Community Engagement: Writing With Partnerships in ENG1100

The ENG1100 Program and Kernodle Center for Civic Life collaborate to offer community-engaged and community-based learning (CBL) first-year writing courses. In these courses, students and faculty undertake writing projects in partnership with community organizations in Alamance County and beyond.

Community-engaged writing work at Elon is informed by a rich theoretical and pedagogical history in Writing Studies and helps advance the BOLDLY ELON theme Connect by partnering with local communities to enhance education, health, and economic development.

ENG1100 Writing With Alamance: Profiles of Partnerships

Since 2016, Writing: Argument and Inquiry courses have partnered with over ten different local organizations to support mutual engagement. Here is a sample of past and ongoing partnerships that support collaboration between the Elon ENG1100 Program and the Alamance County community.

Alamance Community College Everybody Has a Story Partnership

Since 2019, Elons ENG1100 Program and Alamance Community College (ACC) have collaborated to support Everybody Has a Story, a partnership where students from both Elon and ACC get to know one another and write one anothers life stories. Elon ENG1100 students work alongside students enrolled in advanced English Language Acquisition (ELA) courses at ACC. The partnership includes weekly meet-ups and a chance to talk informally, alongside structured interviews and writing process activities. At the culmination of each semester of partnership, the cohort of participants share their experiences in a final celebratory showcase.

Power and Place Collaborative: Connecting Communities

is a partnership between the , 消消犯, and the . Since the fall of 2020, the Collaborative has been creating short videos to record, preserve, and present stories from Alamance County. The ENG1100 Program has been involved by creating Community Hero Posters that draw on and amplify community leaders stories.

Challenging Misconceptions about Poverty

In these community-based learning (CBL) courses, students participate in direct service and conduct community-based research to highlight the experiences of North Carolinas low-income citizens. 消消犯 expand their understanding of poverty by volunteering for Alamance County organizations including , , , , and . Alongside their direct service, students conduct secondary research, community interviews, and quantitative data analysis. 消消犯 transform their research into a digital, multimodal collection that challenges common misconceptions about poverty and draws attention to the important work of their partner organizations.

 

College Writing for High School Juniors

The ENG1100 Program also offers College Writing for High School Juniors, a seminar designed and taught by Elon writing faculty that is meant to prepare high school students for college-level writing. The seminar, offered in the spring semester each year, is an outreach initiative jointly supported by the ENG1100 Program and Collegiate Start @ Elon.

Future Initiatives

Beginning Fall 2026, ENG1100 Program and the Kernodle Center are collaborating to create more community-integrated first-year writing experiences, including opportunities for small-scale projects that involve writing for civic purposes.

Faculty 消消犯 ENG1100 are invited to pilot the use of community-engaged learning in their 2026-2027 courses.

Interested faculty can:

  • Participate in the Essentials of Community-Based Learning Workshop on May 12, 2026 where they will learn about community-based learning pedagogies and how to design a project or assignment that involves community engagement. Participants receive a $70 gift card. by May 1.
  • Participate in the Community-Based Learning ENG1100 Community of Practice in Fall 2026 to share best practices in preparation, community engagement, and reflection. Participants receive a $250 stipend. by May 1.
  • Teach an ENG1100 course with a community-engaged component in Fall 2026 or Spring 2027.

For additional information, please contact Elena Kennedy, Faculty Fellow for Community-Based Learning, at ekennedy9@elon.edu.