Field Notes from Project Homeless Connect

After you finish your volunteer shift at Project Homeless Connect, record your observations from your experience here as a comment. Record everything you remember from your day and include as many details as you can. Be as descriptive as possible. As you conclude, reflect on what was significant about your experience.

IMPORTANT: Please do not use people’s real names. Use initials or pseudonyms. We want to preserve the anonymity of the people you interacted with.

Preparing for Project Homeless Connect

As you prepare for Project Homeless Connect, reflect on your expectations for Saturday’s event. What do you think the day will be like? What do expect to learn? What have you already learned about homelessness or poverty that you think prepares you for volunteering? What did you learn from the volunteer training session? From our experiences thus far at The Gathering Place? If you’re feeling any anxiety, apprehension, or nervousness about the day, please reflect on these feelings, too. Why do you think you feel that way?

Reflecting on Writing for The Gathering Place Project

After you turn in your piece for The Gathering Place, I’d like you to reflect on what it was like to complete this assignment. First, tell us about what it was like to conduct the research for this piece of writing. What did you learn about homelessness, poverty, or The Gathering Place from your interviews that you wouldn’t or couldn’t have learned from a text? Second, what was it like to use these interviews to tell someone’s story and generate an impression about The Gathering Place? How did you grow as a writer? Last, what was it like writing for this non-profit organization? What did you enjoy or find challenging about putting yourself in service to TGP in this way?

Reflecting on the Mother’s Day Tea

Before we do our peer-review workshop on your pieces for The Gathering Place, I’d like you to take a few minutes and reflect on your involvement with The Mother’s Day Tea. First, describe what you did to help out with this event—be as detailed as you can—and then reflect on what was significant for you. What did you learn about yourself as a student or as a volunteer or as a civically engaged person by completing this project? How did working on this event relate to your earlier research or our current writing project? How did it contribute to our relationship with this community organization, as well as to our community as a class?

The Ethics of Servcie-Learning

In pairs, I would like you to write a letter to the editor of The Clarion in which you argue for or against mandatory service-learning at DU. That is, do you think undergraduate students should be required to take at least one service-learning course while they are at DU? Why or why not? If so, what kind of service-learning courses makes sense for students? What kind of civic engagement is good for students, for the university, or for communities off campus? If not, what makes service-learning (mandatory or not) problematic? How might it diminish students’ education experience or prove challenging in ways that fail to promote the public good?

As you craft this letter, keep in mind the rhetorical appeals you learned about in WRIT 1122/1622 last quarter. How can you base part of your argument on your own expertise or authority on this issue? In what ways can you connect with your readers and gain their trust? What emotional appeals might strengthen your position? What commonplace values could you ground your argument in? What outside evidence or testimony could you include to bolster your claim (even doing a cursory search via google)?

Field Notes: Second Interview

After your second interview, post your observations from your experience here as a comment. Continue to record as many details as you can remember from your visit to The Gathering Place. (That is, describe how you felt coming in for your second shift, who you worked with and talked to, how the interviews unfolded, what you noticed or thought was significant.) You might also pay attention to any differences you noted (either in yourself or others) during this visit, or reflect on what you think you're learning from these interviews.

Field Notes: First Interview

After you conduct your first interview, I'd like you to reflect on your experience. In as much detail as you can remember, tell the rest of us what you observed on your first visit to The Gathering Place. Tell us about your first impression of the space, the people you met, how your interviews went, who else you talked to, and how you felt about your visit to The Gathering Place. Be as detailed and descriptive as you can, as you will use these notes later in the quarter for your participant-observer study.