Developing a More Comprehensive Program:

1999-2001

Building on the success of these first courses, in 1999, Profs. Gwen Gorzelsky and Ruth Ray received an Institutional Development Grant from Indiana Campus Compact to develop a more comprehensive service-learning component in composition.

With support from this grant, they developed an extensive mentoring program to assist graduate teaching assistants in creating their own service-learning courses around an after-school program at a Detroit middle school.

Also in that year, Gorzelsky and Ray received an Educational Development Grant from the University to redesign and teach two graduate seminars in composition around the theory and practice of service-learning and to support a group of four newly trained GTA’s in their integration of teaching and research in service-learning.

This original group (Paul Gelinas, Karen Keaton, and Thomas Trimble) presented at local and national conferences together, and went on to write master’s essays and dissertations on community-based writing.