Department of English

In this ABCS (Academically Based Community Service) course, Penn students will work with twelfth graders to write and discuss literature about the history and present tense of voting in our country. During the first of our twice-weekly class sessions, we’ll meet on campus to plan the next lesson. In the following session, we’ll bring this lesson to a high school classroom in West Philly. Sessions at the high school will meet during the same Penn time block so everyone will be free. Each week we’ll use a different poem or short essay (like Reginald Dwayne Betts’s poem about voting for Obama in a Nat Turner T-Shirt, Chanda Feldman’s poem about voter suppression among sharecroppers, and John Lewis’s graphic novel MARCH) as the model for our own creative writing about what voting means to us and what it has meant to our families before us. We’ll also talk about voting policies and structures of government in order to reflect on them in poems and prose. Penn students will gain teaching experience, creative writing techniques, and close reading skills. No previous teaching nor writing experience is required.