“Writing with” is a collaborative partnership between the Johns Hopkins University Writing Program and JHU’s Center for Social Concern (CSC). Through Writing with, UWP faculty and students undertake writing projects in partnership with individuals and organizations throughout Baltimore and the surrounding area.

Community-engaged writing is supported by a long history of innovative pedagogical practice in Writing Studies and helps the UWP and the CSC to advance elements of JHU’s strategic plan and the Krieger School’s priorities.

Baltimore Museum of Art

Every semester, many UWP classes spend time at the Baltimore Museum of Art. We take our students there for a wide range of purposes, including close looking exercises, rhetorical analysis of  wall text, reflective writing, conversations with curators, research, and more. Two sections of Reintro (@BMA: Visual/Text and at BMA: Material/Textual/Arts) collaborate with the museum for full semesters.  

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra OrchKids

In Reintroduction to Writing: Music, School, & Democracy, members of the class worked with OrchKids students and teachers once a week in K-8 Baltimore City Schools—listening, singing, helping children, playing soccer, performing, sharing stories, and more. Student writing centered around these experiences and, more broadly, how music and ideas of democracy show up in American public schools, from the national anthem to arts funding. 

The Bloom Collective

Three classes have been co-taught with Tanay Lynn Harris, the director of Bloom Collective. In Reproductive Justice in Baltimore, students wrote to explore the interconnectedness of Reproductive Justice (RJ) and reflected on the ways RJ manifests in Baltimore City. Students volunteered at maternal health focused community events to learn from members of the Reproductive Justice community.

To gain a global understanding of maternal health, students in Experiential Research Lab Transnational Birthing Justice: Ghana I and II courses, researched the intersections between the African diaspora’s colonial history, culture, and maternal health. Students completed their research by visiting faculty at the University of Ghana, cultural sites, and learning from medical and community-based professionals at various institutions throughout three cities in Ghana.    

Jewtina y Co.

In Community-Engaged Writing: Latino/Jewish Intersections – Jewtina, we explored the intersectional identity of Latin and Jewish life through academic, public, and reflective writing. The course’s work centered our collaboration with Jewtina y Co.’s Chief Executive Officer and Director of Operations, who met with students over Zoom, briefing the class with real-world writing requests on the organization’s needs and offered feedback on student work. In addition to learning about Latin-Jewish history and culture through readings, special class events, and excursions, students wrote research reports, a collaborative social media analysis report, and listicles. 

SPARC

In Community-Engaged Writing: Drugs and Harm Reduction in Baltimore City, students explored harm reduction as a public health strategy through recurring visits with SPARC Women’s Center. Their writing included reflections on how initial assumptions compared to direct experiences with harm reduction services, along with critical analyses of public discourse involving drugs, stigma, and care. 

Station North Tool Library

In Build, Borrow, Repair at the Tool Library, undergraduates from JHU worked with the directors of the Station North Tool Library to produce texts related to surveying best practices, membership models at other tool libraries, and accessible curriculum design. By performing research on behalf of the library and producing written texts for their use, students got first-hand experience in writing for a variety of audiences, including the internal audience at the library and the public. Additionally, students learned about urban housing policy, nonprofit culture, libraries of things, and sharing economies. 

University of Maryland Extension

In Reintroduction to Writing: Habitats Built and Rebuilt, students collaborated with faculty from the University of Maryland Extensions and learned about the role extensionists play in connecting our communities to our institutional research and knowledge. They studied how to move between public and technical audiences while learning about copyright law, food safety, and entomophagy. Over the course of the semester, students drafted scientific articles for peer-reviewed journals and public facing guides, presenting their work to our collaborators. and gaining an appreciation for the work of connecting technical discourse to interested publics. 

Wide Angle Youth Media

In Reintroduction to Writing: The City That Writes, students welcomed Wide Angle Youth Media (WAYM) staffers and interns to class, visited WAYM’s offices and studios, met with communications and social media interns, and read and analyzed text and media generated as part of the organization’s operations. 

Students analyzed the rhetoric of public-facing and internal WAYM documents and media, and, as their final projects, distilled WAYM’s research and writing methods as inspiration for projects in which students answered the question: How can JHU be a better neighbor?