Note: 
Our October 26 visit from this year's Common Book Author, Paul Loeb, was amazing! Thanks for all of your hard work.  We are busy collecting video footage, posting it and photographs online, adding sample student work and sample assignments to the site...read what Paul said about us:

PAUL WRITES:
I thought you’d be interested in an amazing cross-campus adoption of The Impossible Will Take a Little While at Rochester Community & Technical College, in Rochester, Minnesota. I’ve never seen a school use one of my books in as many different ways, with such an explosion of creativity and engagement. So I thought their experience might be useful for other colleges,.

The college assigned The Impossible as a common reading across the curriculum. It was assigned, in whole or part, in freshman composition, sociology, communications, political science, leadership, English, philosophy, psychology, public speaking, interpersonal and intercultural communications classes, general humanities classes, and even some art and music courses. Nursing and chemistry sponsored related events. The college’s music and digital arts students created an installation opposite the college bookstore where people could touch various tiles and hear students reading favorite quotes from the book. The quotes were backed with music that the students had composed. The college’s speech students did dramatic interpretative readings of the poems in public performances. Art and design students crafted invitations, programs and posters for my lecture at the school, and created art shows taking off from various essays.  The school's health classes used the Terry Tempest Williams essay for Breast Cancer Awareness week and the Diane Ackerman piece for discussions of youth suicide prevention.  Faculty and staff read and discussed The Impossible in a reading group and staff development workshops.  

One young woman did a whole slide show taking off from Jack DuVall and Peter Ackerman’s essay about the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina and the resisters who succeeded in getting the Nazis to free 1700 imprisoned Jews from the Berlin police station. She asked people to write responses on Post-it notes while they watched, then assembled these responses into a poem that she read to the class. Other students linked their classroom work with outside community service projects at schools, nursing homes, a Boys and Girls Club, and other local nonprofit groups.  Speech and education majors teamed up to create learning units to help teach the book’s themes of hope in local schools.  Dance students taught classes at the Boys and Girls club and talked about the value of small acts of involvement.  Students also helped register voters in a neck-and-neck Congressional race nearby, then volunteered to get out the vote and drive voters to the polls. 

A group of faculty and students also made the book’s themes the centerpiece of a service learning trip to Cambodia. Students gathered donations such as uniforms, educational, medical, and dental supplies, and financial contributions.  They worked side by side with Youth Service Cambodia, the first indigenous Non Governmental Organization of its kind in Cambodia. Together the students dug wells, built toilets, planted gardens, worked with schools and orphanages, and distributed food and supplies to the poorest of the poor.  The trip’s facilitators taught lessons around the book’s themes to both the U.S. and Cambodian students. 

The college created a special website for the book, which students and faculty used to develop and share new learning materials. The site included annotated study questions (beyond those I’d already prepared), profiles and annotated bibliographies of the book’s authors, and links to student multimedia presentations. The student who created the Post-It poems worked with fellow students in the school’s honors program to edit and publish a book of student essays responding to my themes. Students held displays in the school’s atrium tying in specific essays to issues like homelessness, substance and physical abuse, poverty, depression, and suicide. They publicized  local resources for volunteerism and civic involvement, and faculty and staff brought in representatives of local nonprofits and citizen advocacy groups throughout the year. Students I met in a recent visit said the book and its related activities had transformed their lives and was completely inspiring. I can’t imagine a more fertile use of The Impossible Will Take a Little While as a window to a larger engaged world.

For more information on the project, visit the website or contact Rochester Community & Technical College Common Book coordinator, speech professor Lori Halverson Wente.

By the way, I’m switching to HTML instead of plain text when I send out my articles, since it allows me to include lots of useful links.  If you have a problem reading HTML, you can sign up for a plain text version of my articles by emailing sympa@lists.onenw.org  with a message in the body of the email: subscribe paulloeb-articlestext