Welcome to English 472! I am thrilled to teach this class and to provide you with a substantial public scholarship experience through storytelling. Public scholarship (variously referred to as “publicly engaged academic work,” “community engaged research,” and “community–based research”) “encompasses different forms of making knowledge ‘about, for, and with’ diverse publics and communities. Through a coherent, purposeful sequence of activities, it contributes to the public good and yields artifacts of public and intellectual value.”2 Increasingly, students are participating in public scholarship in and beyond their classes.

Your public scholarship storytelling project — leading story circles and collaboratively (with community participants) writing “Neighborhood narratives”–is part of a larger project to tell new stories about the residents of Reading, PA. The reading, writing, and thinking leading up to the storytelling projects center on stories’ social change potential. Our class text, Telling Stories to Change the World: Global Voices on the Power of Narrative to Build Community and Make Social Justice Claims, will be supplemented with readings on notions of community and neighborhood, community-building, and facilitating story circles. The writing, revising, editing, and review processes for the stories will be highly collaborative.