Town Hall Meeting

Fostering Engaged Scholars

The Town Hall Meeting is the culminating experience of a first-year writing course entitled “Writing for the Public Sphere.”  The course introduces students to the research, reading, and writing practices students need to succeed in the university.  Composition faculty wanted to bring their writing courses fully in dialogue with what research in the field was revealing about student writing: students write with more engagement, and the writing improves more significantly, if they are writing for a real purpose, to a real audience, in a selection of real genres.  To better achieve these aims, the program joined forces with the campus’s civic engagement initiative, linking the work of research writing to the work of engaged citizenship. 

Research and Writing as Engaged Participation

During the semester, English 130 students research issues of local, national or international importance, and produce writing that helps them make sense of the difficult sources they encounter; talk back to those sources and synthesize information; narrate the story of their research and what they have learned about their issue; and propose a course of action that they can realistically fulfill. 

Sponsoring Purpose-Driven Dialogue

Students participate in roundtable discussion groups with other students who have worked on similar or identical questions.   Invited to participate in those roundtable discussions are faculty, staff, administrators and students, along with members of the community.  The Town Hall Meeting has close to 20 roundtable sessions.  After brief opening remarks that iterate the aims and goals for the meeting, participants attend one roundtable discussion to deliberate on the issue and form impact groups.  Roundtables are facilitated by the students who completed the research on the issue at hand, and aim to create purpose-driven conversation that leads to informed action. 

Linking Students and Community Members

After the final session, participants return as a collective for refreshments and to meet with consultants—university and community members who work on the issues students have researched--who can directly help realize students’ courses of action.  The Town Hall has grown from 150 participants to over 600.  Students who have experienced the Town Hall claim that they felt taken seriously as thinkers and researchers, that they felt clearer about their academic interests and goals, and that they saw that their opinions can matter and can make positive change.

The CSU, Chico Town Hall is currently funded in part through a generous grant from the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Charles Engelhard Foundation's Bringing Theory to Practice Project.

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