Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love

Review Gravyland is a book for all in writing and literacy studies who want not only to theorize about the world within which we teach, learn, and write but to change it.-- "Nancy Welch, author of Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World"In Gravyland, Stephen Parks grapples with the hard questions: what is writing education? What about community collaboration? There are no rose-colored glasses here, no trajectory from 'challenging' to 'perfected.' Instead, Parks provides an incredibly valuable discussion of the choices, tough discussions, and hard work that it really takes to engage in community-based writing and collaboration in our roles as writing teachers and researchers, as collaborators with students, and citizens participating in worlds well beyond the classroom.-- "Linda Adler-Kassner, Eastern Michigan University" Product Description In ""Gravyland"", Parks chronicles the history of an urban university writing program and its attempt to develop politically progressive literacy partnerships with the surrounding community while having to work within and against a traditional educational and cultural landscape. He details the experience of the New City Writing program at Temple University from its beginning as a small institute with one program at a local public school to a multi-faceted organization, raising millions of dollars, and establishing partnerships across the diverse neighborhoods of Philadelphia. In doing so, the author describes classrooms where the community takes a seal and become part of the conversation - a conversation which is recorded and shared through a selection of writing produced. While Parks celebrates classroom success in generating knowledge through dialog with the larger community, he also highlights many of the obstacles the organizers of the New City Writing program faced. The author shows that writing alliances between universities and communities are possible but they must take into account the institutional, economic, and political pressures that accompany such partnerships. Blending the theoretical and practical lessons learned, Parks details New City Writing's effort to offer a new model of education, one in which the voice of the professor must share space with the voices of the community, and one in which students come to understand that the right to sit in a classroom is not just the result of war, but of peaceful civil disobedience, of community struggles to gain self-recognition, and of collective efforts to seek social justice. About the Author Stephen Parks is associate professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University. He is the author of Class Politics: The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language. He is also executive director of New City Community Press and editor of Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy.