subject: An Ethnographic Field Project [print this page] The project began when a professor contacted New City Writing, an interdisciplinary institute, housed in our University Writing Program and English Department that Eli Goldblatt and I had founded several years prior.
The professor Jewelry On Sale had initiated an ethnographic field project and encountered Glassville, a 15-block neighborhood that, for fifty years, had maintained an integrated neighborhood with no apparent racial strife or hate crimes. This was notable because an adjacent neighborhood was known for its history of racial conflict.2 Glassville had experienced many of the economic downturns and job losses that have confronted the rest of the city. The fact that Glassville had remained an integrated community in the face of such changes stood in stark contrast to other areas.
As a result of the ethnographic project, Jewelry On Sale the neighborhood association expressed an interest in having its history published. The professor contacted our institute because I had recently formed New City Community Press, a community press dedicated to formalizing much of the writing produced in our literacy and service-learning work with Philadelphia neighborhoods.
After discussions among institute staff, the neighborhood association, and involved faculty, a project was soon formed that bundled these interests together to produce a book of resident interviews, tentatively titled Glassville Memories. Each partner went into the project, however, with a variety of interests.
For those in the Glassville neighborhood association, the book would do more than just record their voices. Part of their struggle was for the association to be recognized as a unique entity within the network of city neighborhoods. In that regard, the book would act as a symbol of the community's distinct identity and, as a consequence, validate its arguments for increased political and economic support.
One of the association's goals for the book was thus politicalto document and legitimate the community's needs within the city's urban renewal plans. From my perspective, the book would enable the institute to move further toward an expanded vision of "Writing Beyond the Curriculum," a concept designed to link student, faculty, and community writing to concepts of social justice (see Parks and Goldblatt.)
Over the previous two years, the institute had attempted to integrate the different literacy/community voices of the surrounding neighborhoods into the writing curriculum, through expanded readings and service-learning opportunities. Much of this work had occurred at the upper end of the English Department curriculum.
Glassvilk Memories, however, would be used in our introductory writing courses. The hope was that such a text would disrupt an introductory writing curriculum that, by focusing heavily on the values of academic discourse, had not paid enough attention to the exclusions that shaped literacy in our city.4 Produced in conjunction with a community organization, the proposed book would make evident how issues of literacy and power were present in a student's "backyard." In this regard, the Press and the community members would be coming together to form a new community-based textbook for our first-year writing course.
