So, I have been thinking about this idea for a while, and have really appreciated situating it within the OP/SDG framework. It is not entirely formulated but the idea is to create a classroom research project based on the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) of the 1930s, which has been the focus of my own research. By way of context, the FWP hired some 6,000 Americans during the Depression to document the country. The idea was to generate a portrait of national identity that would celebrate diversity and engage people from all backgrounds in the cultures and folklore of their own country.

My project would align with the “reduced inequalities” SDG, in its goal to “promote social cohesion between groups of diverse natures.” It would essentially be a contemporary and localized version of the FWP, that would invite students to document and investigate KCC’s community in the same spirit as the 1930s fieldworkers. Within the context of my English composition courses, I would charge students with collecting and transcribing oral histories and folklore (broadly defined as cultural practices), and writing ethnographic essays and profiles based on students and faculty—within a series of guided “topics,” that themselves also align with various SDGs.  

But the key sustainable OP aspect of this is that the class would use digital tools to collect, catalogue and disseminate the archive and they’d showcase their work on a website that could continue to be populated by future students in new composition courses. This would not be a one-off course project, but a longer-term repository for living history, not to mention a useful curriculum for the composition program. Students would be developing and expanding the skills fundamental to these courses– textual analysis, critical writing, and research methods—in a format that I believe could be really accessible and empowering, that connects them to one another, and that has a life and purpose beyond the immediate classroom.

The result ideally would be a complex portrait of collective identity, which certainly in this crazy moment, seems to take on an urgency akin to that felt during the Depression. I’ve done a lot of oral history collecting in the classroom, and it always generates fascinating discussions, questions, and stronger bonds between students from very different backgrounds. But both the FWP and the SDGs offer these efforts historical shape and purpose that I believe would make them more focused and meaningful.

That’s it. There’s more to say but I’ll stop — I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts.

–Sara Rutkowski