Route, n.

1.a. A way or course taken in moving from a starting point to a destination; a regular line of travel or passage; the course of a river, stream, etc. Also: a means of passage; a way in or out. (“Route”)

Introduction

On March 12th, 2020, faculty, staff, and students at Auburn University (AU) received an email announcing that the school would “transition from on-campus instruction to remote delivery beginning Monday, March 16 and continue through April 10 in response to concerns about the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19)” (“Auburn University”). As all classes would be delivered remotely, students were told not to return to campus after spring break, leaving many of them to wonder if and when they’d be able to retrieve their belongings from housing.

As faculty, staff, and students scrambled to adjust to remote pedagogy—a scramble surely not unfamiliar to readers of Reflections—Charlie was faced with a specific set of challenges. At the time, he was teaching a course called “Writing Auburn,” a place-based section of first-year writing he had designed in which students ethnographically engage with communities in Auburn. After receiving the email, Charlie’s first call was not to an Auburn colleague, but to Kevin, who had just received a nearly identical email from his institution, The University of Virginia (UVA). As part of the cross-campus collaboration on emplaced first-year writing that this article details, Kevin was teaching “Writing Charlottesville,” a course that mirrored and communicated with “Writing Auburn.” As our students left campus, often headed away from the places and communities of their research, we initially asked each other: How can we sustain courses on local places, communities, and writing while our students are elsewhere?

That semester, we were deeply engaged with students as they researched community places. Through these projects, students were working to answer a question recently posed by cultural geographer Tim Cresswell (2019): “How to write about a place?” (1). Place, for Cresswell and for our purposes here, can be defined as a site that gathers “materialities, meanings, and practices,” meaningful locations at once made by and participating in social actions (176). The grammatical construction of Cresswell’s question—a declarative posing as an interrogative—suggests, to us, something instructive about the relationship between place and writing. We write about place often in rhetoric and composition. And yet writing about place is uncertain; like place itself, it is malleable, questioning, decidedly in/a process. Now, thinking about place and reflecting on Spring 2020 and its ripple effects, we find ourselves asking a different question than the one in that initial phone call: How can teachers of writing leverage sudden and unexpected spatial changes toward a more dynamic sense of place, community, and writing?

Addressing this question, the work of this article is twofold. First, we locate Writing Auburn and Writing Charlottesville within a tradition of emplaced teaching in rhetoric and composition. By emplaced teaching, we mean approaches to the teaching of writing that emerge from and are responsive to local conditions. We discuss the cross-campus partnership between Writing Auburn and Writing Charlottesville, particularly the digital infrastructure that allowed collaborative mapping and circulation across the two cities. This partnership represents the first iteration of what we will call “rerouting,” or a material and metaphorical revision of the intersecting mobilities that coalesce in a writing classroom. Our hope was that this intentional rerouting-via-partnership would open up new pathways for emplaced teaching. Yet, as we discuss through dialogic narrative, we encountered a second unexpected moment of rerouting: the profound spatial disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. This second rerouting put in stark relief the often-invisible mobilities that underpin the teaching of writing and place as well as some of the limitations of our original approach to partnership, including how we approached writing about place and how we envisioned that writing circulating in partnership. Ultimately, we argue that both of these forms of rerouting, intentional or not, planned or unfolding within the early fog of pandemic, can offer new insights into the teaching of place, community, and writing.

Routes Towards Emplaced Teaching

In this section, each of us shares a narrative describing the various routes we took toward emplaced teaching and, eventually, the resulting partnership. After a description of the early days of the spring 2020 semester, Charlie traces the initial inspiration for Writing Auburn to 2016, in his own movement into a new job at a new university, highlighting issues of place, mobility, and writing emergent in this transition. In these temporally different visions of the course, we can trace some of the conceptual frameworks that inspired the eventual partnership with Writing Charlottesville. Kevin then begins with a narrative of the start of the 2020 semester of Writing Charlottesville before returning to 2018 to trace his routes to emplaced teaching. Paying particular attention to how interests in locative media and digital rhetoric provided the infrastructure for rerouting via cross-campus partnership, he situates the digital mapping platform Neatline within other digital and analog approaches to emplaced teaching, highlighting issues of circulation which led to the dialogic approach to partnership we undertook in the Spring of 2020.

Writing Auburn: Charlie

My Spring 2020 section of “Writing Auburn” was located in the Mell Classroom Building, a new addition to campus filled with sleek classrooms designed for active learning: large glassy dry-erase boards of orange and green with desks that can be joined together to customize the space. Mell is connected to the main library, and from the windows you can see the earliest architecture on campus: mostly 19th century buildings, some of which were used as Confederate hospitals during the Civil War. The aesthetics of these buildings spill over onto the rest of campus: a brick sea of burnt red and orange with white trim, projecting stability, intellectualism, and aesthetic conservatism.^[1]For work on the visual significance of representations of campus and its relationship to writing and disciplinarity, see Reynolds (2007).

On the first day, my goal is to get students to develop an initial collective understanding of this place, of “Auburn” in all its various iterations: a school, a city, an aesthetic, a tradition, a history. I ask students what they know. Facts fly: chartered in 1856 as the East Alabama Male College; women admitted in 1892, desegregated in 1964; one of the country’s land-, sea-, and space-grant institutions; located in a rapidly growing city in eastern Alabama. With these facts circulating and students shouting out additional information, I distribute syllabi and ask them to look only at the front page where a word cloud is prominent. The word cloud visualizes the Wikipedia page for the City of Auburn. The students scour the image, noting immediately the prominence of words like “university,” “students,” and “football.” They set to work explaining to me the relative value of each word.

“But what else do we know about this place?” I ask. I write the word “Auburn” on the board five times, in an exercise students would later call “Auburn Times Five.” The repetition itself is important; it defamiliarizes, like repeating a word over and over in your head until it becomes strange. Divided into groups, students descend on the colorful dry-erase boards and begin to create visualizations of their own, attempting to fill in some of the “gaps” created by the word cloud. Despite my prompting to write “anything that comes to mind when you hear the word Auburn,” students don’t deviate much from the word cloud. University. . . students. . . football…

In these exercises, students construct something of an official portrait of place.^[2]For work on portraits of place in the writing classroom, see Owens (2001). They depend largely on what they know is shared by their colleagues, reluctant to insert their own subjective, experiential insights. I tell them that this semester, this portrait will be insufficient. We will work collectively to construct new ways to write Auburn, an unofficial portrait of place constituted through writing—one that might speak back to this initial picture, identifying gaps in, or erasures of, histories, experiences, and bodies. Later in the semester, as we collectively navigated COVID-19, I would learn the insufficiencies of this portrait-revision-portrait model, but it was fundamental to how I originally designed “Writing Auburn.”

This original design dates back to August 2016, when I found myself relocating from Boston, Massachusetts to Auburn, Alabama. Renting a car at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and driving to Auburn down Interstate 85, I realized I had only been in the state of Alabama once prior, for the campus visit. In this new place, I found myself thinking about the introduction to Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing, in which editor Robert E. Brooke (2003) describes arriving in Lincoln in the summer of 1984 as a new hire at the University of Nebraska, the endpoint of “almost a decade of academic migration” (1). This movement influenced his approach to first-year writing. Upon his arrival, Brooke asks students “to focus on the construction of reasoned arguments that would hold up in any humanities department in any university in our country.” Perhaps predictably, students find the work irrelevant to their everyday lives, abstracting them from the places where their academic labor might have an impact (3-4). From this place-less academic writing, Brooke describes his journey toward place-conscious teaching, a pedagogy of place guided by three principles: the creation of an active and inquiring classroom; a robust engagement with local places in all areas of the curriculum; and the cultivation of citizens guided by notions of “intradependence—that is, people who know enough about their natural and cultural region to fashion lives that enhance the communities located there” (13).

I find the movement Brooke describes, the material and metaphorical routes toward emplaced teaching, generative in theorizing the teaching of place and writing, and it directly inspired the way I designed Writing Auburn.^[3]Esposito (2012) similarly starts work on place-based pedagogy with a discussion of movement, through the streets of Queens, New York, toward the classroom (70). Emplaced teaching is arrived at, if not always geographically, then certainly intellectually. It is informed by a desire to learn about and engage with the rhetorical forces coalescing in the production of place.

That first semester in 2016 I was assigned a section of Honors Writing Seminar II, the second course in our FYW sequence. My goal was to design a course in which students and I collaborate on research leading to a richer understanding of Auburn, to leverage the classroom as part of our collective spatial education. By naming the course “Writing Auburn,” I hoped to signal two conceptual things, which I will elaborate on in the remainder of this section. First, I wanted it to be a statement on the nature of place itself: not a static venue for social actions (like writing), but rather a participant in and consequence of social actions (like writing). “Indeed,” the course description reads, “the title of this section is intended not to offer a concrete description of this course, but rather to provoke a string of questions: What does it mean to write a place? How is Auburn already written? Who gets to write Auburn? What is ‘Auburn?’ How do we answer these questions?” Second, I wanted to foreground the collaborative nature of this work. Together, we would learn about, and potentially take some part in, Writing Auburn.

To get at this more dynamic rendering of place, students were tasked with designing projects that captured the diverse ways that communities use place in shaping everyday life. Students employed research methods—fieldnotes and participant-observation; interviewing; artifact analyses; archival and secondary research—to develop not only a more robust engagement with community partners, but also a more engaged understanding of that community’s relationship with place. The writing classroom seemed a particularly rich venue to be doing this work (e.g. Owens 2001; Reynolds 2004). Place plays a fundamental role in writing; as Lauren Esposito (2012) notes, it “influences our interactions by shaping the genres, texts, and languages we use as writers and readers.” As teachers of writing, then, it is on us to “help students identify those places and communities that are personally significant, and engage them in meaningful work that deals with real issues and real audiences” (70-71). Teachers of writing have more than taken up this call to locate instruction at the intersection of place and community. Rosanne Carlo (2016) describes the breadth of this work: “Place-based literacies and their attention to how location creates possibilities for world-revealing and world-making practices, particularly in the sense of community development and literate practices, are now a dominant theme in pedagogy, community work, and scholarship” (60).

For Writing Auburn, the goal of these engagements was not just for students to recognize spatial experiences, but to think of them critically as objects of critique and revision. “Writing teachers and literacy workers,” Carlo (2016) writes, “are very cognizant of the revision process,” and much of the work on space and place in composition is dedicated to imagining how our work—as teachers, scholars, community members—might participate in a revision of place (60). In Writing Auburn, students were invited into this process of revision through direct participatory research within the community places of their choosing. I asked students to not just describe, but to participate, to imagine the ways that their research, their work, might collaboratively promote a more equitable and inclusive iteration of Auburn.

Though students designed and executed these projects individually, Writing Auburn simultaneously relied on the cultivation of a collaborative classroom space where students shared, debated, and synthesized emergent place-based knowledge. In this sharing, students produced something greater than the sum of their projects: a collective statement on Auburn itself, a remapping of place based on experience, research, and writing. In Writing Auburn, I found that this type of classroom-building required convincing students that their spatial experiences are worthy of consideration, that they were not somehow insignificant to or divorced from the work of a writing classroom (Esposito 2012, 72). I asked students to consider places and communities that might fall out of official portraits of the city, places they regularly inhabit, places that, taken together, form alternative maps of Auburn. A pedagogy of place, I tell them, is just that: a pedagogy of place, a pedagogy of the ways that place in all its iterations coalesce in socially significant ways. To borrow language from Elliot Jacobs (2011), I had to convince students that “a pedagogy that embraces writing about place also embraces all places as worthy of writing about” (53; also qtd. in Esposito 2012). As I explore below, this democratic ethos led students to design projects that not only filled in the gaps of more official portraits of the city, but also expressly challenged their desirability.

To link these often-divergent spatial experiences and research programs, we relied on explicit discussions of mobility, paying significant attention to the mobilities that we collectively carry into the classroom as teachers and students.^[4]Terese Guinsatao Monberg’s (2009) work on service-learning foregrounds movement in an explicit way, arguing that increased attention to the forms of movement too-often implicit in service-learning … Continue reading I ask students to reflect on the ways they move through the city, the routes they take, the paths they carve, and especially the points of intersection. As Julie Drew (2001) notes, “The pedagogical is not located exclusively within the classroom; rather, the classroom is one location in which pedagogical moments occur” (61). To develop an alternative map of Auburn, we had to see ourselves in this mobile way and to (re)imagine writing classrooms, particularly community-engaged classrooms, not as isolated locations but rather as something like what T. Passwater has recently called “permeable infrastructural complexes of mobilities” (para. 9). Asking students to attend to their own mobilities and locating the writing classroom as a point of intersection helped students map out and share their differing engagement with place, contributing to the collective (re)mapping we hoped to achieve.

I’ve offered Writing Auburn once every academic year since 2016, and I view it as successful in getting students to think of place as dynamic and cultivating a classroom where students regularly share these emergent insights. And yet, at the end of each semester, I grew increasingly aware of the course’s limitations. Although the moments of sharing (like presentations and workshops) were always productive, I found them materially insufficient. We spent so much time discussing collaboration, spatial multiplicity, and mobility, and yet the end product of this work, this metaphoric (re)mapping of Auburn, was hopelessly stuck in place. It was a bit of a paradox, really, one that I suspect other teachers of placed-based writing courses might find familiar. While our work found relevance and force through our collaboration and sharing in the classroom, and, for some projects, with community stakeholders, it ran the risk of becoming almost parochial, limited dramatically within the frames and boundaries of its circulation.

So when Kevin called me in the Fall of 2020 to discuss the work he had been doing with emplaced teaching and digital mapping described below, we began to think of ways to maintain our emphasis on the local while simultaneously getting our students to think more explicitly about the circulation of their research. We began to imagine a cross-campus partnership of emplaced courses, a concept bordering on the oxymoronic, we admit. What would rerouting our classes along the 616-mile route between AU and UVA teach us about place, community, and writing?

Writing Charlottesville: Kevin

The Spring 2020 semester of Writing Charlottesville began in a windowless classroom in Bryan Hall. To get here, students might have travelled past the stately white columns of the outdoor corridor overlooking the McIntire Amphitheater, glimpsing the UVA Lawn, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Although it was built later, Bryan Hall adopts many of the architectural principles of Thomas Jefferson’s original “academical village.” It fits in, so to speak. Architecture is where we began our conversations about place. I ask, “What does this campus feel like? What do we know about its history?”

I decided to begin here because, in my time at UVA, I have learned that even first-year students are acquainted with the ways that the architecture of the university reflects its histories and contradictions: enslaved people living among the students and faculty; former slave quarters behind the iconic buildings of the Lawn; monuments to slaveholders, Confederates, and white supremacists. These oft-told stories are fertile ground on which to unpack the complexity of writing and place. Yes, UVA feels historically prestigious and beautiful. It also contains this history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. The first Black student was not admitted until 1950; the first cohort of undergraduate women enrolled in 1970 only after a court order (Nelson and Harold, 2018).

We discuss the role of language in the construction of this place. I show a video from the UVA “Students & Traditions” web page that explains some of the “lingo” of UVA. In one clip, an unnamed student introduces the term “Grounds,” which is how faculty and students refer to campus. She explains, “We never use the ‘C-word,’ which is campus” (“Students and Traditions”). I ask students: what is the significance of saying Grounds and not campus?

This conversation was timely while the landscape and naming practices of the university were under revision. Not far from our classroom, a monument to the enslaved laborers who lived on Grounds was being built. Conversations were also underway to rename buildings and contextualize monuments dedicated to white supremacists. None of this was taken up by students on this first day. Instead, we discussed how the lingo of UVA can make first-year students feel more welcome (or not), and how language like “Grounds” is representative of an air of exceptionalism that aligns with dominant portraits of UVA as an elite public institution.

We shift focus. I say, “what do we know about Charlottesville?” Less enthusiasm this time, more uncertainty. A hand goes up: “Well, there’s the downtown mall.” Another: “And there was the white supremacy rally about the Confederate monuments two years ago, Unite the Right, where Heather Heyer was murdered while peacefully protesting.” Unlike AU, UVA does not share its name with the city in which it is located. The hesitation I sense from students on this first day is symptomatic of their perceptions of the relationship between the city and the university. There seem to be two Charlottesvilles, one for the students and one for residents. There are more contrasts than connections; the boundaries seem stable. I tell students that we will look at this arrangement critically this semester. We will question the imagined boundaries we perceive in these dominant portraits of UVA and Charlottesville while we articulate a new theory of place. “All of our work,” I say, “will filter through a collective digital map. The map will trace our idiosyncratic routes through Charlottesville, accreting information as we engage with and research places.”

My own path to teaching about place started in 2018, when I arrived at UVA persuaded by narratives like Charlie’s: of writing instructors engaging students in place-based classes as a way to learn a new area and student population. I wanted, as Esposito (2012) puts it, to learn “where the students are from, who and what they care about, and how they see themselves as community members” (75). I was inspired by these accounts of place-conscious writing teachers, but I was also struck by the connections between this focus on place and the emerging conversation in writing studies around locative media, or media that “uses portable, networked, location aware computing devices for user-led mapping and artistic interventions in which geographical spaces becomes its canvas” (Lindgren and Owens 2007, 202). As I began to teach my own version of the class—Writing Charlottesville—I began to imagine how digital platforms might enable students to explore their local geographies, to feel and to participate in the mediation of place. I was struck, too, by the language of Charlie’s pitch to his class, that their research amounted to a metaphoric “remapping” of Auburn, as well as by his frustrations with the work. I thought that using Neatline as a digital mapping platform might be a way to attenuate the limitations of circulation that Charlie had begun to see. I hoped that materializing students’ engagements with place in a digital artifact, an actual alternative map, would better capture their rendering of place in a format with circulatory potential. That is, through digital mapping, students might be able to imagine their research moving out of the classroom.

Neatline is a “geotemporal exhibit builder,” meaning that it enables researchers to build interactive exhibits of cultural heritage materials that are rooted in time and (especially) in space. Unlike more industry-focused mapping programs, which often rely on large data sets to represent spatial information, Neatline is meant to facilitate a more hand-crafted vernacular form of spatial representation. Designed for the humanities and social sciences, it focuses attention on the interpretive decision-making process of spatial representation and reasoning (Nowviskie et al 2013). For example, Neatline allows students in emplaced writing courses to annotate and add to an Open Street Map of the university and surrounding area. Users create spatial annotations called “records” that include drawn shapes or images to denote areas of cartographic interest and to link those areas to explanatory text, pictures, other sites, and so on (Figure 1). This annotative layering of meaning was meant to trace and represent Writing Charlottesville students’ ongoing, sometimes messy, engagements with place. Neatline is particularly well-suited to these goals. As Nowviskie et al (2013) explain, “Neatline encourages experimentation” over “finalized interpretations” (693). In this way, Neatline’s design aligns with how I sought to position mapping as exploratory and generative for students, not as an endpoint.

Figure 1

I am certainly not the first teacher of emplaced composition to look to digital platforms to materialize and circulate students’ work. The uptick in interest among compositionists in location-based writing has taken on a decidedly digital flair (Rivers 2016; Walls and Wolcott 2017; Lindgren and Owens 2007; Frith 2015; Schmidt 2011). As Tim Lindgren and Derek Owens (2007) have written, this seems almost counterintuitive: “For those interested in place-based education, it is tempting to think of the Web as a suspect medium, one that tends to disconnect people from actual places and communities” (199). By (re)casting the relationship between technology and place, not as competing modes of being, but rather as “nodes within a feedback loop, a circuit where each realm informs and feeds the other,” Lindgren and Owens present a pedagogy that leverages digital technologies—among them blogging and geoannotation—to both connect students to place and to engage them in the type of place sharing I sought in Writing Charlottesville. More recently, Nathaniel A. Rivers (2016) has introduced the term “geocomposition” to denote pedagogical practices that leverage digital technologies (such as geocaching) to bridge that divide between digital and analog places as students move and collaborate on a new emergent sense of place. In adopting Neatline, I sought to remap the perceived borders between campus and city, to interrupt students’ habitual routes, and to move students beyond critical-rhetorical readings of maps—campus maps, Yelp, Google Maps, and other already-existing spatial arguments about the area—to an active process of writing maps, recasting mapping as a tool not just for those in power “but a tool for everyday action” (Aberley 1993, 5; also qtd. in Brooke and McIntosh 2007).

In the Fall of 2019, I began to use Neatline in Writing Charlottesville. As before, students selected research sites ranging from record stores to libraries, religious institutions to dorm common rooms. Using Neatline, each section of the class collaborated to produce an alternative map of Charlottesville, one that represented their own developing understanding and experiences. In this initial pre-partnership foray into digital mapping, I found that some of the issues Charlie had identified in his Writing Auburn course were addressed, while others remained. The materialization of students’ work was promising. Rather than a metaphoric map, the existence of a tangible artifact—our collective map—and a set of class-generated themes that we used to connect sites did spur conversations about the gaps and borders of our collective understanding of Charlottesville. They were obvious, in a way, made visible by the large swaths of the city that were not annotated (Figure 2). The map helped students to recognize and reflect on the various mobilities they bring with them to the classroom: How their identities, experiences, and status as “students” in a college town enabled and constrained their routes and understanding of the area.

Figure 2

The Neatline maps, then, became rhetorical artifacts that helped grow what Brooke and McIntosh (2007) call considered space, a sensibility wherein “writers consider the spaces they inhabit—making place something to reflect on and opening mental maps to analysis” (133). As they explain, this kind of “deep mapping” can position students to see themselves in place and to explore their relationships to a place (132-133). Yet, issues still remained in this first mapping attempt. Despite the dynamic sense of place we sought to cultivate in producing it, students still viewed the map as a static portrait—more of a record of their engagement than a resource for sustained reflection or action related to their identities as students. This was useful, to be sure. Mapping with their peers positioned students to explore their relationships to Charlottesville, but it did not free us from the feeling that the trajectory of our work was routing us always back to the classroom. Discussions of how, whether, where, and why our digital map might circulate were disconnected from students’ research sites, and the actual circulation of the map was limited to the class itself. We were, once again, stuck in place.

It was in reflecting on this familiar feeling that Charlie and I embarked on the initial curricular rerouting through a cross-campus partnership. As we discussed how we would connect our classrooms, we began to think explicitly about the role that circulation could play in extending the goals of digital mapping beyond a single class exploring their collective relationships to place. Through a partnership, we would move students’ writing about their places to other places, prompting a more explicit discussion about emplaced writing and circulation. We wanted to mobilize, to send along a different route, the kinds of place-conscious civic identity that Brooke and McIntosh (2007) identify with writing for a place.

In devising a partnership between our classes, we were inspired by some of the community literacy work on dialogue, especially work by Ahmed Hachelaf and Steve Parks, who developed digital dialogues between classrooms in Algeria and in the United States. For us, the lesson in this work is how terms—in their example, “human rights,” “community engagement,” “civic society,” and so on—shift in meaning and usefulness across contexts and how they might even mask or “generalize (perhaps globally) about what constitutes the materiality of such work” (Hachelaf and Parks 2018, 8; see also Parks and Hachelaf 2019). While our approach differed in that we were connecting two relatively privileged sites in dialogue, the idea of connecting our classrooms was similarly motivated by the goal of examining how terms and themes shift as they travel different routes: What would students at two public southern universities find in common and in contrast with one another? How do local frameworks influence seemingly stable universal concepts and vice versa? Where would the terms we use to understand and experience place provide moments of productive tension or contradiction from which we might build more complex theories of place? These were some of the questions we planned to explore as we prepared for our partnership in Spring 2020.

Emplaced Teaching and Rerouting – A Dialogue

As the Spring 2020 semester moved online, we reflected on a question posed by Johnathon Mauk (2003): “What happens to writing pedagogy, and the practices of learning to write, in the absence of traditional university geography?” (369). For Mauk, this question is intended to help us attend to “spatial crises,” a deluge of incoming students who, due to socio-economic conditions, lack “a sense of location, without the cartographic skills necessary for placing themselves in the layers and complexities of academic life” (369). While the spatial changes Mauk identifies remain clear, the pace of this breakdown of traditional academic geographies seemed to accelerate in Spring 2020. Rather than a slow erosion, what we experienced was a sudden dissolution of campus space within the context of a larger global rearrangement. One day, we had campus. The next, we didn’t. What was also interrupted, as we discuss in this section, was the understanding of place, writing, and partnership that underpinned our emplaced classes. As we were trying to reroute the trajectory of our classes through cross-campus partnership, we were unexpectedly rerouted again, raising questions about how the work of emplaced classrooms can continue in light of sudden spatial change. In this section, we articulate these two forms of rerouting at work in Spring 2020: our cross-campus partnership and the fallout from COVID-19. In both of these iterations, alternative mobilities emerged that reshaped and refined pedagogical goals related to place and circulation. This dialogue describes those new routes, how they were navigated, the failures and the successes, and what all of this might teach us about emplaced pedagogy going forward, beyond Spring 2020.

Charlie

Early in the semester, students in Spring 2020 took to the challenge of creating an unofficial portrait of Auburn. Reading spatial theorists like Reynolds (2007), hooks (1990), Cresswell (1996), and Lefebvre (1974), they began to see places like Auburn as active, open to be written and revised—that is, not as final as collegiate brick might imply. Oriented by this notion of spatial revision, students developed projects that rejected singular portraits of place, instead writing new community places that, when constellated, offer an alternative cartography of Auburn.

A few examples:

• D. worked with skateboarders at the recently opened Auburn Skatepark to argue that while the park is a valuable community space, it has a secondary effect of “fixing” skaters in a sanctioned location. In doing so, the city effectively reinforces official portraits of place, pushing subcultures like skaters to the margins.
• J. conducted fieldwork on a 19th century lathe on Stanford Lawn. Drawing on fieldnotes, archival and secondary research, and interviews, J. argued that objects like the lathe—originally used to produce weaponry for the Confederate army—produce a historical residue, often imperceptible to the most privileged but immensely significant to contemporary spatial politics. This link between the lathe and the preservation of slavery and white supremacy is made even more complex, J. writes, by the contemporary role the lathe plays in a romantic tradition, a collision of the gendered and racial politics of place.
• U. conducted research with regulars at a popular bao restaurant in downtown Auburn. Drawing on familial memories of bao, popular media on food and culture, and rich primary and secondary data, U. articulated their own theory of food and memory: that the memories we associate with particular meals can be leveraged for cross-cultural dialogue in other community spaces.

During the third week of the semester, Kevin visited the class remotely and we discussed what we hoped to gain via Neatline: that through a cross-campus rerouting of writing cartographies, a new dialogue on space and place might develop, an alternative way to interrogate our own roles in producing Auburn(s) and Charlottesville(s). Students saw an opportunity to shift understandings of place on a larger scale and invite insights into our own blind spots. To that end, each class would compile questions and insights by interacting with the other class’s map. Following remote conversations, each class would collaboratively compose a letter to the other, offering a critique of the new map and listing questions they believed it opened for further research. The terms of this partnership were set. The work of emplaced teaching was rerouted, revised along different networks of circulation that reshaped pedagogical goals.

Kevin

Like Charlie, I found that students in Spring 2020 took up the call to work toward a new portrait of place. Given our focus on the real and imagined boundaries between UVA and Charlottesville, it is no surprise that many student projects interrogated this relationship.

• J. quickly found out through interviews that the restaurant he chose as his research site was closing: UVA had taken over their lease and would not renew it. Challenging official portraits of UVA in partnership with the greater Charlottesville area, J. examined the powerful role UVA plays as a “shadow landlord” and the ongoing processes of gentrification and displacement of businesses as UVA expands.
• A.’s research into a campus climbing gym forwarded a case for UVA facilities to contribute to the university’s mission of “bridging” divides between UVA and Charlottesville. She argued that UVA Recreation had an opportunity and a responsibility to address health disparities between students and local residents and offered concrete steps to do so.
• G. conducted a study of the UVA Chabad House, a Jewish community center. She explored how the woman co-running the center negotiates the traditional Judaism which underpins the Chabad movement with the more progressive views of the students and community members who visit the center, arguing that she is able to embody a kind of feminist ethos that resonates with the community while forwarding the mission of Chabad.

As these projects began to take shape, so did our collective map of Charlottesville. After Charlie visited our class early in the semester, students were excited by the prospect of circulating their portrait. As we neared spring break, class discussions turned to what work we imagined our map doing as it traveled to Auburn, what responsibilities we were taking on, and how our representations of place might shift as they traveled across geographic boundaries. Having an interested audience waiting for the map, a circulatory route, helped students to formulate important questions: How do we want our audience to respond? What do we want them to do or think or know? What ethical concerns do we need to account for in “representing” Charlottesville in this way? These questions had an urgency to them that we had been missing in previous iterations of Writing Charlottesville. We did not yet know that we and our work were shortly to be, literally and figuratively, rerouted.

Charlie

When AU switched to remote instruction, I faced two primary challenges. The first was to ensure that students would be able to meet learning objectives without, in most cases, direct access to their community spaces. Many of these research sites were physically closed to the public, while others became inaccessible to students due to housing changes. I met with each student individually and we developed a specific plan for completing their research. In the end, all students were forced to conduct at least some of their research remotely and digitally. All of the projects for the class were completed.

The second challenge was preserving the rerouting-via-partnership between Auburn and Charlottesville. Because I was relatively unfamiliar with Neatline, I had planned the majority of mapping and cross-campus communication to occur in class, where students and I would interact with the map together. With the transition to Zoom, and my commitment to limiting synchronous classes, I wrestled with how to keep Neatline as part of the course. Ultimately, I decided to cut the mapping component as part of the larger curricular revision. While students completed their research projects and shared them with classmates and community partners as they normally would, they did not upload their projects to Neatline, nor did they continue to communicate with UVA students.

My fear was that in making this decision my class would grow increasingly fragmented and isolated. I spent so much time talking to students about the need for deliberate discussions of circulation, and then I made an abrupt change to the fundamental movement of our work. In some ways, these fears were realized. Students and I discussed a central paradox that seemed to emerge amidst the pandemic: as our classroom space grew, with students strewn about all over the country, the reach of our research grew smaller, more limited in its circulation. It was only later, when students and I began to think of this as a second, and unexpected, form of rerouting, that the limitations of our initial approach, and the affordances of our current situation, became clear.

Kevin

Unlike Charlie, I was able to retain the Neatline map as a central feature of the class. Prior to moving online, we had done much of the difficult work of devising and defining collective themes for our collaborative map, and students were to draft their initial cartographic annotations over the extended spring break. We knew by the end of the break that the partnership with Writing Auburn would not continue. Students still contributed to a collaborative map, but instead of circulating from here (Charlottesville) to there (Auburn) across a definable geographic boundary, the map circulated between and amongst the geographic boundaries that now, improbably, separated students as they continued to research and write about the place(s) they were forced to abandon. As I discuss below, my decision to retain the map was fortuitous because it offered students a place to reflect on the spatial changes they were experiencing for themselves and for their writing.

Charlie

Prior to the pandemic, students and I relied, uncritically, on a spatial fact: we are all here, and we can rely on that here. We talked about mobility, but always surrounding the notion of the classroom as a point of intersection, as I describe above. It was our anchor. Whether it was in the discussions of portraits or revision, we never stepped outside of the routinized ways that our collective mobilities intersected. There’s little surprise, then, that when most of us left Auburn, we felt unanchored, adrift in a spatial experience for which we had not prepared.

When we began to see our departure from our partnership with UVA not just as a consequence of the pandemic, but also as a second form of rerouting, our conversations shifted. Pragmatic questions like “How can I research a place when I’m not there?” became catalysts for questions like “How, to this point, has our research relied on a particular, and limited, notion of place that no longer exists, and may never exist again?” We wondered what reroutings, temporary or permanent, intended or imposed, meant for our futures as students, writers, and citizens beyond just circulating our writing to new audiences. These questions invited us to rethink writing about place beyond the portrait-revision-portrait model that the class was based on. As my students and I worked through COVID, we came to appreciate the frustrations of place, frustrations that the idea of a portrait (with its frames and boundaries) and revision (with its implied first draft) belie.

In hindsight, this heightened sense of place via absence makes some sense: we often become more aware of place in disruption. Cresswell (1996) compares this to a lightbulb burning out, leading “to an instant and heightened awareness of the particular place we are in” (10). Indeed, a light flickering off seems an adequate description of the rapid shift in spatiality of Spring 2020. When changes to the university took hold, I assumed they would be a death knell for all types of emplaced writing instruction. Yet, in line with Cresswell, I now think these changes made space more of a primary concern for my class, not less. The rapid shifts occurred; a generative set of tensions, ironies, and contradictions arose; and in those, our spatial vocabulary was sharpened. In the dark, we became more aware of where we were, or where we weren’t.

This experience has me thinking that maybe rerouting is not just a useful metaphor for thinking through the curricular changes we make as student spatiality grows increasingly unstable, rapidly, slowly, or otherwise. Maybe rerouting itself is a valuable resource available to us as teachers invested in questions of place and community, an act of defamiliarization that can lead students to become more aware of, and more reflexive about, their own spatial histories and experiences, and how those experiences translate into civic identity and action. In other words, maybe the light going off in a classroom doesn’t have to be a moment gone wrong but the foundation for more nuanced, reflexive, and active, if frustrating, thinking about place.

In addition to engaging students in conversations about often unexamined assumptions we rely on in emplaced classrooms, I still believe that one way to cultivate this generative rerouting is to develop networks of emplaced teaching like the one Kevin and I imagine here. Despite its failures, Spring 2020 taught me that getting to fundamental understandings of space and the mobilities that students inhabit can be difficult in the regular routinized motions of a semester within traditional academic space. Partnering with other institutions, and completing the work of those partnerships, can help the mobility of emplaced teaching and community-engagement become clearer and more explicit in ways that don’t require a global pandemic. It can do so by forcing students to think about their research across scales, to make sense of what they are seeing and studying here by seeing what others are seeing and studying somewhere else.

This presents us an opportunity as teachers. Student spatiality has changed and likely will continue to change, and an awareness of place and its ties to community has never been, I suspect, more pronounced. Engaging students in conversations and projects that explore the malleability and fleetingness of spatial resources can help us think through the ways that the routes we travel regularly can lead to a particular form of spatial un-seeing. Cross-campus partnership, however limited, is one way to do this, one way to reroute the routinized sensibilities of classrooms. In this upending of stable spatial categories, my sense is that a new seam for emplaced teaching might open, one that can get at more fundamental questions about writing.

Kevin

In the interim period between the decision to move the semester online and our first virtual meeting, I asked students to post a check-in to the class discussion board. The directions were simple: “Send a picture, a video, or an update letting me and your classmates know where you are self-isolating and what you’ve been up to.” To read through these check-ins was to experience the profound spatial dislocation students experienced as their trajectories were rerouted by the virus and they found themselves dispersed across the country from Colorado to Massachusetts. In these posts, the most common theme was wanting to return to the many places made newly meaningful as they became inaccessible. I found that the mapping project began to take on new meanings and purposes as students worked through these feelings of displacement.

As I reflect on how the decision to continue with the mapping played out, there are two important lessons that thinking in terms of routes and rerouting can offer emplaced pedagogies of all kinds. First, using digital forms of location-based writing (like Neatline) to record and report research can emplace students in local contexts, even in times of spatial disruption. For my students, the nascent map, begun in earnest just before the shift to virtual classes, opened a route back to Charlottesville and back to their research sites. It allowed them to return, in a way, to campus, even as they were very much aware of and emplaced in their new locales. That is, students used the map as a way to reflect on their spatial displacement as well as to examine their previous research experiences in new ways. It became a kind of refrain during the “Mapping Talks” (short culminating presentations organized as virtual conference panels that used the map as a visual aid) for students to offer accounts of the original trajectories of their projects, note the disruption to these plans, and offer the new directions that their project ultimately took. The map was no longer simply an archive of the places we had been, a static portrait, but was an active agent in allowing us to imagine other spatial possibilities. I am reminded here of how Lindgren and Owens (2007) describe the nodes of place and technology creating a generative circuit (197); I found students pinging between nodes as they gave talks: their present locales, the map, and their former spatial realities and routines. In contrast to Charlie’s description of the fragmentation of his class, the map served as a waypoint through which we could still realize some of the collective ethos of the class.

The second lesson that I take away from Spring 2020 has to do with the mobility of writing: thinking of writing in terms of routes and rerouting can be helpful as a way of more actively engaging students in conversations about how writing in emplaced teaching might (or could, or will) circulate.

As the class shifted to virtual instruction, we had to account for the dissolution of the partnership with Writing Auburn. The presumed route our writing would travel had closed; no longer would our map circulate in Charlie’s classroom, nor would it elicit research questions from an interested audience. Instead of dwelling on what seemed lost, our conversations turned to what new purposes might be served by the collaborative mapping. Just as the light switch of spatial disruption caused students to think more deeply about place, so too did the disrupted route of their writing ask them to engage more deeply with their goals for circulation. Neatline was a particularly useful platform in this regard because as a digital artifact it affords the potential for circulation: the opening of a conversation about where our work has import and to whom. Like any map, it asks to be used. When the route we thought our writing would take was closed, students were prompted to think how else the writing might circulate, the work it might do. Instead of a dialogue with Writing Auburn, students reimagined themselves as the audience for the map, an audience working through the feelings of spatial displacement and loss. Ultimately, then, our collaborative map still moved across geographic boundaries, just not the ones we originally envisioned. Although students saw this form of circulation as a diminished one, I would argue that they were more engaged with the rhetorical work of the map in this manifestation than they had been previously when Charlie and I had defined the route their writing would take.

Emplaced teaching necessarily contends with a range of constraints that other pedagogies do not. These might include disruptions from the global (COVID-19) to the hyper-local scale; emplaced classrooms are more permeable to disruption, as some of the foundational work in Composition’s public turn has taught us (Mathieu 2005; Parks 2010). Beyond changing student spatialities, the routes and locales through which we imagine our writing circulating may be disrupted: community partners might disappear or change leadership, publications may fold, grants might run out, stakeholders might shift course or tactics, ethical questions might arise. In light of what is sure to be an uncertain time in higher education, thinking flexibly about the routes of writing for emplaced classrooms can better position us to reroute in productive ways when necessary. In this way, we see rerouting as contributing to an emphasis on circulation—of texts, bodies, and material resources—within what we have called emplaced teaching (Matheiu, Parks, and Rousculp 2012; Welch 2005; Weisser 2002; Matheiu and George 2009; Silvestro 2018; Stuckey 2020). In all, this work has articulated a “willingness to work where the work takes us” (Pauszek et al 2018, 139). Rerouting involves us in articulating the mobilities we take to this work, how those mobilities might change, and in that change, how new spatial and rhetorical relationships might be cultivated.

As I look back on the Spring of 2020, I think that the concept of rerouting is a productive way to think about the circulation of students’ work both in response to disruption and as a deliberate strategy to create roadblocks to predetermined or unexamined routes of circulation. I agree with Charlie that cross-campus partnerships have the potential to reroute the routinized sensibilities of classrooms, but they can only do so when they see students seriously engaged with the goals and ethics of circulating writing within that partnership. Our original cross-campus partnership failed to problematize the portrait-revision-portrait model of writing about place in part because it was Charlie and I who determined the terms and goals of the partnership, and how and why students’ work would travel. In short, we enabled that route to go unexamined, just as it had been when the trajectory of our work was always pointed back at our own classrooms.

Moving forward, we see rerouting as a way to prompt students to engage actively with the goals and ethics of circulation. To push them to ask: What work do we want our map to do, and where? Why connect two privileged classroom sites in partnership rather than circulating the map in new ways locally? How can the goals of the partnership be revised so as to help us engage with the local community? Rerouting students’ work—that is, having them rethink the purposes their work will address and routes their work will travel—can help them to better trace the dynamic, emergent, and socially productive relation between writing, place, and community.

Conclusion

In the midst of the events described in this article, in early April 2020, The New York Times ran an article titled, “College Made them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are” (Casey 2020). The article examines the class-based inequalities exposed when a small liberal arts college moved online. Detailing stories of students and their homelives—from moving immediately to a family’s lavish vacation home to attempting to keep a family’s struggling food truck from closing—the article tells a fundamental truth of the rerouting that occurred this semester: that the pandemic affected different people differently in ways that mirrored and exacerbated existing inequalities. Even a cursory glance at early reporting on COVID-19 has shown how it has put other forms of inequality on display, from the increase in an already unequal and gendered distribution of domestic labor as people spend more time at home (Abdelmahmoud 2020) to the devastating divide in access to care and subsequent deaths within BIPOC communities (Villarosa 2020).

As we think about takeaways from Spring 2020, then, we recognize the limitations of this article. A more robust study of emplaced teaching in moments of spatial disruptions would incorporate more direct experiences of students to unpack how rerouting can be differently distributed in ways significant for research and writing. Because we did not anticipate COVID-19 as we engaged in this cross-campus partnership, we did not have the methodological infrastructure in place to capture this important data.

And yet, in unexpected ruptures like Spring 2020, reflection, storytelling, and dialogue themselves become crucial methodological tools to cull insights from the rubble and, we hope, offer a foundation on which to build future research and teaching. We have offered different iterations of rerouting—from partnerships to digital mapping to a global pandemic—in hopes that, as a concept, it can become a useful tool in our emplaced teaching toolbox. Using rerouting as a way to think through Spring 2020, we’ve offered insights about our own experiences, insights we’d like to close on here.

• In a moment when ecological, economic, and epidemiological changes continue to disrupt our relationship with place and writing, we need more explicit ways to discuss how the various routes students and we travel intersect, or fail to intersect, in meaningful ways. Even in emplaced classrooms where students may be well versed in theories of space and place, routinized mobilities can remain implicit, taken for granted by our students and ourselves. Inviting students into more explicit discussion of routes and rerouting as a central component of emplaced teaching can help us collectively think through the increasingly fragile intersections of our pedagogical lives.
• Spatial ruptures—when established pedagogical routes are disrupted either at the macro, social level or the micro, individual level—present conceptual and logistical challenges to emplaced teaching, but also opportunities for more incisive concrete discussions of the ways our writing affects, and is affected by, the various community and institutional places we inhabit. This can provide alternatives to models of emplaced teaching, like our original partnership, that rely on stable notions of place and of circulation.
• Digital mapping is a productive and flexible platform for tracking students’ messy engagements with community places, understanding and engaging with how writing and technology mediate place, emplacing students in local contexts—even in times of spatial change—and circulating place-based engagements.
• As spatial ruptures present challenges and opportunities for emplaced teaching, so, too, do roadblocks to the circulation of writing. Rerouting—as a response to dynamic spatial contexts and as deliberate strategy—can help instructors and students contend with the emergent circulatory potentials of writing about place and think through these potentials, and their ethics, in emplaced classes.
• An emphasis on local spaces and issues important to our students can be enhanced through broader partnerships with others engaged in similar questions of space, place, and writing. As rhetoric and composition continues to refine its attachments to spatial thinking, it should forge points of connection between pedagogical locations—institutional or otherwise—to provide opportunities for students to think of their place-based engagements within larger networks of inquiry and action.

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