Interested in Health Care? New Course for Fall

ENG W350          Advanced Expository Writing        (Fall 2011)

Topic: Going Public: Writing Health and Healthcare in the United States 

TR 11:15 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. WH 109

Joan Linton jlinton@indiana.edu

N.B. This is a Service-Learning course that requires a 20 hour minimum of community service over 10 weeks. This course also meets an Intensive writing Requirement.

Course Description

This course aims to cultivate the public communicator and social entrepreneur in students in addressing issues of health and health care in the United States. It invites students to integrate community service with academic learning in expanding their skills in writing, persuasion, and critical analysis, and research. In “going public” with their writing, students gain awareness of the power of language—and of story—in creating and transforming publics, and the responsibility that comes with public writing, whether it is to manage and disseminate information or to present a problem and propose a solution.  

Readings and discussions will cover a range of issues related to health and healthcare in the United States, from the personal, motivational aspects of being and staying healthy, to health literacy and education, to problems with insurance and health care as a system. In addressing these issues and problems, the work of Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom on managing the commons, and writings from other public intellectuals on social entrepreneurship, will provide a framework for reflection, as students learn to think about community resources as a health commons, about collective action as essential to democratic participation, and about ways to organize complex systems.

The service experience will provide students with real-world contexts and audiences for their writing. For example, in helping to educate clients about specific diseases and health conditions, students will learn to translate complex and often technical information into everyday language that is easy to follow and empathetic in tone. To this end, readings in public communications research will enable students to develop strategies appropriate to the demands of the topic in question. Finally, students will also have the opportunity through individual or group research to explore possibilities for collective action that enable individuals and families to co-produce their own health within their communities, local and extended, as a key component to improving health and healthcare in the United States.

In addition to active participation in class discussion and idea forums, students will undertake: (1) a series of critical reflections (2 pages each) integrating their service, readings, and research; (2) a group service-writing project for their chosen community agency, and (3) a problem-based research project, resulting in a term paper (8-10 pages). Student will individually assemble a portfolio of their writings, rethinking ideas and revising writing throughout the course (and possibly beyond).