Sarah O’Brien is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. As a Brittain Fellow, she teaches first-year English courses oriented around her disciplinary interests in film studies and the emergent humanities field of animal studies. She also works as a Professional Tutor and as the Consultant for Faculty and Postdoctoral Fellows at Tech’s Communication Center.

As a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature who teaches English at Georgia Tech, I spend a lot of my time remarking on how different my students here are from me and from the students I have previously taught. There are, of course, the stark disciplinary divides: teaching English at Tech requires that I teach my students something about the language, methods, and traditions of the humanities, while I also try to learn—or at least to develop basic proficiency in—those of STEM fields. My students here also (and, in what is perhaps an inevitable fact of teaching, increasingly) differ from me and my previous students generationally. In my film-focused English classes, this manifests most visibly in their different relationships to rapidly changing screen technologies and the media that flow through them—that is, in what I often worry is distracted absorption in “content” that has been fundamentally reshaped by digital transmission. Lastly, my students’ cultural identities vary not only in generational terms but often in nationality and/or ethnicity; though I’ve always studied and worked in large institutions with diverse student and faculty populations, I am regularly struck by the range of different ethnicities and nationalities represented at Tech, as well as by the number of people with hybrid backgrounds.

Sometime last fall, it occurred to me that my students and I are alike in at least one way: our relationship to Georgia Tech and to the larger city of Atlanta is, by design, impermanent. Most students will live on or near campus for the four or five years that it takes them to graduate, and then move far away for jobs; I am nearing the end of my three-year fellowship and, if all goes well, will move on to a new job, likely in a new city, next year. I initially dismissed this similarity as a not terribly significant feature of academia’s curious life cycles. However, I had just received a grant from the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain to enhance a course I was developing on the role of environment in cinema, and I would soon become more involved with SLS as a faculty trainer, prepared to train others about the newly launched center’s principles and initiatives. At some point between SLS meetings and before I quite realized it, I had redesigned the central unit of my course to examine relationships between Atlanta’s environment and media. With the assistance of the SLS course grant, my students created public service announcement videos about Trees Atlanta’s extensive arboretum on the Atlanta BeltLine. We traveled together to the BeltLine for a tour guided by a Tree’s Atlanta docent, and they returned with their groups several times to shoot footage. This project was framed by readings from Atlanta Studies and Southern Spaces, interaction with ATLMaps, and a guest lecture by Dr. Sarah Toton on the city’s complicated history of “blight” and “boosterism.” My students’ excitement about this project was palpable at every step, not least in their presentations of their final products to Karla Vazquez, a representative from Trees Atlanta.

Through this project and working with SLS, I realized that the experience of transience that I share with my students is a critical connection—one that brings out the productive tensions in our many other differences. I admit to initially thinking of Tech/Atlanta as a layover in my career, and I urge my mostly first-year students not to make the similar mistake of thinking of their time at Tech as a mere training ground for their future careers. While higher education invites its own forms of transience, the fact is that young people move a lot nowadays, for all sorts of reasons. Connecting in substantive ways with communities that we may not physically inhabit for long, much less for our entire lives, is perhaps the only way to combat the sense that our life trajectories amount to a string of soon-to-be-long-distance relationships and rented apartments in miscellaneous places. I’ve found that students are eager to invest in their communities and—like me—just need to be jostled out of the assumption that they can’t do so on a limited stay. If anything, living somewhere temporarily is precisely the reason to get involved, as it may produce lasting change in you and/or the place. 

For this and related reasons, fellow Brittain Fellows Anna Ioanes, Melissa Sexton, Caroline Young, and I created a guide for new faculty to partner with SLS. Originally intended for new instructors in the WCP, the resource will be of use to all new faculty, as it offers an overview of different models of incorporating community engagement in college classes, descriptions of sample courses and projects, a listing of additional resources, and tips for taking students off campus. Ideally, it will help you make the most of your time teaching issues related to sustainability and/or social justice at Georgia Tech—however long that might be.

The comprehensive Writing and Communication Guide can be found on our website under the Resources tab.