WRITING DEMOCRACYS INVENTORY OF UNIVERSITY-COMMUNITY PROJECTS 2011

CLiC @ Texas A&M-Commerce The mission of the Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) is to promote a better understanding of how texts and related literacy practices may develop, sustain, or even erode civic engagement across local publics, especially among historically underrepresented groups and across rural, southern, working-class contexts like the region in which Texas A&M-Commerce is situated. Current initiatives engaging university-community partnerships include Writing Democracy Across Northeast Texas, an interdisciplinary and multi-year study providing research and creative opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in collaboration with faculty, local advocacy groups, libraries, museums, and historical associations. Concrete results of CLiC's Writing Democracy Across Northeast Texas initiative include the two-part documentary series "Racing Northeast Texas" (<more>), the digital humanities project "Remixing Northeast Texas" (more), and coordinating efforts to secure the first Texas Historical Marker to be installed at an African American church in Hunt County. CLiC provides research and creative opportunities for faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students across the disciplines, largely through projects that support and engage the surrounding community in public scholarship. CLiC graduate students have worked with CLiC faculty to leverage existing campus resources to support research and relevant outreach. Pursuit of Freedom @ LIU-Brooklyn Starting in Fall 2011 the LIU-Brooklyn campus and two other nearby colleges will participate in a Fund for Improvement of Secondary Education (FIPSE) grant sponsored by the Brooklyn Historical Society(<more>). With the aim of improving academic persistence and success, the two-and-a-half-year collaborative project, Students and Faculty in the Archives,invites entering college students to conduct primary research in underutilized Society archives that chronicle Long Island and Brooklyn history back to the 17th century. At LIU-Brooklyn, the project dovetails with a new learning community initiative and will annually involve 60 entering students in first-year-composition, Core Seminar, and a year-long-History survey in a themed cohort called The Pursuit of Freedom. Students will learn about 18th century slavery in Brooklyn, 19th century struggles for freedom, and ongoing 20th century struggles to complete the unfinished revolution of the Reconstruction era. After inventing a fictional oral history in the first semester based on research on 18th and 19thcentury archival records of slavery and the struggle to abolish it, students will go on in the second semester to investigate the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration as the basis for a culminating project in which they will conduct oral histories of Brooklyn civil rights activists. Through the support of the LIU Library, students and faculty will develop an app that may include, among other things, virtual tours of Society archives and exhibits, Brooklyn neighborhoods, students research projects, and the oral histories.