providing them mental help, and core martial arts education program .  

Urban Word encourages marginalized youth to discover the transformative power of the written and spoken word, providing them the tools, training, and platforms to rewrite their personal narratives and communities. They aim to ignite a personal commitment to social change in young people by promoting active literacy , critical thought , and positive social dialogue .  

Gray Area fosters innovative art and design projects to envision and create our tomorrow using digital tools. They aim to inspire the next generation of change-makers , uphold technology as the key to finding responses to contemporary criticalities, and rethink cities as creative playgrounds to design the future.  

Showdesk is an Italian NGO that supports and encourages youth from underserved communities to develop creative projects and use design as a tool for social development and cultural growth . The organization aims to find young talents and provide them the skills and the confidence to change their future through unconventional educational programs .  

826NYC is dedicated to exploring the endless possibilities of words and fostering generations of creative writers and thinkers, starting from the assumption that creativity is key to engaging youth and promoting positive social change. 826NYC encourages young people to write their future, cultivating writing skills and discovering new approaches. Their creative writing programs are designed to center student voice and encourage youth to harness their imaginations.

Platform aims to create a reality in which all black and indigenous youth, racialized women, and gender-diverse people can participate fully and safely in an equitable society , tickling their leadership capacity to advance gender equity and justice through skill-based workshop series, mentorship, and networking events.  

WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

The program targets non-profit organizations whose work highlights the link between creativity and social transformation. As such, they not only produce unique and unconventional programs and initiatives but generate and foster social change. Areas of intervention might include education, arts and culture, social justice, minorities inclusion.

The program is open to non-profit organizations from all sectors and civil society at large and supports short- or long-term actions that either/or:

• Contribute to the sharing and development of knowledge and culture.
• Support self-expression and creativity.
• Showcase the role of creativity as a driver for social change.
• Support the development of creative ecosystems
• Promote critical thinking, creative doing, lifelong learning and changemaking attitude

WHAT DO WE OFFER?

We offer Moleskine Notebooks in different sizes and layouts.

All products are new and come from current or past collections that have been developed over the last 5 years. The majority of the products available are coming from our Limited Editions Collection, such as Bob Dylan, Dr. Seuss, Rolling Stones, and many others. If you’re selected for the Program, we will do our best to accommodate your product preferences.

Participants can apply for three different product amounts:  

» Small: from 250 to 1.000 pcs  

» Medium: from 1.001 to 3.000 pcs  

» Large: from 3.001 to 5.000 pcs  

Please bear in mind that the Program has a limited number of tools to give per submission round and the number of successful applications proportionately decreases the larger the grant size.  

TIMELINE & SELECTION PROCESS

The Call for 2023 is now closed. Stay tuned for the 2024 Call.

Applications will be reviewed by Moleskine and Moleskine Foundation teams. Due to the anticipated high volume of applications, we will complete the assessment procedure within 8/12 weeks from the submission deadline. This is also why decisions are final and why we unfortunately cannot enter into any correspondence regarding unsuccessful applications afterward.

APPLICATION FORM

• Carefully read the call.
• Be creative in your application – feel free to add links to any video or picture to support your cause.
• Share the call with others and help us grow a global community of likeminded organizations.

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SELECTION CRITERIA

• Quality : innovativeness, and unconventionality of creative programs, delivered consistently over an extended period
• Social transformation and ecosystemic impact : capacity to directly or indirectly foster positive systemic change in relevant individuals and society, at multiple levels.
• Influence and integrity – the ability to drive growth and change perceptions around the “creativity for social change” field and cultural and creative industries.
• Areas of intervention : Education, arts and culture, social justice, racial equity.

We will take into high consideration applications coming from organizations focused on inclusivity, supporting minority groups and underserved communities.

ELEGIBILITY CRITERIA

• Applications must be submitted in English and must be completed in all parts.  
• Applicants must be above 18 years old.  
• The call is open to non-profit organizations officially recognized in the country of operation.
• The organization’s main target should be young adults (16 – 27 years old)
• Organizations from Europe, the US, South Africa, Canada, and Mexico can apply.*
• We do not accept proposals submitted by political parties or religious associations.

*We would like to offer this program worldwide. Unfortunately, there are some areas that we are not able to reach for now. We hope to extend this opportunity soon to Organizations from all geographies.

“Apart from the fact that creativity is innate to all, culture is an important element to work with these creative tools.   Identifying where your creativity comes from, in society and history, to develop it even further.”

“We are here to change things, because artists will have a space and resources to realize what they want. Without thinking about production budget, setting, time restrictions, all of those things we take care of, they can focus on their craft.”

Read the interview

The brand-new creative studio in Libreville offers photography, videography and production services in their unique space in Gabon. The lack of opportunities for creative professionals and amateurs to have access to equipment and opportunities to hone their skills and polish their crafts is detrimental to the creative scene. DWABI Studio was created with the intent of fostering creativity locally, and allowing artists and industries to express themselves freely by removing technical barriers and providing all the tools necessary for them to flourish.

Find DWABI Studio on Facebook and Instagram

“It is about moving in partnership, nurturing practices of culture and identity for healing ourselves, healing communities, and healing systems.” “When young people first began dreaming and envisioning a transformative space in Richmond back in 2002, they were clear that music, arts, culture, justice, and healing had to be core to the work. These young luminaries envisioned a world where both their creativity and their heart had a safe place to reimagine and dream all that we are manifesting today.”

• Lana Tilley, Development Director of RYSE Center

Read the Interview

RYSE Center is based in Richmond, California. The cultural center was launched in 2008, in the rise of violence in Richmond. The city bears the burden of multiple systemic inequities and faces persistent dehumanization, stigma, and criminalization by schools, police, media, community and public systems. These inequities result in disproportionately high rates of homicide, gun violence, high school drop-out and punitive discipline, poverty and unemployment, and mental health crises. RYSE is working to tend, treat, and heal the institutional injuries that put young people in these communities at risk of direct and acute injury.

Visit RYSE Center website

Follow RYSE on Instagram  

Emir Hassani is a musician, teacher and director of programs at Mitrovica Rock School, where he stands for quality education in popular music, teaching employable skills, and putting the “rock” back in “Rock City.”

“And we could manage throughout all these years to keep the same thing going on, which was always hard because of the funding. If you don’t do something interesting with every project, something new, something different, then it’s hard to keep the school funded. We somehow managed, which was important for us because of those small steps that take years and years to just create. But after this period, when you see it all together, it doesn’t look like a small effort.”

The Kosovo conflict has left Mitrovica divided. Albanians live south of the river Ibar, Serbs in the north. The Mitrovica Rock School connects Serb and Albanian teenagers through music. It brings back a music tradition that makes both sides proud and invests in the city’s young people. They stand for quality education in popular music, teaching employable skills, and putting the “rock” back in “Rock City.”

Visit their website

Follow on Instagram

“Women and young girls are not part of the dominant discourse in Somalia since the war, and we are in a very male dominated society, especially regarding access to decision-making positions and visibility. Women’s narratives are seldom leading in the public domain, so we have a role to play to tip the scales.”

The Somali Arts Foundation (SAF) is the first contemporary art institution in Somalia. SAF offers training in photography, cinematography and content production to young creative women in Mogadishu. SAF seeks to promote and create conducive environments for the creative industries to flourish in Somalia, while leveraging the arts to ignite critical discourses around ideas on identity, memory, loss, healing and what it means to be a “Soomaali” person in the 21st Century.

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“It’s being able to transcend traditional ideas and come up with new rules, interpretations and ways of doing things. Art transforms, heals, transcends everything. It helps express a lot of emotions.”

“And from the beginning, it was important for the young people from Siloé to be able to tell their stories because they are really stigmatized, they are associated with the world of violence and danger, and they want to show something else from their region. This project helped them to tell their story as they wanted to tell it, and to show it to the people.”

Kitambo is a non-profit organization based in Bogot á that promotes contemporary African art in Colombia and Latin America, support the visibility of the creation of Colombian artists interested in inquiring about African and diasporic identities and tell their own stories, thus addressing issues of memory and identity.  

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A trailblazer for feminist art in Uganda, her journey in building her own art space and the work she does to fight against gender inequality makes her a pioneer in the Ugandan art scene.

“I thought that there would be so many ways to approach the art scene in order to support it, but for me, because I was very passionate about the role of a woman and also the plight of a woman in this art scene, I thought it makes sense to focus on certain things and then give it my all and then let other people come and focus on what makes more sense to them.”

“I’m really concerned that there are no curators in this country, I’m concerned that the women artists have been misrepresented. I’m concerned that the art education is really critiqued. But depending on what resources we have, we can implement programs and projects that can really respond directly to the needs, the local needs of this context.”

Njabala is a multi-faceted campaign sourcing inspiration from a popular Ugandan myth of Njabala to facilitate conversations on womanhood. They aim to curate periodic exhibitions as well as organize a public program of activities aimed at creating safe spaces for female artists to thrive and blossom.

To facilitate the possibility for the work of women artists to be seen, Njabala Foundation campaigns in various ways against gender inequality in the art world by organizing art exhibitions and events exclusively dedicated to highlighting the work of women artists.

Visit the Njabala Foundation website

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Mazi Mutafa is the founding executive director of Words, Beats & Life, and passionate about Arts Education and centering marginalized voices in his work. Mazi also hosts a weekly hip-hop show featuring performances and interviews with MCs, poets, DJs producers and vocalists and has been a guest lecturer at several universities.

“Ultimately, we exist to awaken the artists within, the creative within, the writer within and help young people to understand the connection between the things that they’re learning in schools and their ability to use those things to transform themselves and then to transform the communities that they are part of.”

“I think that really matters, that our students see the real-world impact of the things that they are learning to do and getting better at and that there’s a community of people out there who support their continued development from an esteemed point of view, but also from motivation like this, this isn’t just important to me or just important to my family, but it’s actually important to this larger community.”

Words Beats and Life is an arts education non-profit located in Washington DC that advocates for the transformative power of hip-hop culture in all its forms.  

Their goal is to invest in Washington DC’s creative eco system to employ their extensive list of artists and creators to be living examples of what the city’s creative youth can accomplish with the right tools and the best role models. They empower artists, aspiring artists and lovers of expression to create, refine and define systems that demonstrate positive change through our individual and collective brilliance.

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“It’s really about developing mindsets that are all about lifelong learning and curiosity and exploration and thinking of problem-solving, you know, thinking about how they can, you know, be a part of their communities and the world and bring their artistic visions and what they want to say to life through a very visual mean.”

“It’s so refreshing to see students exploring their creativity without having all these constraints that they know about already, that they shouldn’t do this or shouldn’t. And I think it leads to so much more creativity.”

NYC SALT is a non-profit organization based in Washington Heights, Manhattan that aims to engage, inspire, and empower underserved youth in New York City to reach their full potential through photography, video and an understanding of the visual industry. SALT creates opportunities in visual arts and pathways to college and career for underserved New York City youth from diverse backgrounds who are dedicated to careers in the arts, by engaging them in a rigorous blend of professional photography instruction, college-preparatory workshops, and career exposure.

Visit the NYC SALT Website

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Kikelomo Oludemi is a Berlin-based DJ, Boiler Room host, and co-founder of Oroko Radio. Growing up with international music influences, she is making her own space in the music industry and building a platform for those that need to be heard.

“I would like to showcase not only everything amazing coming from the continent, but also from collaborations between these communities around the world. I wouldn’t even say it’s about music first, it’s about the desire to have a stronger community.”

“Whether it’s being Black, being a woman, or West African, my identity inherently plays a role in the development of the sound I play, but I don’t want that to be at the forefront of the way I move in the industry. First and foremost, I want people to respect me for the music I play and my skills.”

With over 70 residents from 15 countries across 4 continents, Oroko Radio & Artist Residency aims to connect, inspire and empower Africans and the Diaspora across the globe through conversation and collaboration. Oroko Radio provides a stage for local musicians, DJs, thinkers, moderators, and content creators: an independent hub for expression of self and thought through sound. It also serves as a platform for the content generated through the Oroko Artist Residency.

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Transformative Storywork: Creative Pathways for Social Change

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• Joanna Wheeler 2 ,
• Thea Shahrokh 3 &
• Nava Derakhshani 4  

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There is no one way that oppression is experienced in people’s lives, and there are also many pathways to undoing exclusion. Understanding the relationships between the lived experiences of exclusion and the possibilities for change requires careful attention. In response, this chapter sets out the case for transformative storywork as an approach that can contribute to social change. Transformative storywork is a complex and multimodal process, which operates on an emotional, creative level. It uses storytelling as a form of inquiry, including the exploration of the self and of daily experiences in connection with life history and social context. Through personal and collective creative expression, transformative storywork builds opportunities to challenge unequal relations of power in our own lives and the lives of others. Creative storytelling can both humanize and politicize learning processes by building new and collective possibilities for social change. This chapter sets out the principles, elements, and practices of transformative storywork. We argue that creative expression through crafting personal stories, within a group-based process, enables a deeper understanding of our lives and, importantly, ourselves in relation to others. This relational learning enables reflection on our own stories and experiences. Building from these story processes, further deconstruction of the power relations within different life stories builds an understanding of the structural injustices that affect people’s shared realities. Our analysis is that this relational understanding of structural inequality, built through multimodal creative methods founded in the personal narrative, can support transformative learning and solidarity in shared struggles for social change. This change was not only witnessed but was also experienced both personally and politically by the authors, and the chapter will outline reflexive learnings within these processes to communicate for social change. The chapter draws on examples of previous and ongoing work, including in South Africa.

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Wheeler, J., Shahrokh, T., Derakhshani, N. (2020). Transformative Storywork: Creative Pathways for Social Change. In: Servaes, J. (eds) Handbook of Communication for Development and Social Change. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2014-3_54

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Another Word

From the writing center at the university of wisconsin-madison.

Writing for Social Justice: Writer-Activists Share Their Work

By mia alafaireet and nancy linh karls, featuring jesus galvan, erica kanesaka kalnay, tiffany lee, and amy salinas westmoreland –.

What kinds of power do words really have? What does it mean to be a writer-activist? How can each of us use our writing to push for social change?  These are the questions that fuel the UW-Madison Writing Center’s newest workshop series: “Writing for Social Justice.”

In the time since UW-Madison released the results of a 2016 Campus Climate survey, we at the Writing Center have confronted questions of diversity and inclusion with renewed vigor. [1] As we contemplated the survey’s results and how our programs might play into students’ overall experience of campus life, we began to wonder:  What actions can we take to signal our commitment to diversity, inclusion, and social change? What can we do to foster a sense of belonging for students who may otherwise feel unwelcome on campus?

While we knew there were no easy answers, we decided to start with a series of social justice-oriented workshops designed to spark conversations about the power of writing to elicit equity, inclusion, and change. We hoped that inviting speakers from across the campus community would draw a wide audience and range of perspectives.

We coordinated our first event, “Writing as Activism,” in collaboration with our partners at the campus Multicultural Student Center (MSC) . Amy Salinas Westmoreland and Tiffany Lee, who coordinate the MSC’s social justice programming, collaborated with us to brainstorm approaches, reach out to speakers, and host the event in April of 2018. The event featured four writer-activists, each of whom shared an excerpt from their work and prompted us all to reconsider the intersections between our individual lives as writers and our engagement in broader communities.

“It was a beautiful sight,” says Amy Salinas Westmoreland, Assistant Director of Social Justice programs for the MSC. “All the chairs were filled with students that were engaged, and wanted to know what they could do to make a difference.”

During the course of the session, the panelists presented and shared writing that spanned a wide range of genres.

Jesus Galvan, a senior undergraduate Writing Fellow , shared an outline proposal that he and the former Chair of Associated Students of Madison had collaboratively drafted. As Jesus explained to those gathered in the MSC that day, the objective for this outline was to provide more opportunities for discussion and reflection among incoming first-year students participating in the Our Wisconsin program.

“My piece was a bit different,” Jesus writes, “because it was more of a pedagogical piece, which may be more cut and dry but also very valuable from a systemic standpoint. Personally, I tend to have a knack for thinking about how things are done systematically, and it was awesome to have the opportunity to talk about this collaborative effort.” Although Jesus noted that he and his colleague fell short of their goal to facilitate four pilot discussions, he believes that “this process of trying to instill systemic changes to Our Wisconsin was insightful.”

In terms of presenting his work at the panel, Jesus recalls, “I remember feeling humbled and excited to share this piece – to both the audience as well as the people I presented with. From my experiences in college, I understand that sometimes it can be difficult to get a good turnout with events like this. I was pleasantly surprised to see the number of individuals in attendance that day. It really shows the intrinsic value that students hold in regards to social justice topics and discussions.”

Since graduating from UW-Madison, Jesus continues to work toward social justice by beginning an AmeriCorps fellowship and working at a residential high school in Estes Park, Colorado. Jesus writes, “Although my opportunities to produce creative, social-justice-oriented pieces of writing are limited, I have ample opportunities to help students here in their college admissions essays – something I consider to be social justice work in and of itself.”

Another panelist, Erica Kanesaka Kalnay, a Ph.D. candidate in English, shared one of her short stories, “Duck, Duck, Goose.” Erica writes, “A few months later, what sticks with me about this conversation is how inspired I felt by the level of political engagement among undergraduate writers of color at the UW. When I was an undergraduate student, I went to a predominantly-white institution and did not have a community of writers of color. In workshops, many of my peers and professors regarded writing that was too overtly ‘emotional’ or ‘political’ as substandard, and I internalized many of these beliefs by cloaking my struggles with identity and mental illness under a veil of obfuscation.”

Erica continues, “In retrospect, I understand the pressure to adhere to a tone of ironic detachment as more than just an aesthetic demand, but a mode of silencing voices that challenge dominant narratives. Our conversation touched upon trauma and pain, and at the very same time, gave me hope that writing can be an act of healing, reclamation, and resistance.” (For more of Erica’s work, please see her website at ericakanesaka.com .)

Two other panelists also shared samples of their writing. Erika Gallagher, a senior undergraduate Writing Fellow and Posse Scholar , shared an abstract of her research project, “I Can’t Speak: Changing Perceptions of Linguistic Variations in Leadership.” Francisco Velazquez provided audience members with a copy of “Cardi B Conquers on the Highly Anticipated Invasion of Privacy ,” a review he’d written and had published in The Daily Cardinal just one week prior to this panel. (Both Erika and Francisco have since graduated from UW-Madison.)

Tiffany Lee, the Director of Crossroads (a collaboration between the MSC and the Gender and Sexuality Campus Center ), served as the panel’s moderator.

As she looks back on the panel, Tiffany writes, “What I appreciated most about this event is listening to different writers talk about how their writing is interwoven with their activism. Even though the writers had very different styles and backgrounds, they shared a common belief that writing has power.”

One of the audience members in attendance that day recalls, “I attended the panel with, what is for me, a perpetual skepticism when it comes to thinking about writing acting for good in world. And despite how well attended the event was, despite knowing almost all of the panelists by name from different work they’ve done around campus, and despite the energy of the MSC, I still waited for the panel to begin by wondering how successful writing can be as activism.”

He continues, “But after listening to each speaker, it became so clear to me how powerful writing can be even when its broader effects aren’t apparent yet. What I saw were several students at a variety of different moments in their academic careers, both empowered by the writing they do and already undertaking the difficult work of communicating injustice in a way that is compassionate and compelling. I think it can be easy to not immediately think of writing as activism because it tends to work slowly like a glacier, but the panelists help showcase that, like a glacier, writing can eventually reshape the world.”

These kinds of reflections underscore the power and the potential of writing for social justice.

As Amy Salinas Westmoreland notes, “Whenever we do a social justice workshop, panel, or bring a social justice speaker, our hope is to have an audience engage with the material and leave with some new information. We want folks to leave knowing that they have the power to create change, and this workshop did just that. I specifically remember all the questions that were asked by the audience. I’m proud of our collaboration with the Writing Center, and I hope that we can continue our partnership in the future.”

We were thrilled to see that “Writing as Activism” drew an even larger crowd than anticipated, and the depth of audience engagement encouraged us to expand the series through the 2018-2019 academic year. Keep an eye out for our Fall kickoff event, “Writing Is Power,” and other exciting social justice programming coming in the future!

[1] See the survey results here: https://diversity.wisc.edu/climate/survey/

2 Replies to “Writing for Social Justice: Writer-Activists Share Their Work”

What most delights me about this piece, as well as gives me hope, is the revival of the term “writer-activist” being used in the context of higher education. Today, in my classes and the articles I read, I notice a small distrust of writing as a force that can carry out the work of social justice. At times, the allure and flashiness of public protests and organizing can detract from the more “quiet” forms of activism– writing. The work of the panelists and writers featured in this post imply that writing is one of the necessary platforms and means to approach social justice aims.

After reading this, I am struck with a line of inquiries about the role of writing in high education: How does the context of writing in higher education position writing as a mere task or skill to learn for the job market? How can writer-activists and writing center communities re-cast writing as a transformative act that produces visible changes in the world? What possibilities can writer-activists produce within the institutional limits of higher education? Lastly, how can writer-activists frame their writing as doing the work of public humanities to engage the wider community outside of UW? Food for thought.

I am really looking forward to continuing to following the work of the social justice writing center collaborations and hopefully getting involved myself.

Thank you so much, Nancy and Mia, for this wonderful post. I am so inspired by the examples of students who have used writing for change. Like Amy, I am constantly trying to think about how we can teach students that writing is about more than sending polished emails on the job. This is the goal of my Writing for Social Justice class, but teaching it has been a continual learning process for me, too! Thank you again for sharing. I would love to get involved with the next workshop.

Comments are closed.

Anya Achtenberg

Award-winning author and teacher of fiction, memoir and poetry

Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World

Photo by Shashank Sahay on Unsplash

A 3-part series; each workshop stands on its own, or can be taught as part of the whole. For writers across the genres interested in shifting and expanding their ideas about craft and language, through reframing and recontextualizing the concepts of creative writing. Each workshop uses multicultural and interdisciplinary materials, integrates many writing explorations into the discussions; and goes deeper into concepts which leave “writer’s block” way behind. Centrally creative writing courses, these workshops also offer powerful tools to support work for social change; self-transformation and personal growth; diversity training; and community-building.

“A dream can be the highest point of a life.” —Nigerian writer Ben Okri, The Famished Road

Whether you are a member of a writing group or connected with a literary or educational institution, contact me to arrange a writing workshop in your area.

The workshop series consists of three sections:

• Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World
• Place and Exile/Borders and Crossings
• Yearning and Justice: Writing the Unlived Life

These workshops have been and can be taught in many different formats and time schedules. Each section stands on its own, or can be taught as part of the whole, whether in private workshops, conferences, or retreats, or in a semester-long university course. They treat writing across the genres, using multicultural and interdisciplinary materials.

While it is named a writing course and certainly has that focus—it also offers powerful tools for activists and social change agents in many settings; for self-transformation; for building community; for diversity training; for healing; for leaving “writer’s block” way behind; for developing tools to write and speak the truth in its fullness; for integrating the parts of the self.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS

1. writing for social change:   re-dream a just world.

Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World , begins with an exploration of the profound connection that the act and art of writing have to the work of increasing social justice. We will find in our passion for justice a powerful engine to drive our writing; to reveal, to witness, to commemorate, and to explore language, character and story. But potent as well in freeing and deepening our writing is our work to re-examine the craft and concepts of good writing, whether poetry or prose, fiction or nonfiction, by grounding the craft in its political and historical context. The work of association, for instance, of revealing the connections between things that seem not to be connected, is basic to both the poetic and the political. The readings for this course bring forward an understanding of the craft and issues of creative writing, as well as offer examples of prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction, that bring together extraordinary craft with concerns for social and economic justice. The reading selections are, by the nature of this course, far-reaching, multicultural and interdisciplinary, and support and inspire much participant writing.

Through a series of writing explorations, and with the inspiration of authors who have grappled with how writing makes an impact on the world, the work we do together offers ideas for and practice in ways of using writing for social change. These workshops support us in coming to voice, which is an intrinsic part of the process of overthrowing personal, group and societal censors and tyrants to recover what has been silenced and to empower each speaker. It goes much further, examining some of what is at the heart of writing that can break the social silences, recover people’s history, reveal connections among all things and beings, and re-dream a just world.

For writers at all levels of experience, across the genres, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction.

2.  Place and Exile; Borders and Crossings

This workshop breaks ground in expanding our writing in both content and craft. We will work to go beyond the usual instruction that all writers must write from a sense of place, and instead catch up with a world of peoples in exile from their ancestral homes; often in flight, in war, in refugee camps, and crossing borders that are not only geographic, but also cultural, linguistic, racial, and gender- and class-related. The participants will also be encouraged to create work that speaks of the massive changes to “place”, to environment, that climate change has put into motion. This work on borders and crossings connects directly as well to the building of story, and the understanding that there is always a story next to each story we tell or write. As well, the full development of characterization has much to do with the ability of the writer to cross borders, with knowledge, compassion and respect. The ability to enter another’s world, including that of an object, as Neruda does in his  Elemental Odes , is of course of central importance for poetry and essays as well as narrative. We explore the work of entering and writing the lives of others with a sense of inquiry that does not appropriate.

Very important in our exploration of the relationship of writing to place is the way that writers, even those writing in a language that is not their first tongue, work to make a home in language, thereby filling their creative expression with tension and resistance, music and power. We will look at these evocative and emotional issues in our discussions, and in the illuminating work of other writers, and challenge ourselves in our far-reaching writing explorations to cross boundaries that will free our writing, and deepen our understanding of and respect for the worlds and characters we write about. This workshop yields a great deal of new writing for the participants, as well as a re-visioning of the concepts of literary craft.

3.  Yearning and Justice: Writing the Unlived Life

In this workshop we go way beyond the usual concept of the backstory as the essential for development of characterization and plot, and into the rich concept of the unlived life. For each of us, our society, culture, family, and history, individual and intergenerational, give birth to an unlived life hidden within the life we live to get by. This land of yearning, bordered by frustration, overwork, distractions and violences, large and small, is charged by the deep human desire to create and to express, and to fulfill the individual and social self in creativity and community. All that we have not done or said, have not lived or been able to create; all that we deeply yearn for, moves us as powerfully as that which we have lived. Working with these conscious and unconscious yearnings that move us (and our characters) through life, opens us to a tremendous source of writing that not only deepens characterization and opens story, but hits at the core of what we strain for as we write—perhaps, to express the inexpressible—and, at the core of what we yearn for in our hopes and work for social justice. Writing the unlived life galvanizes our writing in powerful personal and political ways, as it connects to our deep yearnings for our own lives, and for a world of peace and justice, a world in which we can realize our full potential.

Using the unlived life and its yearnings in story expands and deepens characterization, and opens up the stories we write in unexpected ways . By the nature of yearning, this material gives us ways to work with the “unsaid”, with the whispers of subtext in story, with powerful unspoken sources of behaviors in our characters. As writers of the unlived life, we will work to develop the stories, both in fiction and memoir; the poems; and the personal essays, which recognize and portray those aspects of ourselves and of others that have limited social space in which to flourish. This workshop offers ideas for and practice in ways of accessing the unlived life to give birth to powerful images, complex characters, fuller story context, and thoughtful and compassionate analysis of the world around us, and within us, all of which simultaneously supports the full development of our written work.

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CAEX Transcripts: CAEX 6600/6601: Creative Writing for Social Change

• CAEX 6100/6101: Critical Thinking for Social Change
• CAEX 6600/6601: Creative Writing for Social Change
• CAEX 6700/6701: Strategic Writing for Social Change
• CAEX Social Change Courses
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SKIL 6600/6601: Creative Writing for Social Change

Video published on April 26, 2019

View the recording  

Last updated on 5/22/2019

Visual : Animated video for Creative Writing for Social Change SKIL Course 6600/6601

Audio : Soft instrumental music

Audio : Emily Dahlen: Hello, Walden University students.

• Do you journal or write poems or stories for fun?
• Are you interested in improving your writing skills through creative writing techniques?
• Would you like to reach a broader audience with your social change message?  

If you answered yes to any of these questions and you are a master’s or doctoral student, consider enrolling in the Office of Academic Support course, Creative Writing for Social Change.

Rest assured you do not need to have any prior experience with creative writing to take the course. Come with an open mind!

In Creative Writing for Social Change you explore how creative writing has influenced social movements and write your own piece on a social issue. Topics covered in the 6-week course include

• principles of writing fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry;
• analysis and application of literary devices; and
• revision of your creative work.

The course includes practice in both writing and analyzing creative works. First, you research how creative writing has contributed to social change. In the following weeks, you dive into the genres of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Using the tools in the course, you write in each of these genres and ultimately choose one of your rough drafts to revise. You then leave the course with a polished piece of creative writing on a social change topic.

To register for an upcoming term, contact Student Success Advising at [email protected] .

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Storytelling for Social Change

Description.

How can storytelling promote social change?

This course develops skills for using stories to deliver messages that affect audiences and shape attitudes for social change. Learn how building empathy and developing characters can offer multiple perspectives on complex problems. Social change happens when listeners or viewers identify with messages delivered through a protagonist they identify with. Theatre artists and professional storytellers offer expertise about how to craft a story that develops empathy and delivers impact.

You will watch video interviews with storytelling experts, view performances, and write your own story for social change. See how stories told from diverse perspectives contribute to understanding new perspectives about pertinent world issues. Learn how effective storytelling can be your tool for change.

This course is for anyone who wants to effectively tell an impactful story. This includes (but is not limited to):

• Professionals working in not-for-profit or commercial sectors
• Entertainment industry development teams
• Writers and arts enthusiasts
• Community workers and social activists
• Marketing and development teams
• Educators and public speakers
• Customer service representatives

Please check out the course preview video in YouTube!

U-M Credit Eligible

Anita Gonzalez

Chair of Dance and Professor of Theater & Drama

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Intro to Genres: Writing and Social Change

Crwr 12133 intro to genres: writing and social change.

In this course, we will explore the embattled, yet perpetually alive relationship between writing and activism by reading canonical and emergent works of fiction, narrative prose, and poetry that not only represent social ills, but seek to address and even spur social justice in some way. Students will be encouraged to choose an issue to research and respond to for the quarter—and will be asked to produce short works in a range of genres in relation to that issue. Works studied will include the essays of John Ruskin, the poetry and prose of Fred Moten, the short stories of John Keene, the poetry and essays of Anne Boyer, the graphic novels of Nick Drnaso, the performative/visual poetry of Douglas Kearney and Cecilia Vicuña, and the translational poetry of Rosa Alcalà. A field trip will be planned in conjunction with our environmental writing, and students will be asked to make every effort to attend.

Note on enrollment: If you have a particular interest in or need for this course, please write Professor Scappettone directly at [email protected] with a brief statement of interest (including your major and year) so as to be added to the wait list.

Open bid through  my.uchicago.edu . Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

How arts and culture can serve as a force for social change

Wanuri Kahiu Image:  Boris Baldinger/World Economic Forum

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Linda peterhans.

.chakra .wef-9dduvl{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-9dduvl{font-size:1.125rem;}} Explore and monitor how .chakra .wef-15eoq1r{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;color:#F7DB5E;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-15eoq1r{font-size:1.125rem;}} Social Innovation is affecting economies, industries and global issues

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Stay up to date:, social innovation.

• These 5 initiatives showcase how social innovators and artists around the world are transforming society.
• Examples include redefining storytelling, changing stereotypes and giving a voice to the voiceless.

The world of art needs more social enterprise, and the world of social enterprise needs more art. Ever since the World Economic Forum’s Cultural Leaders network and the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship launched the Centred-Self collaboration earlier this year , it struck us that both fields have only just scratched the surface of how interacting with one other could lead world-changing breakthroughs.

The Schwab Foundation’s community of leading social innovators and the Forum’s Cultural leaders’ network can serve as role models who are leveraging the power of creativity and storytelling to address the world’s greatest problems.

Here are five initiatives from the Schwab Foundation community and the Forum’s Cultural Leaders network that showcase how arts and culture serve as a force for social change.

Redefining storytelling

Wanuri Kahiu is a Kenyan filmmaker whose award-winning stories and films have received international acclaim and screened at more than 100 film festivals worldwide. Kahiu is an advocate for images of fun, fierce and frivolous African images, and her film Rafiki was the first Kenyan film to be invited to Cannes Film Festival, in 2019.

When her film was banned by her government for depicting a joyful lesbian love story, Kahiu became an unintentional leader for freedom of expression, fighting a constitutional case for her rights. At the World Economic Forum in Davos 2020, she discussed her strive in fighting for freedom of expression for artists, activists and social change makers around the world. “Freedom of expression is not a luxury. It’s a freedom,” Kahiu said.

Transforming communities

More than 30 years ago, Schwab Foundation Awardee Tim Jones founded Artscape , a not-for-profit urban development organization that makes space for creativity and transforms communities.

Artscapes involves clustering creative people together in real-estate projects that serve the needs of the arts and cultural community and advance multiple public-policy objectives, private development interests, community and neighbourhood aspirations and philanthropic missions.

"Art plays a crucial role in shaping and renewing culture: it can shine a spotlight on truth, create moments of joy or inspire us to act. In times like these, we need to empower artists like never before to help us reflect, to rekindle our hope and to imagine a better future,” Jones said.

Artscape develops and manages unique cultural facilities—including community cultural hubs, multi-purpose creative spaces and artist live/work projects—and delivering programs and services that promote creativity and cultural space development. Today, Artscape is recognized as an international leader in creative placemaking, a practice that leverages the power of art, culture and creativity to catalyze change, growth and transformation in communities.

The Cultural Leaders network convenes influential artists, cultural leaders and cultural institutions to engage them in the work of the World Economic Forum and to recognize the importance of cultural dimensions in all major issues.

Cultural Leaders help promote and advance inclusive and sustainable cultural change. The World Economic Forum collaborates with Cultural Leaders by co-developing exhibitions, performance, experiences and panels at our global and regional physical and virtual events, by commissioning and producing new work, and by engaging them in Forum projects such as the New Narratives Lab .

Examples include the Emmy-Award winning VR documentaries “ Awavena ” and “ Collisions ”, which was screened at the Australian Parliament and influenced the vote of new resolution to ban nuclear weapons, The Afghan Women’s Orchestra tour , which started a national dialogue on education, and the “ ACCESS+ABILITY ” exhibition on disability inclusion, co-curated with the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Building a more inclusive world

Thando Hopa is a South African model, diversity activist and lawyer. In April 2019 she made history by becoming the first person with albinism to appear on the cover of Vogue.

In her inspiring talk at Davos 2020, she discussed how issues around race, identity and self-perception were investigated in a 1940s experiment that told children to attribute qualities to a series of dolls that were identical except for colour, and then asked them to select the doll they thought represented them.

For Hopa, this experiment has a particularly personal relevance: as a black African woman with albinism, which doll should she identify with, she asks?

“True inclusivity means finding space for everyone, affording everyone respect and giving people agency over their sense of identity,” she said. Hopa is now paving the way for a more inclusive representation in media that benefit and support all bodies and identities.

Changing stereotypes

When Schwab Foundation Awardee Andreas Heinecke worked at a radio station in the 1980s, he was asked to re-train a journalist who had become blind after a car accident. "He had all these images about this person in his head," said his colleague, Annkatrin Meyer, the head of production of Dialogue in the Dark . "Then the door opened and there was this handsome young guy, asking him if he wanted a coffee, and he was confronted with all of his stereotypes".

Shortly after, Heinecke established the Dialogue in the Dark to challenge society's perceptions of blindness. His organisation, Dialogue Social Enterprise, offers exhibitions and business training in total darkness, creating jobs for the blind, disabled and disadvantaged worldwide. Its exhibition uses blind guides to lead visitors through settings in total darkness where they learn to interact without sight, helping change mindsets on disability. More than 7 million visitors from 30 countries have experienced the exhibition, giving more than 7,000 blind people jobs since 1988.

In his Agenda article for the World Economic Forum , Heinecke wrote that it’s time for more “Artepreneurs” – a term, he says, “that can refer to people who pursue their social mission through artistic means and create models that are innovative, scalable and measurable”.

Giving a voice to the voiceless

Rena Effendi is an Azerbaijani award-winning photographer whose work portrays the socioeconomic effects of globalization on marginalized communities around the world and celebrates the strength of the human spirit.

Effendi dedicated her session at Davos 2020 to telling the personal story of one individual, a poignant story of a 50-year old man who fought to rescue his seven orphaned grandchildren in Syria and whom he had never met.

There is a reason why Rena Effendi wanted to share his story. As we rely more on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, she explained, we lose empathy. "Faces disappear behind data – it is my job to bring those faces back," she said in her moving talk.

The three women artists above belong to the New Narratives Lab , a year-long fellowship dedicated to fostering a new and diverse generation of Cultural Leaders to drive social change. Similarly, the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship provides a three-year programme to support an under-recognized movement of people who are developing innovative mechanisms to deliver social or environmental good.

As we continue to bring together both these networks of passionate, driven individuals using their ingenuity to tackle the world’s greatest problems, we are proud to provide them with a safe space to get inspired, lead with empathy and discuss their unique challenges as they continue driving change.

What is the World Economic Forum doing to champion social innovation?

Social innovators are addressing the world’s most serious and entrenched challenges, ranging from illiteracy to clean water and sanitation, girls’ education, prison reform, financial inclusion and disaster relief.

The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship is supporting more than 400 leading social innovators operating in over 190 countries.

Since its foundation in 1998, a total of 722 million lives have been directly improved by the work of this community of leading social innovators.

Our global network of experts, partner institutions and World Economic Forum constituents are invited to nominate outstanding social innovators.

Visit the Schwab Foundation website for more information about the award process and the selection criteria.

Read more about the Foundation's impact.

Learn more about the Schwab Foundation and nominate a Social Innovators of the Year 2021 here .

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License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda

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UW TACOMA DIVISION OF CULTURE, ART AND COMM WRITING INSTRUCTION

• Spring Quarter 2024
• Summer Quarter 2024
• Autumn Quarter 2024

TWRT 101 Writing Ready (2) Provides a foundation in college-level writing before enrolling in Introduction to Academic Writing and the first-year program. Introduces reading and composing skills needed for successful writing in academic settings, including close readings, critical thinking, and writing in response to others' ideas. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 101

TWRT 111 Discourse Foundations (2, max. 8) Helps improve academic writing skills by focusing on students' own writing practices. Teaches reading skills to comprehend and analyze complex texts, review and analyze grammar structures as they appear in academic writing, and build advanced vocabulary. Prerequisite: either TWRT 120, TWRT 121, or TCORE 101; must be taken concurrently . Credit/no-credit only. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 111

TWRT 120 Academic Writing I (5) Introduces principles of argument, critical thinking, reflection, analytical reading, writing, and research practices needed for academic writing. Covers skills for managing the writing process and how to transfer learning to other disciplinary contexts for writing as part of first of a two-course sequence. Prerequisite: completion of Tacoma Writing Selection survey. Credit/no-credit only. Offered: AW. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 120

TWRT 121 Academic Writing II (5) C Reinforces and engages more deeply with principles of argument, critical thinking, reflection, analytical reading, writing, and research practices needed for academic writing. Covers skills for managing the writing process and how to transfer learning to other disciplinary contexts for writing as second part of a two-course sequence. Prerequisite: TWRT 120. Offered: WSp. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 121

TWRT 200 Introduction to Creative Writing (5) A&H Introduces several genres and explores the creative writing process and terminology of imaginative expression. Cannot be taken for credit if credit received for TWRT 201. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 200

TWRT 201 Creative Writing in the Global Context (5) A&H Introduces fundamentals of Prose and Poetry writing and explores the creative writing process and terminology of imaginative expression within international contexts. Emphasizes the importance of local and global audiences in shaping literary arts through Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) projects in partnership with students and faculty at international universities. Cannot be taken for credit if credit received for TWRT 200. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 201

TWRT 211 Argument and Research in Writing (5) C Focuses on writing critical analyses of texts in the arts and sciences. Emphasizes close reading, critical thinking, and developing well-supported arguments as well as advanced library research skills. Stresses managing the writing process so that good work can be produced within given time constraints. Prepares students for upper-division writing tasks. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 211

TWRT 270 Poetry Writing (5) A&H Introduces students to the craft and process of poetry writing from initial draft to advanced revision. Explores current writing styles, poetic forms, and various aesthetic issues. Students discuss craft, assigned writings, and share work with other class members. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 270

TWRT 274 Spoken Word Poetry (5) A&H, DIV Introduces students to creating spoken word performances and studying spoken word and slam poetry by analyzing its composition, performance, and social and historical contexts. Develops critical studies relevant to the U.S. rooted in social theories of race, gender, ethnicity and disability, and concepts related to inequality and exclusion. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 274

TWRT 280 Fiction Writing (5) A&H Introduces the process and techniques of fiction writing. Readings familiarize students with various writing styles and strategies of other writers. Students discuss craft, the assigned readings, and share work with other class members. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 280

TWRT 287 Creative Nonfiction Writing (5) A&H Builds narrative and descriptive skills in several genres of creative nonfiction, including the personal essay, feature articles for general trade magazines, or the literary essay. Includes reading of models and writers' workshops to provide feedback on drafts. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 287

TWRT 291 Technical Communication in the Workplace (5) C Teaches objective-oriented and audience-centered communication for the workplace, while focusing on key genres of technical communication - reports, proposals, manual, and document design - essential for success in the professional world. Prerequisite: a minimum grade of 2.0 in either T CORE 101, TWRT 112, TWRT 121, or TWRT 211. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 291

TWRT 292 Power, Privilege, and Bias in Technology Design (3) DIV Explores how design and technology are shaped by social, political, cultural and material forces and can create barriers and contribute to social change, inequality and equity. Examines technology as a tool of oppression or liberation in regards to identity categories and difference--ability, ethnicity, race, age, class, gender, and sexuality. Prerequisite: Either TCORE 101, TWRT 112, TWRT 121, TWRT 211, ENGL 131, or ENGL 141. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 292

TWRT 320 Rhetoric, Public Life, and Civic Engagement (5) Introduces rhetorical criticism by examining how particular rhetorical theories and traditions have been applied to specific social issues. Explores the development of rhetoric, as both a theory and a practice, and how those at the margins of the Western rhetorical tradition have worked to expand its purview. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 320

TWRT 330 Written and Visual Rhetoric (5) A&H Explores the principles and practices of written and visual rhetoric to learn to employ both effectively in print-based and electronic texts. Prerequisite: minimum grade of 2.0 in TWRT 211. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 330

TWRT 331 Writing in the Natural Sciences (5) A&H, C Studies communications and rhetorical principles for sharing scientific knowledge in professional meetings with other scientists and with general audiences. Focuses on three most common genes: scientific paper (including literature review and abstract writing), research proposal, and scientific poster. Prerequisite: a minimum grade 2.0 in either TWRT 211 or TWRT 291. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 331

TWRT 333 Writing Through Comics (5) A&H Introduces a critical perspective on comics and builds skills in creative writing and rhetoric studies. Focuses on theory and craft, providing a lens for interpretation and application, employing workshops for students to create (and revise) their own comics. Prerequisite: minimum 2.0 grade in either T CORE 101, TWRT 112, TWRT 121, TWRT 211 or ENGL 131. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 333

TWRT 340 Asian American Rhetorics, Literacies, and Activism (5) DIV Explores rhetorical and literacy practices of diverse Asian Americans and analyzes the role of language in Asian American activism across time and space. Develops skills in rhetorical analysis and multimodal composition. Prerequisite: a minimum grade of 2.0 in either T CORE 101, TWRT 112, TWRT 121, TWRT 211, ENGL 121, ENGL 131, ENGL 141, or ENGL 182; recommended: TWRT 211 or T SOC 270. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 340

TWRT 350 Principles of User Centered Design (5) SSc Explores the philosophy and process for developing solutions to design problems, including technical systems such as software applications and communication projects such as websites. Develops skills to identify and solve design problems through research, testing, and analysis. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 350

TWRT 353 User Experience Writing (5) Explores the concept of writing as a design practice and process used to solve problems for users through a human-centered design process. Develops skills to research and write for inclusive user experiences, including the ability to understand and address implicit bias through strategic use of tone, voice, and language. Prerequisite: either T CORE 101, TWRT 121, TWRT 211, or TWRT 291. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 353

TWRT 355 Usability Testing and Research (5) SSc Explores the concept of usability and research methods related to the evaluation of information and communication products as part of the user-centered design process. Develops skills to design and conduct usability studies, analyze results, and make recommendations. Prerequisite: TWRT 291. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 355

TWRT 360 PLAYWRITING (5) A&H Introduces foundational skills in playwriting and writing for the stage including reading of scripts and analyses of produced plays to develop awareness of the playwright's process and position in theater productions. Employs workshops to provide feedback on drafts as students write and refine scripts. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 360

TWRT 362 Writing and War (5) A&H/SSc Introduces students to the practice of multi-genre creative writing in the context of war. Emphasizes the writing of witness and explores the cultural impact of violent conflict in poetry and prose. Discusses writing as an act of peace and requires students to develop creative writing techniques in multiple genres. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 362

TWRT 364 Food Writing for Cultural Exploration (5) A&H, DIV Examines the construction of cultural identity through the craft and structure of writing food-focused narratives. Using Latinx and Ethnic American interdisciplinary texts, students will evaluate the intersectional nature of race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomics in food traditions. These texts will be used as models for the creation of original content in poetry and prose. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 364

TWRT 365 Literary Editing and Publishing (5) A&H Explores practices of literary editing, magazine design, and literary small press publishing. Readings examine history, aesthetics, funding, promotion, layout, and other issues faced by literary journals in print and in emerging online media. Student assignments reflect practices of literary editors. Credit/no-credit only. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 365

TWRT 372 Writing Eco-Poetry (5) A&H Introduces the practice of poetry writing within the context of nature and eco-writing. Develops skills to read, analyze, and respond to seminal works of nature poems, eco-poems, and critical essays from Romanticism to contemporary poetry, then create, workshop, and revise original nature and eco-poems. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 372

TWRT 382 WRITING POPULAR FICTION (5) A&H Teaches students to write popular fiction. Explores questions of narrative, characterization, action, form, formula, and code in popular genres. Uses primary and secondary texts to study mystery, romance, spy thriller, western, horror, and science fiction. Emphasizes peer review, revision, assessment, and reflection as methods of producing excellent written work. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 382

TWRT 384 WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION (5) A&H Builds upon foundations skills in fiction writing and introduces elements essential to writing historical fiction, including research. Includes readings from creative and historical texts and employs workshops to provide feedback on drafts as students write and revise their own short stories. Prerequisite: either TWRT 200, TWRT 280, TWRT 380, or TWRT 382. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 384

TWRT 388 Writing for Social Change (5) A&H Examines the rhetorical force of various forms of communication within specific social, political, and cultural contexts. Building on research and writing completed in other courses, students compose a project demonstrating their learning and which is intended for public audiences. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 388

TWRT 389 Nature Writing (5) A&H Introduces students to the skills of creative non-fiction writing within the context of nature and environmental writing. Students read, analyze, and respond to seminal works of nature essays and environmental essays, as well as eco-critical writing, then create, workshop, and revise their own original nature and environmental essays. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 389

TWRT 391 Advanced Technical Communication (5) A&H Explores Technical Communication concepts and skills to inform the creation of information across a variety of genres. Focuses on researching, creating, and delivering information through written and oral communication forms used in professional and technical settings. Prerequisite: TWRT 291 View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 391

TWRT 420 Rhetoric and the City: Composing Urban Landscapes (5) SSc Examines cites through an interdisciplinary lens, as texts that can be read, revised, and re-written as/through symbolic action. After reading and discussing critical theory about space and place, students conduct place-based research in preparation to compose critical essays, narratives, and visuals depicting specific experiences related to the city. Prerequisite: either T CORE 101, TWRT 112, TWRT 121, TWRT 211, ENGL 131, or ENGL 141; recommended: TWRT 320, TWRT 330, TWRT 340, or TWRT 388. Offered: Sp. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 420

TWRT 440 Cross-Cultural Communication Design (5) SSc Examines issues that affect communication from global and local perspectives including the role culture and technology play in human interactions. Discusses the research and practices that writers and designers need to consider when internationalizing and localizing information products. Explores techniques and skills to develop effective communication products. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 440

TWRT 450 Principles of Accessible Design (5) SSc Explores accessibility barriers, standards, and guidelines for designing products and processes such as self-service kiosks and websites. Develops skills to solve accessibility problems through video ethnographies of barriers, apply automated and adaptive technology tools for testing and analyze data for devising solutions. Prerequisite: either TWRT 291, TWRT 350, TWRT 355, TWRT 440, TCOM 320, or TCOM 420. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 450

TWRT 464 Teaching Writing (5) A&H Studies theories and practices of writing education and the history and challenges of writing assessment. Explores learning communities. Emphasizes pedagogical questions of social class, ethnicity, multilingualism, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and nationality. Prerequisite: minimum grade of 2.0 in either TWRT 211 or TWRT 272. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 464

TWRT 470 Advanced Poetry Writing (5, max. 10) A&H Builds upon foundational skills in writing both traditional and contemporary poetry. Includes reading of models and writers' workshops to provide feedback on drafts. Students develop a portfolio of polished writing by the end of the course. Prerequisite: minimum grade of 2.0 in either TWRT 270 or TWRT 372. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 470

TWRT 480 Advanced Fiction Writing (5, max. 10) A&H Builds upon foundational skills in fiction writing such as dialog, narration, theme, language, and character. Includes reading of models and writers' workshops to provide feedback on drafts. Students develop a portfolio of polished writing by the end of the course. Prerequisite: minimum grade of 2.0 in either TWRT 280, TWRT 380, TWRT 382, or TWRT 384. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 480

TWRT 487 Advanced Creative Nonfiction (5, max. 10) A&H Builds on beginning creative nonfiction skills in several genres: personal or lyric essay, literary journalism, the nonfiction "short", or prose poetry. Includes reading of models and writers' workshops to provide feedback on drafts. Students develop a portfolio of polished writing by the end of the course. Prerequisite: TWRT 287 or TWRT 389. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 487

TWRT 492 Special Topics in Rhetoric and Composition (5, max. 10) SSc Introduces students to current and emergent conversations in the fields of/at the intersection of rhetoric, composition, literacy studies, and technical communication. The content of specific sections to be determined by individual faculty in Writing Studies in reflection of their research and scholarly interests. Sections may also reflect new directions in research methods and pedagogical approaches. Prerequisite: either T CORE 101, TWRT 112, TWRT 121, TWRT 211, ENGL 131, or ENGL 141. ; recommended: TWRT 320, TWRT 330, TWRT 340, or TWRT 388. Offered: Sp. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 492

TWRT 499 Advanced Topics in Creative Writing (1-5, max. 15) A&H Builds on beginning creative writing skills. Includes reading of models and writers' workshops to provide feedback on drafts. Students work on developing a portfolio of published writing. Prerequisite: either TWRT 270, TWRT 280, or TWRT 287. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 499

School of Social Work

Creative writing for social workers.

32nd Annual Creative Writing Workshop for Social Workers

July 14-17, 2023 

REGISTER  

About the Workshop

The University of Iowa is known nationally as " The Writing University ," and our institution boasts a rich tradition of great writing and an early and enduring commitment to the creative arts. Iowa’s tradition of writing has been guided by the principle that, though writing is a solitary practice, it’s one significantly enriched by interaction with other writers. There has also been a growing focus in recent years on how writing and language are critical in so many other professions and pursuits beyond the purely literary. It's fitting, then, that we continue to offer an annual opportunity for social workers and other helping professionals to gather in a workshop space for an intensive experience to work on their writing craft and learn how it can be leveraged, both in practice and in reflective self-care. 

This workshop will be conducted in person. Some assignments will be completed on your own time and some will be done during class sessions with the instructor and fellow participants.

Learning Objectives

Participants will:

• Improve creative writing skill in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, blogs etc.
• Understand how writing can be used as a professional tool in human services work as counselors, educators, advocates, researchers, and practitioners.

The Process

The seminar will meet in person in Iowa City over the course of 4 days. Each day includes assignments completed on your own time and interaction in real time with the instructor and fellow participants. Activities include a mixture of presentations from guest authors, writing instruction and practice, and peer critiques of participants’ work. Several hours are reserved for one-on-one coaching sessions with the lead instructor. Participants may be beginners or experienced--and sometimes even published--writers. Most participants have not previously attended a writing workshop, or even thought of themselves as writers. Diversity of experience, and an active interest and curiosity about the possibilities inherent in creative writing, are the essential ingredients for a fresh and exciting workshop experience.

Cost & CEUs

$525 / 24 CEU hours — Participants who complete the workshop are eligible to enroll in future sessions of our Master Class in Creative Writing for Social Workers.

About the Presenter

Ellen Szabo, M.Ed. , is the primary writing instructor for the course. She is the founder of Szabo Creative Consulting, promoting the use of creative writing for personal investigation, enrichment and social change. She earned her B.A. from Harvard College, with a concentration in English and American Literature, and her M.Ed. from Columbia University Teacher’s College, in Counseling Psychology. She writes and teaches with focus on how innovation and creativity can illuminate, inspire and advocate compassionate transformation. Guest speakers will share experiences with projects related to creative writing for social change, journaling for personal growth, and/or the written word as a tool for enhancing social justice.

CLASS IS LIMITED TO 12 PARTICIPANTS.

Creative Writing Master Class for Social Workers

July 18-19, 2023 

About the Master Class

Master Class will build upon the principles and instruction from the four-day Creative Writing for Social Work seminar. This workshop illuminates and explores various techniques for discovering and amplifying the spirit and purpose of each participant’s writing, with emphasis on how creative expression can facilitate personal transformation.

The focus is on exploration, experimentation, and discovery of each person’s unique writing voice. In a supportive, stimulating atmosphere, participants build upon their creative writing skills with additional instruction, writing prompts, and facilitated discussion of their work.

This workshop will be conducted in an in-person format. Some assignments will be completed on your own time and some will be done during live class sessions with the instructor and fellow participants.

Prerequisite : Completion of the four-day Creative Writing for Social Work workshop

CLASS IS LIMITED TO 6 PARTICIPANTS.

$525 / 12 CEU hours

Women Writing for (a) Change

For over 30 years, Women Writing for (a) Change ®  has provided a safe and non-competitive environment for individuals to develop their writing skills, cultivate their creativity and strengthen their voices.  At WWf(a)C, our writers, whether first-timers or the more experienced, find community, connection and meaningful conversation within our writing circles.  

We encourage writing as a process of self-discovery and self-expression — a celebration of the individual voice. Our classes provide a unique setting in which honoring each other’s words enriches participants’ lives.

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12 “Public Writing for Social Change”

Ashley J. Holmes

This essay challenges students to use public writing to embrace their role as an “academic citizen” (i.e., someone who takes the writing and research we do in college and puts it to practical and civic use in our communities in the hopes of contributing toward positive social change).* Beginning with invention and how to find an exigent public issue, the chapter moves students through important steps of planning to write for a public rhetor- ical situation, such as defining and researching a public audience, genre of writing, and context for eventual publication or circulation. The essay provides a brief introduction to public sphere theories to help students move beyond thinking of their audience in public writing as “the general public” and instead embrace a more specific audience within the multiplicity of publics for their writing. With examples from a broad range of genres and styles that fall under the umbrella of public writing, the essay offers support for more traditional public writing assignments (e.g., the op-ed or letter to a representative), as well as digital or multimodal assignments (e.g., blogs, social media campaigns, or digital stories).

Can a tweet—a genre of public writing—cause social change? There’s an article I like to teach by Malcom Gladwell that explores this question. In “Small Change: Why the Revolution Won’t Be Tweeted,” Gladwell recounts the story of four freshmen from North Caro- lina A&T who sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960, sparking a series of sit-ins and protests. Being skeptical of the impact of social media, Gladwell reminds us that all the events of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s “happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.” On one hand, Gladwell’s critiques may be warranted when we think about isolated instances of what some people call “clicktivism” or “slacktivism”—things like clicking a “like” button, changing a profile picture’s frame to support a cause, or signing an online petition. On the other hand, Gladwell wrote this article in 2010, and we have since witnessed the power of groups to use social media and online tools to organize broader movements, such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and many others.

While just one tweet or letter to the editor isn’t going to lead to sweep- ing social change by itself, using public writing to respond to the exigences of our current times can help us tap into networks that may advance a cause one step at a time. As Julius Bailey and David Leonard note in their study of the Black Lives Matter movement: “The expressions of black love, the creation of spaces of protest, the demands for justice that follow, each can gather momentum and spread to become large-scale social movements that can no longer be ignored” (emphasis added, 77). Sometimes public writing can be a small snowflake contributing to the momentum of a growing snowball, but it can just easily melt without having much effect. For writing to have the potential of a public impact beyond our personal thoughts on the page, beyond our peers in the class or the teacher assigning a grade, we have to successfully engage with a public rhetorical situation for our writing, finding ways to connect with the efforts of broader publics and counterpublics.

Writing for a public rhetorical situation means planning ahead by choosing a timely and relevant public issue, as well as anticipating the ways we will publish and circulate our writing to reach the public audiences who can help effect change. In this essay, we will walk through important components of planning, writing, and publishing to consider when com- posing public writing for social change. A first step in the process, though, is to understand the possibilities and privileges of your role as an academic citizen.

Academic Citizens

Take a minute and brainstorm a quick list of characteristics or words that come to mind when you, separately, think of the word “academic” and the word “citizen.”

Under your list of characteristics for “academic,” perhaps you brain- stormed words like “school,” “books,” “research,” or “teachers.” You might have listed characteristics like “smart” or “intellectual.” You might have approached the list by describing what you envision as not academic, by listing things like “not personal” or “not practical,” whether you agree with those designations or not. For the column of characteristics and words for “citizen,” did you list words like “government,” “voting,” or “civic duty”? You might have brainstormed your own role as a citizen by thinking about your local “community” or your “country of origin.”

Now that our creative juices are flowing, let’s put these two words together. In what ways is it possible to bring together what we do as writers and researchers in college with what is expected of us as citizens? For me, being an academic citizen means taking the scholarly work we do in col- lege and putting it to practical and civic use in our communities in the hopes of contributing toward positive social change. All the work you do as a student to research issues and write about them in persuasive ways has the potential to shape the world around you, but only if you circulate your writing to reach public audiences beyond your school.

The concept of an “academic citizen” is not entirely new; many scholars believe in a broad role for education that is tied to democratic ideals, as well as a more public conception of intellectuals. For example, writing in his Prison Notebooks in the 1920s and ‘30s, Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci argued that all people are intellectuals, whether they become an intellectual through advanced schooling, social status, or life experience. Gramsci sees school as central in developing a working-class group of intellectuals—what he calls “organic intellectuals”—that will critically ques- tion the traditional structure of how knowledge is produced (Hoare and Smith 131). Building on some of the foundational ideas of Gramsci, Henry A. Giroux has written about the importance of public universities and colleges making a commitment to address society’s problems. Similarly, Ellen Cushman argues that “public intellectuals” should use their research “to address social issues” and improve “under-served neighborhoods” (329).

The concept of an organic or public intellectual has a lot in common with what I mean by being an academic citizen.

In the next few pages, I hope to convince you that making a slight shift in how you think about your role in higher education can help you move toward these more public and civic goals and to start a journey toward be- coming an academic citizen. Instead of only thinking about yourself as a student doing work for the teacher, begin thinking about the potential for your academic work to contribute toward efforts to address social injustices in your community, state, or country. While one single letter or 280-word tweet is unlikely to cause a sea change, writing that is publicly circulated has the power to tap into broader networks, movements, and efforts that, when combined, can help us move one step closer to social change, even if that step is small. I would like to invite you to think about how some of the academic research and writing you do for school can become some- thing more than just a grade—whether that’s through your contributions to your church bulletin, for example, or a letter you send to your state representative.

Finding an Issue: Invention and Exigency

Being an effective public writer starts with having a good issue. When you think of all the many things you could write about, what does it mean to have a good issue? And, how can you find one? I recommend you choose an issue that meets the following criteria:

• public—in other words, it’s discussed and debated in the public realm or has implications for public audiences and communities,
• personally relevant—it should ideally be something that you care about or that interests you, and
• timely—it’s relevant to this specific moment.

Choosing a public issue does not mean you need to ignore personal concerns. In fact, it can present an opportunity to make the personal pub- lic by using your interests, experiences, and beliefs to help fuel your public writing and arguments. To aid in your public writing journey, let me tell you about two rhetorical concepts: invention and exigency.

Invention—one of the five rhetorical canons (the others are arrange- ment, style, memory, and delivery)—is a valuable rhetorical tool; it in- volves a process of discovery that can help you figure out what to say or write. Invention is meant to be generative. In other words, it’s meant to  help you generate lots of ideas that could be useful in your writing and research. Eventually you will need to narrow those ideas down for your ar- gument, selecting and arranging the ones that help you most persuasively make your case. However, during invention, “you are trying to come up with as many ideas as the situation and topic will allow. So turn your judg- ment down to zero while inventing. Keep an open mind” (Pullman 112).

As you are trying to find a public issue and decide what you will say about it, you might try various invention strategies, like the “Writing on Location” activity explained below, to help you generate more ideas.

An Invention Activity: Writing on Location

Choose a local, public location—an actual, physical spot or site—where you can observe and write for a short amount of time—whether that’s with pen and paper or typing on your phone, tablet, or laptop. Consider a spot with some interesting visuals or bustling activity that will prompt you to brainstorm or freewrite ideas related to your assignment. While visiting your location, find a spot to sit, stand, or lie down where you can write for a few minutes. Compose a freewrite or reflection that informally captures whatever comes to your mind while you are actually, physically in the location. What do you see? What do you hear? What is intriguing? What seems surprising? You are encouraged to take pictures and/or videos that will help capture your experiences in this location at this moment and may serve as evidence in digital, multimodal assignments. (When taking pictures or videos in public, you should be particularly respectful of the privacy of people around you and protect their anonymity.)

When I assign students to write on location, they often end up with relevant and timely public issues. There is something about being physically present in a public space that helps writers begin to form a reaction. One of my former students, for example, chose to write on location at a historic cemetery near her apartment. She was distressed to see the many broken and cracked tombstones and dilapidated conditions at the cemetery. This eventually led to her composing a public blog about how local residents could (and should) get involved with the efforts of a cemetery preservation and restoration society. Another student wrote on location at the university’s library late in the evening and became frustrated when the library began closing. She used some of the notes from her “Writing on Location” freewrite to help develop a public letter to the library’s Dean to extend the library’s hours.

Invention activities like writing on location may be especially helpful at the start of your process. However, invention can happen “at any stage of the writing process” (Trim and Isaac 108). You shouldn’t hesitate to go back to the generative, brainstorming work of invention if you become stuck, even if you have already started writing or revising a draft. Writing on location may not work for all of your interests, but give it a try and see if it helps you work to find a public issue for your writing. (For suggestions of other invention activities and practices, read Trim and Isaac’s “Reinvent- ing Invention.”)

As you are discovering new ideas through invention, I would also like to encourage you to keep in mind possible exigences related to your issue. Doing so will help ensure your issue and public response is timely and relevant for your targeted audience. Rhetorician Lloyd F. Bitzer argued that any rhetorical situation has three constituent parts: an exigence, an audience, and a set of constraints (6). The exigence is the sense of urgency that demands or invites a rhetorical response, whether that’s the delivery of a speech, the submission of a college essay, or the painting of a mural on the side of a building, for example. You may see the exigence as the assignment that your teacher has asked you to write; it certainly is urgent that you complete the assignment if you want to succeed in the course. Even though our audience or exigency may get us going with writing, “the force which drives composing is the writer’s own set of goals, purposes, or intentions” (Flower and Hayes 69). The exigences for your writing can and often are a combination of personal intentions and school-initiated assignments.

When you write for a public rhetorical situation (even if it is pulling double duty as a class assignment), it is important to establish a public ex- igence for your issue. Exigences can work in your favor if you can frame your issue and stance in a way that shows the urgency of the matter for your audience. To help situate your issue within an exigence, you might put yourself in the shoes of a skeptical reader and ask: why this issue? And, why now? For example, a student in one of the civic writing courses I taught selected to research and write about a bill that would allow local governments to relocate monuments. He was able to situate that issue and frame it within current events news stories at the time that were related to the removal of confederate monuments; this helped him build urgency and establish timeliness for the issue, even though the bill did not explicitly mention confederate monuments. Establishing an exigence can hook your readers and keep them reading. Speaking of readers, who are your readers? In the next section, we will explore options for engaging a realistic public audience for your writing.

Engaging Realistic Publics: Preliminary  Research and Planning

The parts of a rhetorical situation are connected in ways that can make it difficult to make some decisions—like discovering your issue and defin- ing the exigence—without also considering other components—like the audience or genre for your writing. As you narrow your public issue and consider its relevance, you should also begin thinking about who you will write to and in what form. This section provides strategies for how to re- search possibilities for your public rhetorical situation by understanding which publics you are addressing.

When you think about the audience for a piece of public writing, what first comes to mind? Easy—the general public, right? The general public seems to cover most any audience for writing that is meant for someone other than oneself (like a personal journal) or the teacher (for class assign- ments). Everything else tends to be lumped in with “the general public”— like the people out there who read newspapers or your Instagram followers. Here’s the problem. There’s really no such thing as the general public. In fact, my quick list of audiences above should already suggest to you that each of those groups has a set of distinct characteristics, even if newspa- per readers and your Instagram followers share some things in common. What kinds of evidence they may find convincing or how you might be rhetorically persuasive in your arguments is impacted by your selection of audience. Trying to write to an amorphous, generic mass of people would set you up for challenges. To further demonstrate this point, let me take a quick aside to frame the significance of “publics” and the public sphere.

Researchers who study and write about the public sphere—that space where the so-called general public comes together to discuss, write about, and debate issues that they have in common—help us understand how we can be more effective public writers. For example, Jürgen Habermas con- ceived of the public sphere as an idealized space accessible to all. Haber- mas examined how people in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries came together in places like Britain’s coffee houses and France’s salons to debate civic issues. This marked a shift from the typically personal or pri- vate conversations people had in their homes. While Habermas’s concep- tion of the public sphere was foundational, his work has been criticized for being overly idealized. If you were not a White male with property, you were not able to participate in civic debates in the public sphere.

Nancy Fraser and others have argued for a more nuanced conception of publics—yes, the “s” on “publics” is important. Fraser studied “counterpublics”; historically, these were public spheres that existed alongside the coffee houses and salons. Counterpublic gatherings and clubs gave opportunities for women, the working class, and others without money or privilege and who were excluded from dominant public spheres to develop “alternative styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech” (Fraser 62). The takeaway here is that to conceive of a singular public sphere—or the general public—is inaccurate; there is a “plurality of competing publics” and counterpublics (Fraser 61).

Take a minute and think about the different public and counterpublic spheres in your own life: where do some of your family, friends, or community groups gather? What do you talk about? Are there some topics that are taboo or off-limits? Are there certain styles and ways of speaking that you use with those groups? The answers probably vary depending on which public or counterpublic spheres you are envisioning. Recognizing a multiplicity of publics means acknowledging and valuing the way our differences can challenge us to alter and expand our views of the world.

Defining and Researching Your Public Rhetorical Situation: Considerations of Audience, Purpose, Genre, and Context

I invite you to take a few minutes to brainstorm the parts of your public rhetorical situation. We’ve already been exploring exigent issues and pub- lics/counterpublics, but now it’s time to narrow to a more specific audi- ence, define your purpose, select your public writing genre, and select the context for publication/circulation. Because these parts of your writing are connected, you may find it helpful to complete the following “Planning for Your Public Rhetorical Situation” activity, which asks you a series of questions about each. (Some of these questions have been adapted from Louise Dunlap’s “Audience Analysis Grid” (127).)

Activity: Planning for Your Public Rhetorical Situation

As you prepare for a public writing situation, I invite you to use the following prompts to help you explore potential audiences and to analyze the relationships among issue, purpose, audience, genre, and context.

Issue and Purpose: Write a few sentences about how you understand your issue at this point. What do you already know? What do you need to know? What are your goals for public writing? What do you hope to accomplish?

Possible Publics: Make a list of at least 5 possible audiences you could address through public writing. Why do they (or should they) care about your issue? Can they effect the kind of change you are asking for?

Narrowed Audience: Circle one audience from your list above that you’d like to explore in more detail. Conduct some preliminary research and begin analyzing this possible audience. What does the audience already know about the issue? How have they been engaged with it (if at all) al- ready? What do you think they need to know? What are their attitudes, beliefs, or values? How might you be able to find common ground with this audience?

Genre: What genre would be most fitting and persuasive for your select- ed audience? How will the genre impact the way you communicate your message? What are the typical conventions (style, structure, tone, use of visuals, etc.) of the genre?

Context for Publication: How will you “go public” with your writing to reach your intended audience? What publication venues—print or digital, formal or informal—would be appealing to your audience and fit with your message? What genre options are available to you within the possible site of publication? How will you circulate your writing?

As you work through this set of questions, I hope you will begin to narrow and define not only your public issue but also the essential compo- nents of your public writing situation.

A common challenge student writers face with public writing is think- ing of the public as ambiguous (Weisser). Writing studies researcher Chris- tian Weisser advocates for students to “locate strong publics where their voices can lead to action,” so that public writing has a greater chance of leading to “significant, tangible, immediate results” (Weisser 109, 111). To locate strong publics for your writing, you must understand that there is a plurality of publics and then begin to narrow to the specific public or counterpublic communities you will target as your audience. You begin that process by brainstorming very specific kinds of readers who are im- pacted by or would be interested in your public issue. For example, you could consider demographic groups (e.g., age, gender identity or sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, geographic location, etc.).

As you are thinking of potential public audiences, you could also let the potential place of publication help define your audience. For instance, if your final piece of public writing will be a Facebook post to your account, your audience would be defined by your Facebook friends (in which case  you might begin brainstorming the mix of publics and counterpublics that exist within your own set of friends). Or, if you want to try to publish your writing as an op-ed in your school’s newspaper, you would want to define your audience through the students at your school and the diverse sets of peer groups they represent; perhaps you want to tailor that audience to be even more specific, so you are speaking directly to LGBTQ+ students at your school. As you make progress on selecting your issue or audience, consider how other components like your genre or place of publication may afford new opportunities or present new constraints in how you compose your public writing.

One of my preferred ways to define a public audience is by selecting an actual person or organization with a name and actual address (wheth- er a physical address or email address). Writing to a specific person takes some of the guessing game out of trying to understand a large and com- plex group of people. You can and should “analyze your audience to learn where their views differ from yours” contends Louise Dunlap in her book Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing; then turn that audience analysis into a “communication strategy” (120). This becomes a bit easier when your audience is a specific, actual person. Students in my classes have researched, written, and mailed letters to the university pres- ident, state and national representatives, directors of non-profit organizations, celebrities, athletes, and CEOs of businesses—just to name a few single-person audiences.

Keep in mind that successfully meeting the needs of your audience may result in changes to the style, structure, and tone of your writing compared to the kind of writing you typically submit for your college classes. Compared to lengthy research essays, most public writing genres should be concise, clear, and direct—free of jargon that would be unfamiliar to the audience. It would also be inappropriate to include parenthetical MLA citations or a Works Cited list for most public genres. To let your audi- ences know where you found your information, shift to using attributive tags—identify sources by title, author, year of publication, and/or place of publication within your writing. Finally, while the kind of peer-reviewed sources you typically use in college can provide good evidence in public writing, a compelling personal story may be more effective and convinc- ing to some public audiences—a combination of personal evidence with research-based evidence can be ideal.

I often encourage students to create lists of public genres just to get an expansive set of ideas for the range of options they have; here are a few public writing genres that have been popular with students over the  years—many of which were combined as a series of posts or as a digital,  multimodal project.

• meme • infographic • podcast • editorial • digital story • newsletter • map • email • photo essay • blog • website • social media post • business letter • flyer/poster

This list is certainly not exhaustive. What other examples of public writing genres can you think of?

Considering Digital Publics

Today, we encounter much of the public writing we read in digital public spheres. Digital writing offers writers a unique set of affordances and challenges when communicating your message. You have the opportunity to compose in multiple modes, incorporating visuals or audio with your writing. Many multimodal texts allow for experimentation, creativity, and even disruption of the status quo in ways that may be compelling for your argument. In my classes, students have created Google Maps, posted to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, composed blogs, and circulated online petitions. For example, in a Digital Writing and Publishing course I teach, one student paired a Google Map of the best skateboarding locations around town with a blog that made a public argument for transforming vacant parking lots into legal skating locations. Digital public writing can present new opportunities to communicate our messages in ways that chal- lenge traditional styles of knowledge production and textual circulation.

With these new opportunities, though, comes a set of expectations for being intentional with issues of visual design and layout. Alex Reid notes in “Why Blog? Searching for Writing on the Web” that we should consider issues of “design and layout” as interrelated to “questions of content” when composing a blog post (315). Effective digital design often means embedding media and/or incorporating hyperlinks to external sites (Car- roll). Savvy online readers expect well-designed, interactive online content.

One of the benefits of situating your writing in digital online publics is the opportunity you have to reach a broad and diverse set of online readers and to connect with broader social movements. In her research about a digital campaign to stop violence against women, Jennifer Nish concluded that digital publishing increases the reach of activism, making the spread of material “more visible than some print-based forms of activist commu- nication” (240). Similarly, you can increase your reach on social media platforms through the use of hashtags to more effectively reach a specific audience. When used effectively, the hashtag itself carries rhetorical weight and can help communicate a host of positions within just a word or phrase (Langford and Speight).

Digital publishing often allows for a multimodal mix of genres to help you communicate your public message effectively. In one of the Civic Writing classes I taught, a student researched a series of state-level education bills. For her final public project, she created infographics that helped break the education bills in layman’s terms, explaining how they would impact the state if passed. To follow through with circulating her message, this student posted a series of tweets with links to her online infographics. Here’s one example tweet: “For anyone interested in #EducationPolicy, here are 5 bills that are currently sitting on @GovernorDeal’s desk waiting to be signed into law. #GaEdYouthCmte #GaHigherEdCmte.” Here you can see how the student used a mix of hashtags to connect with public au- diences who may be interested in her issue and @-ing the Governor who ultimately would make the decision of whether to sign them into law. She also effectively uses exigence by noting that the bills were sitting on the Governor’s desk waiting to be signed.

While this section has only scratched the surface of digital public writ- ing, I hope it gives you a preview of some of the opportunities and addi- tional expectations that arise when you situate your writing online.

Going Public with Writing: Publication and Circulation

You may be wondering about the most important part of public writing— the act of going public through publication and/or circulation of your writ- ing. Some students who are assigned public writing for a class go through  the motions but then ultimately submit their writing only to the teacher for a grade. I would like to challenge you to follow through in actually going public with your writing, to actually reach the audiences you have worked so hard to persuade. Of course, how you go public with your writing will depend on all the pieces of the rhetorical situation puzzle you have already planned for: your audience, genre, purpose, and context. When I teach public writing through business letters, I have a letter mailing party in class where I bring envelopes and stamps (and cookies!); students write in the addresses, sign their letters, and mail them off. Whether it’s “snail mail” or email, posting a public flyer or publishing a blog post, I challenge you to circulate your message and reach your public audience.

Of course, circulating your writing within some public spheres could be risky, and you should think about the implications of “going public” with your writing. For example, maybe you have taken up the cause of LGBTQ+ rights in your public writing, telling a personal story of your experiences with coming out to be persuasive. If you were not yet ready to tell your family about your sexual orientation but decided to publish your writing on Facebook—and you have family members as Facebook friends—that may put you in a tricky situation. Many of us have become careful with curating our social media audiences, but you have to be equal- ly mindful in other publication venues—maybe your editorial in the school newspaper stating your views about the death penalty will cause you to lose credibility or friendships. In some cases, you may feel so strongly commit- ted that the rewards of publishing your positions outweigh other risks, but you should take a moment to assess the ways your issue, audience, genre, and publication venue are all interconnected within the complexities of your public rhetorical situation.

In the article “Going Public” by Peter Mortensen, I have a favorite passage that I often call to mind when I am writing for a public audience: “we must go public. And we can” (182). Mortensen is asking writing studies re- searchers to write for increasingly public audiences “outside the profession, beyond the academy” (182); he’s asking his colleagues to embrace the role of public intellectual that I mentioned at the start of this essay. What I love about the line is how it communicates in just a few words the necessity, urgency, and possibility that comes with public writing. Whether you are a university researcher used to writing to other researchers or a first-year college student used to writing only for your teachers, writing for pub lic audiences and in public genres can seem daunting, but, as Mortensen reminds us, we must go public, and we can. As academic citizens of the world, we have a responsibility to ourselves and to the publics around us to use writing to improve our communities and address injustices. Not every piece of writing that goes public will change the world, and we often do not get to see an immediate impact; indeed, the kind of social change that addresses deep injustices often takes time and far-reaching efforts beyond a single email or blog post, but these small rhetorical acts can begin to gather momentum and move toward change in small steps.

When you arrive at your graduation day, I hope you will recall what it means to be an academic citizen. Listen for the moment just before the commencement speaker has you move your tassel from the right to the left. They will confer your degree and say: “with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities appertaining thereto.” In the celebration of your ac- complishments, remember that obtaining a higher education is a privilege that comes with responsibilities to your community and society. Being an academic citizen simply means using your education for good in the world, and public writing can help you accomplish those goals.

Works Cited

Bailey, Julius, and David J. Leonard. “Black Lives Matter: Post-Nihilistic Free- dom Dreams.” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, vol. 5, no. 3⁄4, 2015, pp. 67-77. Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 1, 1968, pp. 1-14.

Carroll, Brian. Writing and Editing for Digital Media. 3rd ed. Routledge, 2017. Cushman, Ellen. “The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, and Activist Re-search.” College English, vol. 61, no. 3, 1999, pp. 328-36.

Dunlap, Louise. Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing. New Village Press, 2007.

Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. “The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a

Rhetorical Problem.” Landmark Essays on Writing Process, edited by Sondra Perl, Hermagoras Press, 1994, pp. 63-74.

Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text, no. 25/26, 1990, pp. 56-80.

Gladwell, Malcolm. “Small Change: Why the Revolution Won’t Be Tweet- ed.” The New Yorker, 27 Sept. 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell. Accessed 5 Jan. 2021.

Giroux, Henry A. “The Public Intellectuals Project.” https://www.henryagiroux.com/public-intellectuals-project. Accessed 1 Sept. 2020.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inqui- ry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence. MIT Press, 1989.

Hoare, Quentin, and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, editors. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Lawrence & Wishart, 1971.

Langford, Catherine L., and Montené Speight. “#BlackLivesMatter: Epistemic Positioning, Challenges, and Possibilities.” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, vol. 5, no. 3/4, 2015, pp. 78-89.

Mortensen, Peter. “Going Public.” CCC, vol. 50, no. 2, 1998, pp. 182-205. Nish, Jennifer. “Spreadable Genres, Multiple Publics: The Pixel Project’s Digital Campaigns to Stop Violence against Women.” Genre and the Performance of Publics, edited by Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi, Utah State UP, 2016, pp. 239-56.

Pullman, George. Persuasion: History, Theory, Practice. Hackett Publishing, 2013. Reid, Alex. “Why Blog? Searching for Writing on the Web.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 2, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2011, pp. 302-19.

Trim, Michelle D., and Megan Isaac. “Reinventing Invention: Discovery and Investment in Writing.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 107-25.

Weisser, Christian R. Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere. Southern Illinois UP, 2002.

Teacher Resources for Public

Writing for social change.

“Public Writing for Social Change” represents a compilation of my best advice for students who are writing for public audiences and contexts based on the lessons I’ve learned from teaching public writing for over 15 years. Public writing assignments require rhetorical sophistication, genre awareness, and targeted research toward a specific audience, context, and exigence. The essay addresses some of the common pitfalls I have seen from students who struggle with public writing, such as choosing an issue that does not have a public exigence, conceiving of one’s audience too broadly, or not following through by actually “going public” with their writing.

Even with the many benefits, assigning public writing can be tricky if the goals of one’s writing courses or programs are solely based within academic writing styles and genres. Without delving too deeply into the perennial debates about what the “content” of first-year composition cours- es should be, I would like to encourage instructors interested in teaching public writing but also concerned about preparing students to write for academic purposes and contexts to situate and frame the public writing you assign within the academic goals of your courses. Public writing pedagogies are deeply enmeshed with academic literacies, such as research skills, clarity and coherence in communication, having a clear thesis or main idea, and supporting one’s argument with convincing evidence. To meet the needs and expectations of writing programs, students, and the broader academic community, you may need to make these connections between academic and public writing explicit, while also highlighting how the differences between them can help develop rhetorical sophistication as students shift from one style to the next.

An ideal way to build into your course design this lesson about the relationship between academic and public writing is to preface a public writing assignment with a more traditional academic writing assignment. For example, when I assign public business letters on social justice issues, students first conduct academic research on the issue in advance, and I have, in some courses, assigned an academic research essay, rhetorical analysis, and/or annotated bibliography as the project immediately preceding the public writing assignment. I have also taught public writing as part of a “remix” or “re-mediation” project after a research essay; in this scenario, students transform their traditional research essay into a public and/or dig- ital, multimodal piece of writing. Students have to consider how a change from academic to public audience, purpose, genre, and/or context might  impact their argument, evidence, or approach to persuasion and rhetorical appeals. Yet another course progression I have used starts with the personal, then moves to the academic, and ends with the public, asking students to hone and develop their rhetorical understanding with each assignment. Ideally, students pull a thread of personal interest from the first assignment (a literacy narrative, for instance), then conduct academic research on the topic and write in an academic genre, and, finally, situate that personal topic as a public issue to then use a mix of personal and academic research to persuasively argue one’s stance to an audience who can effect change.

I continue to teach public writing because of the powerful ways it bridges academic literacies with civic purposes to address social justice issues—all within public genres that will serve students in their careers and lives post-graduation. I hope this essay offers support for you to pursue this pedagogical work, too.

Discussion Questions

• The opening of this chapter asks “Can a tweet—a genre of public writing—cause social change?” Read Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Small Change: Why the Revolution Won’t Be Tweeted” and offer your reaction to Gladwell’s perspective. Do you think social me- dia writing—like Twitter or Facebook posts—as a kind of public writing can lead to meaningful social change? Give examples from current events and/or your life experiences to support your stance.
• Based on the brainstorming you did in Table 1, how would you define an “academic citizen” in your own words? Can you think of any examples of academic citizens or public intellectuals from popular culture or from among your teachers or peers? What do those individuals do that make them academic citizens or public intellectuals in your view?
• Try the invention activity “Writing on Location,” and then write a reflection about your experience. What was your reaction to writ- ing on location—helpful, distracting, surprising, upsetting, excit- ing, a mix of reactions? What ideas, writing, pictures did you create that may be useful in your public writing assignment? How might you use those items in your public writing?
• The section of the essay on “publics” highlights debates among public sphere theories about whether there is a singular public sphere or whether there are multiple publics and counterpublic spheres. What is your opinion in this debate? Give examples from your experiences or from public culture to support your position.
• What have been your prior experiences with writing in digital pub- lic spaces, and what have you learned about writing in general from writing in digital contexts? Give a specific example from your ex- perience, such as posting to a social media site or commenting on a website, and explain what unique considerations you had to account for in terms of the style of your writing, how you conceived of audience, the type of writing, or the context in which it was publicly viewable. How was this writing similar to the writing you do for school? How was it different?
• This essay invites you to “go public” by publishing and/or circulating your writing to reach an audience who can effect change. Brainstorm a list of possibilities for going public with your writing; include a mix of digital and print publishing contexts and consider how to circulate (i.e., distribute or share) your writing with others. For example, you could “publish” your writing by printing it to a flyer, but you would need to consider where to post or hand out your flyer to “circulate” it to your targeted audience.

“Public Writing for Social Change” Copyright © 2022 by Ashley J. Holmes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The One Method That Changes Your—and All Students’—Writing

Science-based writing methods can achieve dramatic results..

Posted May 14, 2024 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

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• A focus on writing style might have limited the method's impacts.

I remember spending hours commenting painstakingly on my students’ papers when I was a graduate student teaching in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. My students loved our classes, and they filled my sections and gave me terrific course evaluations. Yet I could see that their writing failed to change significantly over the course of the semester. I ended up feeling as if I should refund their money, haunted by the blunt instruments we had to teach writing.

As I’ve learned from directing five writing programs at three different universities, methods matter. When I reviewed comments on papers from instructors who taught in my programs, I discovered that the quantity and quality of comments on students’ papers made only a slight impact on writing outcomes. For instance, one notoriously lazy instructor took several weeks to return assignments and only used spelling and grammar checkers to automate comments. But his conscientious colleague made dozens of sharp observations about students’ arguments, paragraphs, and sentences. However, Mr. Conscientious’ students improved perhaps only 10% over Mr. Minimalist’s students. Even then, the differences stemmed from basic guidelines Mr. Conscientious insisted his students write to, which included providing context sentences at the outset of their essay introductions.

Educators have also poured resources into teaching writing, with increasing numbers of hours dedicated to teaching writing across primary, secondary, and higher education . Yet studies continue to find writing skills inadequate . In higher education, most universities require at least a year of writing-intensive courses, with many universities also requiring writing across the curriculum or writing in the disciplines to help preserve students’ writing skills. However, writing outcomes have remained mostly unchanged .

While pursuing my doctorate, I dedicated my research to figuring out how writing worked. As a graduate student also teaching part-time, I was an early convert to process writing. I also taught those ancient principles of logos, ethos, and pathos, as well as grammar and punctuation. Nevertheless, these frameworks only created a canvas for students’ writing. What was missing: how writers should handle words, sentence structure, and relationships between sentences.

Yet researchers published the beginnings of a science-based writing method over 30 years ago. George Gopen, Gregory Colomb, and Joseph Williams created a framework for identifying how to maximize the clarity, coherence, and continuity of writing. In particular, Gopen and Swan (1990) created a methodology for making scientific writing readable . This work should have been a revelation to anyone teaching in or directing a writing program. But, weirdly, comparatively few writing programs or faculty embraced this work, despite Williams, Colomb, and Gopen publishing both research and textbooks outlining the method and process.

Peculiarly, this framework—represented by Williams’ Style series of textbooks and Gopen’s reader expectation approach—failed to become standard in writing courses, likely because of two limitations. First, both Gopen and Williams hewed to a relativistic stance on writing methods, noting that rule-flouting often creates a memorable style. This stance created a raft of often-contradictory principles for writing. For example, Williams demonstrated that beginning sentences with There is or There are openings hijacked the clarity of sentences, then argued writers should use There is or There are to shunt important content into sentence emphasis positions, where readers recall content best. Second, these researchers failed to tie this writing framework to the wealth of data in psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience , or cognitive psychology on how our reading brains process written English. For instance, textbooks written by these three principal researchers avoid any mention of why emphasis positions exist at the ends of sentences and paragraphs—despite the concept clearly originating in the recency effect. This limitation may stem from the humanities’ long-held antipathy to the idea that writing is a product, rather than a process. Or even that science-based methods can help teachers and programs measure the effectiveness of writing, one reason why university First-Year Writing programs have failed to improve students’ writing in any measurable way.

Nevertheless, when you teach students how our reading brains work, you create a powerful method for rapidly improving their writing—in any course that requires writing and at all levels of education. Students can grasp how writing works as a system and assess the costs and benefits of decisions writers face, even as they choose their first words. This method also works powerfully to help students immediately understand how, for instance, paragraph heads leverage priming effects to shape readers’ understanding of paragraph content.

Using this method, I and my colleagues have helped students use a single writing assignment to secure hundreds of jobs, win millions in grant funding, and advance through the ranks in academia. However, we’ve also used the same method without modifications in elementary and secondary classrooms to bolster students’ writing by as much as three grade levels in a single year.

Perhaps the time has arrived for this well-kept secret to revolutionizing student writing outcomes to begin making inroads into more writing classrooms.

Gopen, G. D. and J. A. Swan (1990). "The Science of Scientific Writing." American Scientist 78(6): 550-558.

Gopen, George. The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader’s Perspective . Pearson, 2004.

Gopen, George. Expectations: Teaching Writing from the Reader’s Perspective . Pearson, 2004.

Williams, Joseph. Style: Toward Clarity and Grace . University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Williams, Joseph. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace . Harper Collins, 1994.

Williams, Joseph. Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace . Longman, 2002.

Jane Yellowlees Douglas, Ph.D. , is a consultant on writing and organizations. She is also the author, with Maria B. Grant, MD, of The Biomedical Writer: What You Need to Succeed in Academic Medicine .

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