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.

Mother's Day Tea Plans

Once your group has come up with a plan for your tasks for the Mother's Day Tea, please give the rest of us an update on what you're planning to do. Thanks!

Reflecting on Your First Two Writing Assignments

Take a few minutes and reflect on your first two writing assignments for this class. As a writer, how did you approach compiling your annotated bibliography? What did your writing process look like for this project? What did you learn about research from doing it?

Next, contrast this experience to that of writing your research memo. What did you do differently as a writer to create this document? How did your writing change? How did you figure out what to include in this memo and what to leave out? What do you think you’ll take away from this assignment as a writer?

Reflecting on Our Progress Thus Far, Preparing for Our Next Project

Now that we’ve finished the main part of Elliot Liebow’s study and been visited by two staff members from The Gathering Place, I’d like you to reflect on the connections you see emerging between this study and this organization. In the final chapter of Tell Them Who I Am, Liebow writes,

Homeless people are homeless because they do not have a place to live.

Given all of our reading and discussion (and your research, too), what do you think about this assertion? How does it relate to the perspectives that Justine and Lisa brought to our class on Monday? What do you think is the most significant thing you’ve learned about homelessness, poverty, gender or research from them or from our course thus far that will prepare you for our work with The Gathering Place?

The Value of Relationships

In our reading for today, Elliot Liebow focuses on the kinds of relationships that the women of his study cultivate when they are homeless and reflects on the impact of these relationships on their lives, their well-being, and their ability to survive in the shelters and on the street. Take a few minutes and reflect on this chapter. Identify one of the conclusions Liebow comes to about these relationships and integrate a quotation into your comment from him that illustrates this point. How do Liebow’s observations support this conclusion? Why is it significant?

Presenting Research to Different Audiences

To start today’s class, I’d like you to think about the differences between the scholarly audience you are writing to for our first assignment and the research memo to The Gathering Place that you’ll eventually be writing. First, given the reading you’ve done thus far for your annotated bibliographies, I’d like you to characterize what about this research appeals to scholarly readers. That is, how do these studies establish their credibility within their academic fields? How are the findings presented so as to meet the expectations of other academics who study this issue?

Second, if you had to translate your research and present it to an audience of DU students who are preparing to volunteer for Project Homeless Connect or the young people who speak in the video from Denver’s Road Home, what information from these articles would be important and appropriate to share with them? How would you explain the findings to them in a way that would make sense given their understanding of the issue?

Ultimately, given your response to these two prompts, how would you describe the difference between writing for scholars and for a group of your peers?

Practice Works Cited Page

When you've identified your five sources for this assignment, please post a practice works cited page here as a comment. By Monday, I would also like you to post a summary of one source. Remember to summarize the main claim or conclusion of the source, describe its methodology, discuss the evidence the study uses to support its claims, and comment on the significance of this particular study.

Research Update

Before you leave class, post a comment here and give the rest of us an update on how your research is going for your annotated bibliography. What topic or issue are you focusing on? What database have you been using that has been the most helpful? How many sources have you found so far (ones that you think you'll end up using)? Which ones seem the most promising? Do you have any questions about using the databases through Penrose Library? Are there any challenges that you are facing as a researcher that you’d like help with?

Generating Questions for Today’s Discussion

To start class today, I would like you to get into the pairs listed below and take a few minutes to reflect on the reading for today. What was the most interesting part of Liebow’s study thus far? What did you think about it? Then, frame a few questions about the reading that you think would generate a thoughtful conversation among the rest of us. Post your question(s) here as a comment.

Here are the pairs I would like you to work in: Priya & Lynzi, Devon & Malina, Leslie & Nicole, Alex H. & Claire (& Sierra), Brooke & Hadley, Charlie & James, Alex P. & Jason.

Initial Reflections on "Tell Them Who I Am"

Before class on Monday, I would like you to reflect on the first two reading assignments for our course (this past Wednesday’s and this upcoming Monday’s). First, in your own words, describe what a participant-observer study is. What are the limitations of this kind of study? What are we able to learn by conducting such research? Explain how Liebow’s study illustrates this kind of methodology. How does his position and identity as a researcher shape his study?

Second, how does Liebow describe the physical spaces of the shelter in the introduction to his book? How do these spaces impact the women who use them for shelter?

Third, pick one of the first three chapters (“Day by Day,” “Work and Jobs,” and “Family”) that you thought was the most interesting and summarize the main point of it. What was significant for your about this chapter? Identify a compelling passage, anecdote, or moment in this chapter and explain to the rest of class why it resonated with you. How does it relate to the main purpose of Liebow’s study?

Welcome to WRIT 1633! Post your interview of your classmate here as a comment.

For your first blog post, please introduce the classmate you interviewed to the rest of us. Write a 250-350 profile that captures who he or she is, where he or she is from, and what he or she likes to do. Tell us more about this person’s experiences as a writer or his or her interest in service-learning. Perhaps most importantly, give us a sense of this person’s experience with the issue of homelessness and what he or she hopes to learn about (as a writer, researcher, or civically engaged person) by taking this course.

Whatever issues you focus on, take care with this short piece, for it is our first impression of you as a writer, as well as the first impression of the person you interviewed. Have fun with this piece—make it interesting! Use quotes, brief stories, and any other vivid details you can discover to enrich your profile of this person.