This fall, Taylor students have a unique opportunity to engage the community and get published. Chronicling the Crossroads, a paid civic storytelling opportunity for college students, is looking for volunteers for its latest cohort.
Organized by the Community Engaged Alliance (CEA), Chronicling the Crossroads seeks to publish stories of Hoosiers overcoming division, said Mark Pike, director of programming and strategic initiatives at CEA.
Overcoming “division” can be interpreted in many ways. Pike left the nature of this term broad, he said.
“It can look like intergenerational division, right?” he said. “How do old people and new people learn to talk to each other? It can be geographic division, it can be an urban rural divide. It can be division based on local decision making. It can be social isolation. So, it’s an intentionally broad topic that people can kind of make whatever they want out of it.”
Students will interview community members, turning those interviews into first-person narratives that will ultimately be published in book form next spring.
“It could be attending a Rotary Club meeting,” he said. “It could be, ‘Hey, I know that all these people go to the same coffee shop every day and hang out.’ It could be a personal connection that they have. So there'll be a variety of ways that students can interact with folks in their community.”
In addition to getting published, students will also receive a stipend of $550 and an hourly wage of $20 when doing assignments, according to the informational poster.
The program will also count as a practicum opportunity if it meets the 120-hour time requirement, Benjamin Wetzel, associate professor of history, said. Each writer’s commitment to the program will determine whether they reach this amount of time, but he was optimistic that students could reach the requirement, especially when counting training.
Each story would be a 750 to 1500-word piece, edited by the CEA.
The CEA will collaborate on the publication with the Facing Project, a nonprofit which “creates a more understanding and empathetic world through stories that inspire action,” according to their website. The book’s release will be conducted in the same way the book was written — alongside the community.
Those involved would also have the opportunity to work with Free Press Indiana, a journalism nonprofit supporting citizen journalists and community newsrooms across the state, to improve their local event coverage. Writers would attend local meetings, taking notes that Free Press would use to publish articles later.
Students can apply at the CEA webpage. Applicants, in addition to providing basic contact information, will fill out six essays. The prompts will ask about their interest in the fellowship, their commitment to civic dialogue and the importance of learning across cultural differences. The essays are short, Pike said; all of them can be answered in under 600 words.
The top 15 applicants will be chosen for this cohort, he said. While competition may be fierce, Pike expects at least one Taylor student will get accepted, especially if multiple apply.
All academic disciplines are welcome, he said. Applicants’ intellectual qualities are what truly matter.
“I think students that are intellectually humble, that can be persuaded, that have a certain amount of cognitive malleability, students who can interpret what they're hearing generously and can exercise empathy and curiosity and a genuine interest in other people should apply,” Pike said. “So not listening to talk, but listening to understand.”
Those values are core to Pike’s mission. CEA is a nonpartisan nonprofit which aims to create more civic-minded graduates in Indiana, Pike said. It runs a number of programs for college students, all aimed at helping students understand the public purpose of higher education.
Chronicling the Crossroads, Pike hopes, will further that goal and bring Hoosiers together.
“There are a couple of different outcomes I would like to see,” he said. “I think the first one is developing the human capacity for people to navigate disagreement.So how do we become more curious about each other? How do we listen to each other? How do we become more humble and communicate with each other?”
For Pike, the task of answering those questions is existential. He recalls reading a Pew study that indicated only 44% of Americans trusted their neighbors, a number that has been steadily declining over the past decade.
Ideally, the project will continue for a number of years, forming an anthology of how students responded to those themes over time, he said.
“As we see that decline in trust of our neighbors, I think the only way to overcome that is to talk to each other, to understand the common challenges that we face, the common goals and ultimately the common humanity that we share,” he said.
Students interested can reach out to Kyra Zylstra, CEA’s liaison at Taylor, or email CEA directly at contactus@engagedalliance.org
