**responses edited for clarity
Writing is best when it is a collaboration. In high school, the thought of someone critiquing my work was terrifying. However, a great way to grow as a writer is to work with those around you, receiving and giving feedback. In WRD 371: Mentoring Youth in Community Groups, DePaul students have an opportunity to grow their ability to provide feedback, enhancing their own reflective writing processes, and help younger students at the local Leo High School develop their writing. Finding these types of spaces can be intimidating, but WRD 371 has become a haven for young writers. We last put a spotlight on WRD 371 back in 2022, but Professor Jen Finstrom was more than happy to catch up and introduce the class to upcoming potential students!
What major changes are there from the 2022 version of the course?
I first taught WRD 371 in Winter Quarter of 2017, and it’s happened every year since then. When I taught the course in 2022, that was the second year that I partnered with Leo High School and Mr. Redmond, the high school’s English teacher. The first year that I partnered with Leo, we were fully on Zoom due to the pandemic. This will be my fifth year working with Mr. Redmond, and we like to say that every year we add something new. This is such an exciting aspect of the partnership for me! For example, we have periodically added an additional visit for the Leo students and DePaul students to meet in person.
In earlier versions of this course, we had just one visit for an open mic event at Leo. Then we had open mics at both Leo and DePaul. Then we added workshop days where the Leo students would visit DePaul and have round robin style mini workshops with groups of DePaul students. Each of those workshops focuses on an aspect of writing or a collaborative writing prompt that lasts about 15 to 20 minutes. These workshops were built into the course two years ago now, and I see the tremendous value they add to give both sets of students the chance to meet everyone in person. While planning the visits takes some logistical work (and lots of collaboration!), Mr. Redmond and I hope to have our classes meet in person earlier than we have in the past, and that will hopefully be a change for this year.
Why do you find the collaborative aspect so beneficial?
I feel very strongly that teaching in general is collaborative, and this class really gives me the opportunity to lean into that. Not only is this class a collaboration between myself and Mr. Redmond, it’s also a collaboration between the students in my class in planning activities for the Leo students, and with the Leo students themselves in sharing what they would like to learn more about. Everyone involved in the class brings their own strengths and gifts to it, and by bringing all of those strengths together, we get something new that I could never have conceived of on my own. In fact, I tell my class early on that the things that I feel to be the strongest parts of the class grew out of past collaborations. I can tell many stories of past students who helped find a way to streamline one of the technological elements, suggested a reading, or made an observation that stuck with me and is now something I make use of. Everyone who has taken this class or participated in it has left something of themselves, and I’m excited to see what learning and growth happens with this winter’s iteration.
What are some of the biggest challenges faced by college students in this course?
I think it can be challenging to see how much you have to give and trust yourself. Everyone in my class can speak to their experience of starting college, and once we start the conversation about what they wish they had known I think they see how much they are able to contribute to our partnership. I ask students to put themselves in the mindset of their high school selves and think about what it would have meant to be collaborating with college students. I’ve heard so much good advice being given by my class in their small groups, and I’m so glad that the space for these conversations can be made. Advice I can give to better trust what you have to offer is to focus on making connections rather than impressions. Out of connection comes collaboration and that leads to the learning and growth that are our goals.
Through conversations with the students in my class, I can also see that learning to be flexible can be a challenge. Sometimes we need to shift plans if there is a change to our partner’s schedule. And, sometimes absences affect group size on both our end and on Leo’s end, which causes activities to be shifted or altered. This is a reality of working collaboratively, and the ability to be flexible is certainly something I talk about on the first day and throughout the quarter. But without challenges there wouldn’t be learning and growth, and at the end of the quarter, we find ourselves with so much of value that we weren’t expecting to gain.
What is the biggest area of growth you see from both sets of students?
I see a real growth in confidence and trust in oneself. The DePaul students in my class work in small groups of three and four to plan activities and writing prompts for their corresponding small groups of Leo students, and in these small groups, they have the opportunity to both work collaboratively and to take the lead on various portions of the planning. I think that seeing something you’ve planned manifest is so valuable, as there is the opportunity to make decisions in the moment about whether something is working or not and change directions if necessary. We spend a lot of time in class reflecting on what went well and what might benefit from change. Having the opportunity to exercise those skills over the course of the quarter while making meaningful connections in community is so important.
In a typical class, there will be DePaul students of multiple majors as well as WRD majors, and students of various grade levels with various future goals. No one needs to know anything about poetry going into this class, and the initial thing we focus on is building rapport with our community at Leo, as well as with our community in the classroom. Always having that goal of building rapport and increasing connection gives a foundation for my class to rely on, and I feel that it provides a solid backdrop for both the academic work and the community work that we do. For the Leo students, this class culminates in an open mic event where they perform their work, often memorizing their poems beforehand. These performances are always incredible, and ending the quarter on this note of confidence and celebration really highlights what we’ve all experienced together.
I also see both sets of students supporting and relying on each other and cheering each other on.