Abstract

This article details a flood-focused, community-based writing course that was derailed by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis to argue that despite major challenges, the course helped to prepare students to face some of the fear and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, offered them a space through weekly reflection responses to process their isolation, and positioned them to more capaciously empathize with community members who had lived through the trauma of persistent, catastrophic flooding. The stunted community-based learning course still allowed students to contribute to the work of the community partner and offered unexpected chances for students to process their own trauma. By the end of the semester, students emphasized the importance of community-based learning for cultivating the kinds of empathy and critical civic responsibility they felt would become necessities in a COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 world. We detail some of the important lessons of adapting the course to the COVID-19 crisis and suggest pathways for other faculty and community partners to build flexible, long-term collaborations that can not only ride out traumatic interruptions but actually provide students with the equipment they need to navigate these challenges.

Introduction

When colleges and universities across the country announced the suspension of face-to-face learning in early March 2020 in response to the growing COVID-19 pandemic, faculty, staff, and graduate students faced the unprecedented challenge of shifting the entire enterprise of higher education online in mere days. In our institutional context, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, instructors transitioned some 3,700 courses fully online over the ten days of spring break (Meyerhofer 2020), and the story was the same in schools across the country. This massive disruption prompted a tangle of challenges for learners, instructors, and staff. Undergraduates were asked to move out of dorms and, in some cases, into unstable or unsafe living conditions. Instructors unfamiliar with online learning platforms and best practices scurried to move courses online in days. The university community faced uncertainties about student recruitment, faculty hiring, employee furloughs, and university budgets. Most important, as COVID-19 cases continued to soar throughout 2020 and again in 2021, we faced the increasingly likely reality of family members, friends, neighbors, and ourselves getting sick and even dying of the virus.

The public health nightmare and unprecedented pedagogical shift prompted by COVID-19 posed an additional suite of challenges for community-based learning courses, including: potential transmission of the virus between university students and non-university community members; the suspension of face-to-face instruction, university travel, and site visits; constriction of non-profit budgets; increased pressure on social services; diminished capacity of organizational staff as caregiving responsibilities increased; and still, as we finalize this article almost two years on, the total suspension of “normal” life. While we do not want to downplay these acute challenges in the least, we—the authorship team comprised of undergraduate students, community partners, and faculty—offer the case of our Spring 2020 flood-focused, community-based writing course, “Writing Rivers,” to argue that students’ participation in a community-based writing course did important work to equip them to face the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here we highlight students’ own written reflections from the Spring 2020 semester to demonstrate that our course helped to prepare students to face some of the fear and uncertainty the COVID-19 pandemic presented. Writing Rivers offered students a space through weekly reflective responses to process their isolation in campus apartments and temporary living arrangements while positioning them to more capaciously empathize with—and work to advocate alongside—community members who had lived through the trauma of persistent, catastrophic flooding: another “natural disaster” accelerated by human mismanagement, structural inequity, and neglect. While the course’s community-focused outcomes were, in part, shortchanged because of the pandemic, the interrupted community-based learning course still allowed students to contribute to the community-identified needs of the partner organization while offering a model for students to process their own trauma. By the end of the semester, many students emphasized the importance of community-based learning for cultivating empathy, structural critique, and civic responsibility, qualities they felt would become necessities in this new shared future. Below, we detail students’ experiences, reflect on how the course was able to produce some positive outcomes given the circumstances, and consider lessons for ourselves and other community-university collaborators for weathering future crises.

A Community-based Learning Collaboration Between UW-Madison and the Non-profit Driftless Writing Center

The class we focus on here, Writing Rivers, is a community-based learning (CBL) designated section of the Department of English’s advanced undergraduate course Seminar in the Major, capped at 20 students. The community-based learning designation, coordinated through UW-Madison’s Morgridge Center for Public Service, marks classes that offer “a credit-bearing educational experience that integrates meaningful community service with guided reflection to enhance students’ understanding of course content as well as their sense of civic responsibility.” The Morgridge Center offers significant intellectual, financial, and logistical support for community-based learning at the university, including $5,000 course development grants for instructors interested in developing community relationships that might foster community-based learning courses. That was the case with Writing Rivers. A Morgridge Center course development grant funded faculty member Gottschalk Druschke to take regular, four-hour roundtrips to meet in person with community partners in southwestern Wisconsin, purchase supplies to support the course, rent a bus for an early semester orientation, fund fleet vehicles for students to make their own roundtrips, and pay for meals during orientations and field visits. The Morgridge Center also trained undergraduate community-based learning interns for the course each semester who worked with students on issues of bias, cultural humility, trauma-informed pedagogy, and best practices, as well as offering suggestions for written reflections. (Funds from an additional source, the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment grant program, allowed us to offer a $1500 payment to the Driftless Writing Center to support student orientations and course planning in AY 19/20.)

While community-based learning courses at UW-Madison are shaped on a class-to-class and semester-to-semester basis by the Morgridge Center, they are also shaped by the wider institutional context and history of UW-Madison’s Wisconsin Idea and the Wisconsin Experience. Put simply, the Wisconsin Idea is the notion “that education should influence people’s lives beyond the boundaries of the classroom”; it originated with former UW-Madison President Charles Van Hise who insisted in 1905, “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every family of the state.” The Wisconsin Idea is problematic, of course, in its paternalistic impulse, and that is a legacy we address head-on in Writing Rivers, considering the history of harmful intervention from the state capital, Madison, in the lives of folks around the state. But the Wisconsin Idea sets an important tone for valuing community engagement. And it comes to life for students as its manifestation in what has been dubbed the Wisconsin Experience: “UW-Madison’s vision for the total student experience,” that “combines learning in and out of the classroom, with students engaging in four areas of intellectual and personal growth.” Those four areas include: empathy and humility; relentless curiosity; intellectual confidence; and purposeful action. The Wisconsin Experience offers an ideal context for community-based learning at UW-Madison, and our discussions of the Wisconsin Experience in class and out returned often to “empathy and humility,” which became a guidepost for our learning together.

This backdrop is important for understanding Writing Rivers, a joint effort between UW-Madison faculty member Gottschalk Druschke, collaborators Tamara Dean, Jennifer Morales, Lisa Henner, Carly Frerichs, Robin Hosemann, Brad Steinmetz, Tim Hundt, and Kate Fitzgerald from the all-volunteer nonprofit Driftless Writing Center (DWC) in rural, southwestern Wisconsin, and faculty member Margot Higgins from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Writing Rivers serves DWC’s Stories from the Flood project, a community-driven effort to gather oral and written narratives from residents of southwestern Wisconsin’s Kickapoo River and Coon Creek watersheds who experienced catastrophic flooding in August and September 2018. The goal of the project is to promote community healing through storytelling, while creating the foundation for an urgent community conversation about flood resilience in this flood-prone region. “Stories from the Flood” was launched by members of DWC who themselves experienced devastating flooding alongside their watershed neighbors. After hatching the idea, DWC partners reached out to Gottschalk Druschke to help support their community-driven effort.

The growing partnership between Stories from the Flood and Writing Rivers became a vehicle for exploring and attempting to begin to undo some of the previous damage of university-community relations. Some flood survivors, for instance, shared that they had been interviewed in the past for university research projects that never returned results to the community, or, worse, turned results against the community. It took a great deal of effort to actively work against this damage and towards a more reciprocal relationship. We did that in a number of ways. For one thing, the course is not a one-off; instead, Stories from the Flood is built into the fabric of Writing Rivers, with different students cycling through the course each semester (and, in several cases, continuing that work in independent studies, fellowships, and even into graduate studies). Faculty instructor Gottschalk Druschke plays a coordinating role, sustaining that relationship through time: teaching Writing Rivers each semester (from Fall 2019 to presently Fall 2021) in support of Stories from the Flood, while working to hold herself accountable to DWC and the Stories from the Flood project long-term. Likewise, DWC community partners, and Dean especially, have put a huge amount of energy and labor into the success of the project and into students’ work with it, including consistent coordination and communication with university faculty and students, input on student projects, visioning, scheduling, and general support. This model of multi-semester—and now multi-year—collaboration has been central to adapting to the profound interruption of COVID-19. This is not always easy, and we have certainly had our share of challenging conversations about ownership and representation, student behavior, and competing visions, expectations, and timelines. For example, while DWC asked storytellers to sign a release form that allowed narratives to be archived and reproduced in any form, DWC project leaders were reluctant to release those stories to university faculty until they had negotiated assurances that storytellers would not be regarded as mere sources of data and that individual stories would remain situated in context as part of the larger community-wide representation of the flood’s effects. Open and frequent communication between Gottschalk Druschke and Dean, especially, and their shared vision for the longer-term goals for Stories from the Flood allowed them to consider how students could continue to support the community-driven effort even when courses moved abruptly online in March 2020 (and remained virtual through Fall 2020, Spring 2021, and Fall 2021) and how to center reciprocal benefit through the process.

Reciprocity has always been our guidepost. We have worked together long enough to see that this collaboration across university faculty and students and a community organization not rooted in the world of academe benefited both university learners and the community partner. DWC could not have moved its project as far forward had it not been for the partnership with university faculty and students and the financial and human resources they bring to the table. Student involvement, particularly, added an important dimension to the project. Flood survivors reported that they were able to open up and reveal more to student story gatherers, most of whom came with humility and without preconceived notions, than they might have to their fellow community members with DWC. For one thing, students seemed able to gather thorough and penetrating responses from storytellers because storytellers didn’t assume students knew most of the details and backstory, and students were especially good about following the list of prompts provided by DWC and improvising insightful follow-up questions. But also the empathy of student story gatherers influenced the project’s outcomes for the better. This attitude was cultivated in a number of ways, through the course’s emphasis on:

• flexible collaboration over graded performance aided through completion-based grading;
• students’ frequent contact with Dean and project partners as well as an in-person visit to flood affected communities prior to story gathering visits that helped students and partners build trust, camaraderie, and accountability before interacting with individual community storytellers;
• trauma-informed care, supported by community-based learning course interns; and
• community over academic outcomes, with clarity from the outset that the course was built around the Stories from the Flood project, not the other way around.

This give and take, we argue, is a central feature of ethical community-based learning relationships: what the Morgridge Center describes as “reciprocal, mutually beneficial relationships that value the knowledge of each partner.” Though this is always a work in progress, we have kept our eyes firmly on this goal of a reciprocal, mutually beneficial relationship as we co-build and sustain the collaboration.

With this goal of reciprocity in mind, Stories from the Flood became the central focus for Writing Rivers, with every classroom activity and writing project tailored around its various phases. Stories from the Flood is the mechanism through which students meet the learning outcomes of the class to:

• Learn about writing, rhetoric, rivers, resilience, and Wisconsin history as it shapes the present
• Engage with Wisconsin’s freshwater ecosystems and the humans who rely on them
• Create original, coherent, and compelling analyses that push beyond summary to synthetic, independent, critical thinking
• Apply the tools of rhetoric to solve problems and take action in the public sphere
• Partner with others to address timely problems and create positive community change
• Enact the Wisconsin Experience: cultivating empathy and humility, relentless curiosity, intellectual confidence, and purposeful action

During the first semester of the collaboration, in Fall 2019, students traveled to the Kickapoo River and Coon Creek watersheds to record oral histories from community storytellers. They then created transcripts of those oral histories, analyzed the transcripts, highlighted the most poignant excerpts, and grouped them into themes such as “Loss” and “Relying on Neighbors.” DWC relied on students’ analyses to create, publish, and distribute a public-facing booklet that highlighted storytellers’ flood experiences for fellow community members, support workers, and policymakers. That booklet was one of the centerpieces of a celebration event in the Valley in November 2019 that brought together over 100 Stories from the Flood participants, volunteers, students, and politicians to share stories and discuss how to move forward together with floods, and the booklet was later distributed at locations throughout the Valley.

That first semester, a smaller than typical group of enrolled students formed a tight cohort, throwing themselves into the work and treating the responsibility delegated to them with reverence. There were some exceptions to all this feel-goodness in subsequent semesters: two students who took advantage of their story gathering location, a local bar, by getting a little too comfortable with storytellers and forgetting to turn on their recorder, which meant failing on the shared promise to include that story in the project archive; students who resented making four-hour round trips for story gathering on precious weekends; students who fetishized storytellers’ community-driven efforts at flood recovery to suggest that everyone experiencing hardship should similarly pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But those students were largely the exception to the rule. The project benefited from the earnest and long-term commitment of the first student cohort, who set a high bar for the students who came after them: community members and partners raved about their compassion, earnestness, and professionalism, and those students continued to gather stories, support future cohorts, and speak at student orientations after their official course enrollment ended.

The Spring 2020 version of Writing Rivers was meant to continue the work of Fall 2019, with at least three planned round trips to the Kickapoo River and Coon Creek watersheds through the semester: one trip for a meet-and-greet with DWC organizers, group orientation, and mini-tour of the area, and at least two subsequent trips in small groups to record oral histories with flood-affected residents. Later work in the class would involve summarizing and analyzing the contents of the growing Stories from the Flood oral history archive (100-plus stories as of March 2020) and preparing synthetic reports to support the development of a project findings report aimed at various constituencies around the Valley, including decision makers, policymakers, mental health professionals, and health care workers.

Students’ work through the first half of the Spring 2020 semester, pre-COVID, focused largely on familiarizing themselves with the Stories from the Flood project and its watersheds, with community-based learning and oral history practices, with trauma-informed approaches, and with the previously gathered oral histories that form the Stories from the Flood archive. The cohort was largely unfamiliar with the physical and mental consequences of flooding or with oral history methodology, so we spent several weeks at the beginning of the semester, with the help of a community-based learning intern and the head of the UW-Madison Libraries’ Oral History Program, learning about how to be attentive but largely quiet listeners, how to engage respectfully with traumatic stories and traumatized storytellers, and how to investigate our own biases and identify our own positionality related to community storytellers. We needed to do collective work in class to undo some students’ negative stereotypes about rural, under-resourced communities, and we had discussions about the various kinds of diversity represented in the region and the kinds of conditions that might leave some rural Wisconsin residents feeling suspicious of outsiders and resentful of state politics. But we also needed to address the very real damage that some minoritized students had experienced in rural communities and consider how to help them feel safe and supported throughout the course: making space for students to get to know our community partners and visit the area before traveling out for a more intimate story gathering visit and pairing potentially vulnerable students with storytellers that community partners knew personally.

This open-ended, process-based work was aided by the course’s reliance on completion-based grading, which created space for us to de-center the mastery of course content and re-center student development and collaborative process (Inoue 2015). Completion-based grading was meant to set the tone for the class: valuing engagement over academic performance. As the syllabus explained, “This course will likely be very different from other courses you’ve taken, requiring commitment outside of the classroom, independent action, empathy, and collaboration with a range of partners. This course will push all of us in challenging and sometimes uncomfortable ways, but I hope it will be one of the most consequential and rewarding things you’ve contributed to in your academic lives here at UW-Madison.” Empathy was a touchstone, and students were encouraged to examine their expectations and biases to meet these flood stories—and their tellers—with open minds and hearts. And many did. Several students expressed their early apprehension about community-based learning, criticizing its “preachiness” and being suspicious of its claims towards reciprocity. Those students reported being happily surprised by the course and project by mid-semester though a few students continued to report that our CBL course had too much of a focus on “talking and feeling” rather than academic content. But the majority of students in the class returned again and again to the power of these flood stories and emphasized how project storytellers all had unique stories to tell but echoed common themes: isolation during a flood event; distrust of government attempts to address the damage; overwhelming anxiety knowing the next flood is coming but not knowing when; and also surprise at the kindnesses shown by neighbors and strangers, the small moments of healing, and the self-sufficiency and resilience that became so apparent in the days, weeks, months, and years post-flood.

Those discussions and our shared work together seemed to come to a screeching halt when University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank announced on Wednesday, March 11, 2020—two days before the start of Spring Break—that all face-to-face instruction would be suspended at the end of break, Monday, March 23, 2020. At the time, Writing Rivers students were just launching into weekend visits for story gathering with roughly half of students having made one trip so far. Project organizers had scheduled six story gathering sessions around the watersheds for the weekends bracketing Spring Break (no easy feat given the logistics of home-based meetings across a broad geographic area two hours from campus). Faculty member Gottschalk Druschke had a two-day trip planned to the Valley during Spring Break to meet DWC members and attend a community meeting about watershed planning and flood resilience organized by DWC’s Tim Hundt. After 24 hours of confusion, and in consultation with DWC, it became apparent that we would need to cancel students’ story gathering sessions; the Morgridge Center then recommended suspending all in-person contact for community-based learning courses, and the university restricted all travel. After alerting students and cancelling story sessions and vehicle reservations, Gottschalk Druschke still assumed she would make her own overnight trip to visit collaborators, until it dawned on her that she could be a disease vector introducing COVID-19 from the state capital Madison to the more isolated Kickapoo Valley. She cancelled the trip just as Hundt cancelled the in-person watershed planning meeting, and DWC then suspended all their own programming, including all story sessions for the Stories from the Flood project. This is still the situation we are writing from in Fall 2021. Story gathering is suspended. Other DWC activities have moved largely online. UW-Madison courses met face-to-face for six days of the Fall 2020 semester before a not-unexpected surge of student COVID-19 cases prompted another shift to virtual learning. Many UW-Madison courses continued to meet online through Spring 2021, and all community-based learning at the university was virtual and largely improvised through the 2020/2021 academic year.

Community Engagement and Self Reflection During COVID-19

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the suspension of face-to-face learning in March 2020, students had just submitted their first writing project: a thematic analysis of a subset of oral histories to support the preparation of a Stories from the Flood findings report to be prepared by DWC. Students were in the midst of individual conferences with Gottschalk Druschke that week, meant to prepare students to kick off their second major writing project: a research-based report specialized on a particular issue of student interest related to the project, including mental health resources (and the lack thereof), risk communication during floods, and land conservation strategies for flood mitigation. Half of those conferences were completed the day before the COVID-19 suspension announcement. The other half, scheduled for the day following the announcement, quickly became a surreal set of phone check-ins by Gottschalk Druschke into students’ well-being, including plans for moving out of the dorms, questions about students’ vanishing hourly jobs, and strategizing about computer and wi-fi access in new living situations. Gottschalk Druschke quickly sent an email to the whole class telling them not to think about the course for the time being, to take care of themselves and their safety and mental health, and to reach out with any needs or concerns. Gottschalk Druschke promised she would follow-up near the end of Spring Break with an alternate plan for the rest of the semester, having no idea at the time what that alternate plan might be.

Over Spring Break, Gottschalk Druschke and Dean convened by phone to discuss alternate strategies for continuing our collective work. In lieu of in-person trips to the Valley for story gathering, students would instead work to quality control transcripts of oral histories gathered in Summer and Fall 2019 and early Spring 2020. While less engaging than story gathering trips to meet community residents, the process of listening slowly and carefully to an oral history audio file, while poring over and revising the transcript text, offered an intimate connection for students with project storytellers and was no less important to the overall project; accurate transcripts were essential to delivering the archive to the Vernon County Historical Society and the Oral History Program at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse’s Murphy Library for easy access by contributors and the larger flood-prone community. Gottschalk Druschke changed the existing grading structure for the course to reflect that change, then shifted in-class engagement to a series of weekly written reflections and small-group research check-ins and eliminated the only major project in the class that wasn’t explicitly aimed at supporting project aims: an end-of-semester creative project based on student engagement with Stories from the Flood. The baseline grade was shifted from an A/B to an A, and students were encouraged to complete whatever they were able to in a Pass/Fail manner to earn an A in the revised course.

While reflection had been a part of our course throughout the semester, it became the central form of weekly communication between students and Gottschalk Druschke in the COVID-19 shift to online learning. Gottschalk Druschke knew, from polling students, that many didn’t have reliable internet connections in their current living situations, and she also knew they were overwhelmed with all kinds of school-related and personal challenges. So she suspended synchronous instruction and shifted completely to text-based work submitted through our online learning platform. This shift included a series of five weekly reflection papers and a course-end reflection. While reflections were positioned to help students process their changing circumstances and existed for the purpose of exploring thoughts and communicating with Gottschalk Druschke, the student responses were so revelatory that Gottschalk Druschke reached out to students to invite them to tell their own stories in this more public forum. With the written consent of all students from the course, many of whom participated as coauthors here, we offer these reflections as they reveal three major themes: 1) the ability for students to connect their COVID-19 isolation with the impacts of flooding on Stories from the Flood storytellers; 2) the importance of structured reflection for processing trauma and imagining a path forward; and 3) the urgent need for community-based learning and the cultivation of empathy in a COVID-19-altered world. We then close the essay by pointing towards lessons for our own future work and for other community-university partnerships working to weather acute and ongoing crises.

Student Connections to Flood Stories and Flood Storytellers

Despite our surprise shift to online learning, students completed important work for the community-driven Stories from the Flood project during Spring 2020 through both quality control of project transcripts and the preparation of research-based reports on urgent community needs to inform a findings report for area decision makers. What became clear in students’ reflections through those pandemic weeks, however, was how much students also gained from their collaboration with the project during this unprecedented time. Pre-pandemic, students struggled to connect with the experiences of flood-affected storytellers. Despite their work to empathize, most students couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live through a broadly experienced crisis, the negative material and psychic effects of which were felt for weeks, months, and years. They hadn’t lived through a “natural” disaster, couldn’t imagine the isolation of flooding and flood recovery, hadn’t experienced the lack of federal intervention that demanded neighbors collaborate to support neighbors, and, especially, hadn’t lived with the chronic uncertainty associated with life in a flood-prone landscape.

But COVID-19 changed all that. Students’ experiences shifting abruptly into virtual learning, navigating the ongoing uncertainty of the pandemic, and experiencing loneliness as they moved into self-isolation put students in empathetic relation with flood storytellers in ways that none of us anticipated. In their reflective writing through those early weeks, students described being understandably worried and overwhelmed. At the same time, they detailed their capacity for finding resources and strength in their community-based learning experience, in each other, and in the Stories from the Flood storytellers and community partners: strength to move forward despite fear and uncertainty within political and economic structures that cause, sustain, and amplify trauma in some communities over others. Again and again, students pointed to empathy as central to our ability to move forward together.

We recognize that this is a partial outcome. These reflective responses demonstrate the personal transformations of individual students as they came to relate to the flood stories they had been listening to and working with all semester. The suspension of in-person story gathering, and the shift to supporting courser scale project needs, created the conditions for students to gain immediate benefits from the courage and honesty of community storytellers without immediate, reciprocal return. We still suggest, however, that the cultivation of empathy was a significant outcome of the course, and one with future potential for more radical change. We were heartened to see how much students grew in their capacity to relate to project storytellers in important and generative ways.

Just as project storytellers described the emotional ups and downs of their flood experiences, Julia B., a student in Writing Rivers, connected with flood-affected storyteller Sarah B. and her own oscillations between laughter and tears, the shock when the weight of it all sneaks up on you:

“God damn. I feel like the last time we were all in class together was in another world. The route I’d take after class from the Psych building to my chem discussion in Sterling Hall, hundreds of students streaming pass me. It’s a scene that would be considered headline news right now. I’m soaking up nostalgia, disappointment and hope in fluctuating parts right now. I’m always a little sad at the end of school years. Maybe sad isn’t the right word… it’s like nostalgia but not for any one time or place. Just a gentle reminder that time is moving faster and faster. Especially right now. Both fast while staying still, confined to only a handful of places and people… I’m reminded of one of the recordings we listened to as a class. Sarah B., the hilarious southern woman. She’s joking, reflecting, telling stories about the flood. And then she says, ‘I kind of want to… cry.’ I remember that hitting me. I even remember where I was when I listened to it, sitting on the bench at the entrance of the Geology museum before my geosci class. I feel like Sarah B. sometimes. I’m joking, telling stories, reflecting on everything in good spirits. And then suddenly it all catches up to me and I want to cry.”

Carl Z. felt that same emotional weight, and zeroed in on the uncertainty of the early weeks of the pandemic and its similarities with the uncertainties of frequent and accelerating flooding:

“It took some time but I established a routine. Nothing felt ‘normal,’ really, but I was making it work. My focus was shot, though. I had so many thoughts on my mind. There were so many unknowns. There still are many unknowns, in regards to what will happen. My Spanish and Mythology professors both recorded lectures for us to watch. In the beginning, I was watching them all, but slowly, that resolve began to crumble. They didn’t seem important. People are dying. We are living through a global pandemic. Suddenly, I wasn’t invested in the importance of a figurine of an unidentified snake goddess from 1700 BCE. So I stopped attending the lectures, finding ways to do the bare minimum for passing. This class, though, offered more flexibility. I was able to work on things on my own time, as I was able. That helped me so much, especially because I really did care about the floods of the Driftless area and the people there. I know much more about flooding than I ever thought I would, now. The citizens of La Farge, Viola, Viroqua, etc., have to deal with the stress of not knowing when the next catastrophic flood might happen. Certainly, it is not the same, but I do think that this pandemic has given me some perspective about what it means to live with that kind of uncertainty.”

Students like Julia B. and Carl Z., among others, talked about their individual emotional reactions to the early weeks of the pandemic and the connections with the emotions of individual Stories from the Flood storytellers. But students also picked up on connections beyond individual experiences, asking important questions about community impacts and structural inequities. A number of students noted the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic drew their attention to the differential impacts of these crises on different communities. Maggie N., for instance, pointed to structural inequities revealed by both crises:

“I think [Stories from the Flood] had probably made me more sympathetic and aware of the additional issues these communities face when dealing with devastation. Families in the Kickapoo Valley who would like to move, but don’t have the money to can (sort of) be linked to families dealing with extra struggles with COVID-19. I live in the Milwaukee area and I know the statistics are already disproportionate and shocking for people of color. COVID-19 is showing the issues with our healthcare system and other systems that have been around for a long time.”

Sharon K. made a similar point about inequity, responsibility, and privilege:

“Overall, the situation with COVID-19 has made me appreciate the normalcy I took for granted my whole life. Never would I have imagined that I would experience or live through a pandemic, but here we are. I feel more obligated to follow rules and remain home, despite not wanting to, because although I feel healthy and secure, it’s impossible to know who I might be affecting just by being outside. I feel a responsibility to my community, and to all the individuals in it, and I think it’s more of a pressing feeling because of my experiences with this class. I know that people everywhere have access to differing amounts of resources, and I am always trying to be conscientious of my privileges. This class has definitely brought to light structural issues present in federal relief programs, and I think that it’s important for everyone to continue increasing their knowledge about systemic problems so that we are more aware and better equipped to combat them.”

At the level of the individual, the community, and larger societal structures, students’ COVID experiences put many of them into a new relationship with the Stories from the Flood storytellers and the project as whole. Students had been thoughtful contributors to the project prior to the pandemic, but, during it, students seemed to realize there were lessons in these stories that they could relate to, empathize with, and even draw inspiration from. Stories from the Flood seemed to help many students find ways in to processing their COVID-19 experiences personally and societally.

Certainly, there were exceptions to this trend. A few students in the course did not draw deep connections to project storytellers or to community partners before or during the pandemic; one student, for instance, suggested in their final course reflection that the flood stories project was interesting for letting them experience “how the other half lives.” But even those students who felt the shift to virtual learning left them without a strong connection to community members in the project watersheds—as one student put it, “I know they’re real people, but I don’t see them, their body language, what they feel that they can’t or won’t say”—still identified ways they grew as writers, students, and humans through the course. And the majority of students had quite profound things to say about their growing identification with community storytellers.

The Importance of Reflection for Processing Trauma and Imagining a Path Forward

Students who detailed important connections to and lessons learned from Stories from the Flood storytellers seemed to learn these lessons because of the central role of reflection in the revised course. This came as somewhat of a surprise to Gottschalk Druschke, who was trained in a community-based writing program at University of Illinois at Chicago that eschewed reflection. Then-faculty director Ann Merle Feldman (2008) has critiqued reflection as “embody[ing] contradictory rhetorical and generic aims; students are asked by teachers to produce an authentic account of an experience and, at the same time, convince their teacher that the expected learning has occurred. What starts out as an essay based on personal experience— which itself is problematic because experience is always mediated— becomes a petition to the teacher for a grade” (101). Because of that training, Gottschalk Druschke has had lingering reservations about a reliance on reflection in community-based writing courses, but the turn to asynchronous, online, pandemic learning seemed to demand it.

So we worked in Writing Rivers to mediate some of those concerns about the false authenticity of reflection in two ways. First, the use of completion-based grading eliminated the need to petition for a grade. In short, students just needed to submit something each week. There was no value in extolling a student’s personal transformation. In fact, in the midst of the pandemic, Gottschalk Druschke invited students to spend their time complaining! Or at least airing their very real concerns. And still, students wrote about empathy and growth and possibility and hope. Second, these pieces of reflective writing were positioned not as performances for a passive teacher but as reciprocal forms of writing that created a relationship that demanded response. We argue that the expectation that students were writing to a specific person who, in turn, engaged with and responded in writing to what they wrote changed the nature of the reflection genre. Instead of static performance or petition, reflective responses put students in dialogue with a responsive instructor who was learning and adapting in real time just as they were. We also want to emphasize that this was a dialogue purposefully focused on healing: for flood survivors; students; and their instructor.

The idea of writing as healing was central to DWC’s creation of the Stories from the Flood project. Based in part on Pennebaker’s (1997) work, Stories from the Flood—originally intended as a written project—was built from Pennebaker’s ideas that “writing about trauma can alleviate its negative effects and lead to improved physical and emotional health” (Moran 2013). Community partners from DWC wanted to find a way to support flood recovery in their own communities in the wake of the 2018 flooding, and writing seemed a good way to do that. Writing as healing has certainly been taken up across composition studies, and personal reflective essays have become a standard genre in the college writing classroom (Day 2019).

At the same time, we are well aware of critiques of writing as healing and its centering—and even forced outing—of student trauma. As Molloy (2016) argued, “Writing to heal might very well be a positive movement. However, the pedagogy also has the capacity to carry with it narrowly defined, hegemonic dispositions toward trauma and recovery as well as to offer writers constricted inventional purviews within which to imagine and recast their experiences” (136). In the writing classroom, an emphasis on writing as healing carries the possibility to focus on student trauma in ways that are potentially reductive and even actively harmful. This critique is reminiscent of Tuck and Yang’s (2014) suggestion that too often academic research focuses on Native, urban, or other disenfranchised communities only in the context of pain and trauma. As they put it, in academia, “The subaltern can speak, but is only invited to speak her/our pain” (Tuck and Yang 2014, 226). As they detail, this danger still exists despite, and often because of, good intentions. So we wanted to be cautious about positioning students to center their own trauma alongside the sometimes traumatic flood stories they engaged with all semester.

But just as DWC’s aims for Stories from the Flood included helping storytellers process their trauma by recasting their narratives, Writing Rivers seemed to help many students process their experiences with the class and its disruption to facilitate their own healing. How did that work? We think this is partly related to the point about undermining the strictly performative aspects of reflective writing. Our work was not centered on students writing about their pain. Instead, weekly reflective writing in the wake of the COVID-19 shift to virtual learning was a pragmatic response to change, offering an outlet for students to choose—or not—to share their experiences and ask for support. As students focused on their engagement with the Stories from the Flood storytellers, they thought through their own experiences, explained their personal challenges, mused on structural inequities, and spent a great deal of time thinking about the alternate futures they hoped to build. Students located themselves in their bodies and in the hierarchical relations of power that structured their lives (Carey 2016; Vieira 2019), and then wrote towards relational, imagined futures.

And so, in the chaos related to the abrupt shift to university-wide virtual learning, weekly reflective responses ended up serving as a tool for students to explore their own experiences and their engagement with the flood stories, as a robust record of the early weeks of the pandemic, and as a means for them to build their own stories. The function of these reflective pieces of writing weren’t lost on many students. Sharon K. found those weekly reflections an important space to slow down and listen to herself:

“I’d also like to preface this reflection by saying that I am immensely grateful to you, Professor Druschke, for urging us to engage in introspective thinking and reflection. Personally, I find that I don’t often spend too much time processing my thoughts and feelings during times of commotion and uncertainty, times when I ought to be processing and reflecting the most. I’ve made jokes to my family and friends that I’m an outcast in that I’m an English major and a writer that doesn’t constantly turn to writing to cope or emotionally release. I love reading other author’s work and being able to connect to the emotion and experiences depicted within their work, but I have realized that I myself am uncomfortable in formulating and seeing my own emotions etched into formal existence. Though I still do not practice what I’m trying to preach all that often, this class, along with pushing me to seek out educational experiences outside of classroom walls, has left me with a deeper and more meaningful connection to and appreciation for writing. There is a beauty to all human experience, and writing provides the platform for individuals to tell and relay stories that would otherwise be unheard of by others across the world. We write to remember. We write to connect. We write to cope. We write because we are human.”

Sharon K. expanded on the idea elsewhere in her writing:

“Overall, although I feel an overwhelming emotional strain in transitioning to online classes while also being stuck indoors, I am especially grateful that I am enrolled in this class because without it, I would not be asked to reflect. Being an English major, it is expected that I be asked to write, but writing becomes meaningless if nothing important is being said. It becomes meaningless when everyone is struggling, and adjusting, and feeling, but not seeing one another or explicitly recognizing that what we are going through is historic. It becomes just another task I have to do to meet requirements and receive grades for. This class, above all other things, has taught me the importance of writing personally, of experiencing personally. Each individual that I have encountered and have yet to encounter has a story unlike anyone else’s, and each story is valuable. Though we may not be able to talk about or read every individual’s story, it is still important to remember the human experience underlying each word and phrase in a newspaper, each blip of media coverage on the daily news. Though we may not always be able to be connected to the world physically, as COVID-19 has shown us, we are always connected in our ability to relay experiences and communicate with one another, to find meaning and emotion in our common humanity.”

Daniel R. also found value in the weekly reflective responses, positioning these reflections as a form of self-care, a means to check in on himself in the chaos:

“The weekly little check-ins were actually really awesome ways to digest everything that was happening. With so much going on, it is hard to think critically and check in with yourself without being prompted, and these assignments gave me assigned time to think about how I was doing. They gave me an outlet to express myself pretty explicitly and without a filter or guise. I think they were really helpful in my studies this semester. They kept me homed in on myself and made my work better as a result.”

Ellie J. extended that idea, explaining that these pieces of reflective writing offered a chance to process, but also offered a chance to create her own historical record:

“I’ve gained a lot of material for writing. Write what you know isn’t always the best method for writing in my opinions, because personally I believe that you can write what you don’t know so long as you have empathy for situations, but I digress. In this case however I think it’s impossible to not write about living through an unprecedented historical event. There hasn’t been a pandemic like this in most of our lifetimes, and I think it’s important to realize that certain things that we put out into the world right now are going to be looked back on as historical primary resources. HOWEVER, I think it’s also important to actually write about things that are happening, rather than just writing about the fact that we’re in a historic time. With the information that I learned about collecting oral histories and how writing stories about traumatic events helping people cope, I have made journaling a priority through this experience so that I will have first hand accounts of the different kinds of things I struggled with.”

For many students, weekly reciprocal reflections offered the chance to process their own experiences, consider those experiences in relation to the flood stories, narrate their own stories, and create a historical record. Once again, their work—through reflection—helped them to focus personally, by slowing down and taking care, and also to think about their connections to others and to the future. The Stories from the Flood storytellers helped students understand the value in taking charge of their own stories: not to fall prey to a dangerous bootstraps narrative but as an important mode of asserting their voices and experiences in relation to others and in opposition to structures that exacerbated the situation. These realizations were key for students during the semester: a focus inward that brought the outside into focus.

This was an important and somewhat unexpected outcome. With the abrupt transition online in March 2020 at the outset of a pandemic, Dean and Gottschalk Druschke were frankly thrilled just to have come up with alternate activities for students to complete that would support the larger project. They hoped students might still gain something from their virtual interactions with the community, but they did not necessarily assume that would be the case. And yet student reflections served a similar role to the Stories from the Flood process: with individuals narrating their navigation of a surprising and, frankly, life-defining interruption in order to process their trauma in community with others. And students recognized that this ability to look within and without and to put themselves in empathetic relation with others would be central to their ability to move forward.

The Need for Community Based Learning in a COVID-19 and Post-COVID-19 World

We began drafting this article in May 2020, when we hoped that a post-COVID-19 world was on the not-so-distant horizon. Twenty-one months later, as we revise it, the “post” feels like an impossibility, but the lessons learned seem potentially even more relevant for our current and constant state of dis-ease: for engaging an uncertain future; expanding empathy and understanding of people caught in the trauma of an overwhelming and alarming crisis; laying the groundwork for both self-compassion and for compassion towards community.

That turn was personal, yes, but was not simply an issue of personal transformation. Students’ reflections on the semester pointed to an interesting progression, in many cases projecting what students wanted to follow from reflection: connection and action. It was exciting to see where empathy—slowing down, listening, recognizing fears, self-soothing, acknowledging and taking heart in the fact that we’re part of something bigger—leads. This projection, rooted in hope, is a powerful tool. Like empathy, hope became another touchstone, a powerful topos in our ongoing collaboration. Members of the DWC team, storytellers from the local community, and students regularly returned to hope, not coincidentally a central focus of Mathieu’s (2005; Minnix 2017; Wood 2020) tactically oriented work on community-based writing. “Hope,” Mathieu (2005) tells us, “is what mediates between the insufficient present and an imagined but better future… To hope, then, is to look critically at one’s present condition, assess what is missing, and then long for and work for a not-yet reality, a future anticipated” (19). A pedagogy of hope takes a tactical approach that emphasizes “rhetorically timely actions” (Mathieu 2005, 17) over static infrastructures: kairotic and mutable responses like our shift to virtual learning, the adoption of weekly call and response papers, the quality controlling of project transcripts, and the Stories from the Flood project itself. Students described these changes in their own words.

Rachel A. reflected on Wisconsin’s rural/urban divide (related, also, to a town and gown divide) and the work of her community-based learning experience to foster connection and cultivate empathy across divides:

“In class, we talked a lot about how rural communities in [state] do not trust the government, and I have had the chance to witness that firsthand throughout this pandemic. Both my immediate family and people in my community struggle to comprehend why the government has taken certain actions… I think that is something that the Wisconsin Experience and Idea helped me develop: a commitment to the wellbeing of people outside of my immediate circle… I believe the CBL experiences have helped me develop my ability to foster connection and community, embody empathy, offer support, and remain open to learning.”

Ellie J. thought about her growing perspective on the internal diversity of “communities” and the importance of working together across difference:

“I think that community-based learning teaches you a lot about what it means to be a community. It doesn’t mean that you all have the same past experience and resources, but rather you learn how to share with each other and help each other because of where you live or what you’re all going through. It means that those with more resources can take time to help those who have less. And when the entire world goes through something like a pandemic, it forms a community out of us all. It teaches everyone how to think about everyone else, on a global scale, when they make decisions, like whether or not to go on a spring break trip, and find ways to help those who might be struggling more than you.”

Kristi K. focused on the need to pull together as a community and take responsibility for each other’s health and safety:

“I think community-based learning will be very valuable after COVID-19 because people are experiencing so much trauma and pain. A lot of people are going through times, especially local businesses so I think a lot of people will need help and a lot of people can learn from helping these people. There are going to be more stories to tell and more people that want/need to tell their stories. Right now, it’s hard to accept the fact that I can’t do anything to help people because it is more safe and helpful to stay inside. The focus towards civic engagement, public service, and the Wisconsin Idea influences my understanding of the pandemic we are experiencing right now by demonstrating how important it is to give back to the community in anyway you can. I think now more than ever service and civic engagement have to be practiced. The nation feels divided with people blaming other people, but no one is to blame. No one was hoping this would happen. In addition, there are people who refuse to recognize the danger COVID-19 and are trying to fight for their ‘freedom.’ Through civic engagement, we should be promoting people who are fighting for the safety of our community, instead of following the people who believe that their freedom is being taken away by quarantine.”

Daniel R. reflected directly on the role our community-based learning experience played in equipping him for the pandemic and its aftermath:

“Working in community-based learning during this time has prepared me for the aftermath of this pandemic and the headache it will be. Working with people in this course, we have our own little community that has power and have researched the horribly slow moving and difficult process of government assistance. I now have a more realistic (and dreary) view of how getting help from the government is, but also a revived appreciation of the importance of real community work and helping our neighbors.”

Carl Z. focused on the crucial lessons he hoped would be learned from the structural inequities laid bare by the flood and the pandemic.

“I think that community-based learning will be especially valuable in a post-COVID-19 world because of the attention that it has brought to class disparity and healthcare inequality. Being educated in a way that emphasizes the importance of community and helping one another impacts the way we can handle crises like this pandemic. This is not a world where we can be selfish. We have a responsibility to lift each other up and take care of one another. Part of what makes us human is our ability to empathize and problem solve.”

Mary R. echoed this theme:

“This is a big and scary time. I know that has been said a lot. But I mean it more in an interpersonal sense. I’m scared of the ignorance and active individualism going on. I’m scared of the immediate effects of people being sick, dying, hospitals being overwhelmed, doctors working in danger of their own lives, the elderly, low-income, POC, incarcerated folks, the homeless. What will everyone do? If they can’t get care just die echolessly? I’m scared of the government. I’m scared of the aftermath, that we will still be cruel to our planet and our people. I’m scared of politics, of rich white people and their NIMBY monologues. I’m scared of everything ‘going back to normal’ when normal was never good enough, when normal was only ‘normal’ for those of privilege. I’m scared that after all this is over, another pandemic will occur, and then another, all exacerbated by climate change and emphasized by divisions in wealth, resource allocation, and accessibility, while others lounge in excess…. Mostly, I am reflecting on inequality: that has existed, is heightened, and will persist far after this.”

Mary R. also focused on using her community-based learning experience to turn anxiety and fear into hope:

“Overall I’m too unsure of the future to make any definitive claims about what I think will happen, how we will change or simply revert, I don’t know. I am hopeful, though. I am hopeful for a shift, progress, an awakening. I fear that hope being crushed by capitalism and industry and donald t****. But I still maintain it, like a little candle with a short wick on a windy day. I keep the hope, kept close, against my chest and flickering. And I hope for myself that I can share and spread love, and calm, and kindness. I want to take what I have learned from this course, about myself and about what I can do to listen to and uplift others, and take it on with me, build upon it, and connect to the world more fully than I could before… I am anxious about the ‘post-COVID’ world, but I hope I can carry that anxiety with a sense of hope and excitement. Rather than fearing the worst, I hope to look towards the positives, the potential benefits, and the outcomes of isolation that could turn into grater connectivity, spiritual intune-ness, self work and progress, less individualism and more collective efforts towards change, and more love, always, more love. I want to see a world that does not just take and destroy, but gives and grows, nurtures and builds. I hope in the depths of my soul that this can be some sort of cosmic collective consciousness shift, where we are reminded of what really matters, who needs the most care, why we act and respond in certain ways, and how to embrace each other so much more than we ever thought that we could.”

Again and again, students emphasized the kinds of personal, collective, and structural changes necessary to move forward together and saw the power they themselves held to critique, connect, and build.

We saw the cultivation of empathy as an important starting point, a generative glint of connection from self to other. Written reflection, alongside students’ active participation in the community-driven effort of Stories from the Flood—even when participation turned virtual—facilitated students’ abilities to work through important frameworks of critical community-engaged scholarship, with students continually circulating through a focus on self and self in relation to others, while participating in engaged reflection and representation, and shifting attention from self to system (Milner 2007). Importantly, students’ own experience living through crisis fostered their capacity for self-reflection in relation to other individuals and systems, while still making important contributions to the project’s interventional aims.

Writing to Heal: Precarity, Hope, and Desire

We hope that students’ powerful voices have helped to make the point that our community-based writing course—even and maybe especially in the midst of a pandemic—offered valuable and actionable lessons for many students: preparing them to face some of the fear and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic; offering them space through weekly reflection to process their own isolation; and positioning them to more capaciously empathize with community members who had lived through the trauma of persistent, catastrophic flooding. Ultimately, the stunted and then virtual community-based learning course still allowed students to contribute to the work of the community partner and offered unexpected chances for them to deal with chaos and trauma in their own lives. By the end of the semester, students emphasized that their community-based learning experience was an important way to build empathy and practice civic responsibility, features they felt were increasingly essential to confronting the challenges of our times.

These were important outcomes for students, though we recognize that our shift to virtual engagement came at significant cost: we lost the chance to support individual community members in the Kickapoo River and Coon Creek watersheds to tell their personal stories of flooding and work together towards community healing. We made the collective decision that in-person interaction was a central component of the healing aspects of our story gathering process, and so we suspended story collection efforts in Spring 2020 in hopes that we could resume in Fall 2021. A surge in the Delta variant across Wisconsin at the start of the Fall 2021 semester (the time of this writing) halted our plans, and we might consider in Spring 2022 whether it is time to shift to online story gathering. We recognize that the trauma of repeated flooding has been compounded by the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic and that there might be an even more acute need to reach out to isolated community members who want and need to talk online rather than not at all.

In the meantime, we are working to hold ourselves accountable to the 100-plus community members who have so far shared their stories with the Stories from the Flood project: treating their stories with reverence and care; collaborating together on the mundane tasks necessary to deliver their stories to the Vernon County Historical Society and the UW-La Crosse Murphy Library so that storytellers can share their stories with family members and can listen to stories of other community members affected across the region; and working to highlight the urgent needs identified in these flood stories—for timely government assistance; for better flood warning systems; for improved communication across the watersheds; for improvements to make infrastructure more flood resilient; for increased access to mental health care; and for improved support for flood-borne illnesses; among other things—and advocate for those needs with county, state, and federal decision makers. In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic shifted students’ work from a focus on direct service to a focus on advocacy as part of this larger community-driven effort. The forced suspension of story collection pushed us to pursue the potential policy outcomes of the project with more urgency: Zooming in to county-level flood mitigation meetings; offering supporting material for flood recovery grant proposals; working towards the project findings report; and securing federal funding to support community-driven flood resilience planning in the watersheds. We see this link between written self-reflection and systemic intervention as central to the work of our course, in keeping with important arguments to intentionally center action-oriented approaches to social justice in technical communication pedagogy (Jones and Walton 2018). Maybe it comes as no surprise that so many students not only drew connections between Stories from the Flood storytellers and their own pandemic experiences individually but also structurally. They focused on individual trauma, on the importance of community supports, on their developing empathy for others’ experiences, and on the ways that catastrophes magnify already existing inequalities and serve to further divide the well-resourced from the marginalized. And they detailed their hopes for becoming engines for change to address these inequities.

On behalf of our community storytellers, our students, and the project team, through both direct service and advocacy—both interpersonal interaction and structural critique—we hope that this work helps to emphasize the importance of working through—but not fetishizing—trauma and findings ways to relate together to build new, even not yet imagined, futures. In the words of Tuck and Yang (2014), we want to decenter damage and recenter desire:

Alongside analyses of pain and damage-centered research, Eve (Tuck 2009, 2010) has theorized desire-based research as not the antonym but rather the antidote for damage-focused narratives. Pain narratives are always incomplete. They bemoan the food deserts, but forget to see the food innovations; they lament the concrete jungles and miss the roses and the tobacco from concrete. Desire centered research does not deny the experience of tragedy, trauma, and pain, but positions the knowing derived from such experiences as wise. This is not about seeing the bright side of hard times, or even believing that everything happens for a reason. Utilizing a desire-based framework is about working inside a more complex and dynamic understanding of what one, or a community, comes to know in (a) lived life (231).

As Tuck (2010) put it a few years earlier, “Desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future; it is integral to our humanness. It is not only the painful elements of social and psychic realities, but also the textured acumen and hope” (644). Rather than focus on damage, as Tuck and Yang (2014) critique, Stories from the Flood emphasized future possibility and desire: strength, action, resilience, and hope. And just as students are supporting the work of making sure storytellers’ experiences inform flood resilience planning in the affected watersheds, project storytellers served as mentors for students in the course to address the trauma of the pandemic, while positioning that trauma in a context of action. In short, Stories from the Flood storytellers offered students critically important equipment for living. These stories offered students the tools they needed to reflect on their own challenging and even painful experiences and then find ways to move forward together. Our work with Stories from the Flood offered students a model of storytelling and story-making: the chance to write their own stories in relationship to the COVID-19 pandemic and to imagine what Mathieu (2005) referred to as their “future anticipated” (19). In the meantime, students’ work in the class helped to support the project team’s efforts to manifest—through advocacy, policy, and planning—this future anticipated. We hope this example inspires others to find creative ways to collaborate across university boundaries even—and maybe especially—in times of crisis, to consider how regular reflection can make space for healing and transformation, and to think actively about how to sustain collaborations over time that cycle through self-reflection, connection to others, and structural change.

References

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