By Emily Sok, Published March 21, 2024
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/veronica-house-a775914/
Academia.edu C.V.: https://udenver.academia.edu/VeronicaHouse/CurriculumVitae
Veronica House works as a community engaged consultant, working with teachers to design assignments, and with community partners to understand local needs. She launched the University of Colorado Boulder’s WISE program, which stands for “Writing Initiative for Service and Engagement,” after partnering with over 35 local community partners. This culminated into a series of writing courses that are tailored to meet both student/degree needs (e.g., business writing, first-year writing), and local community needs. Today she works at the University of Denver’s Center for Community Engagement to Advance Scholarship and Learning.
The writing assignment ideas listed throughout this article are inspiring: a proposal letter asking for donations, musical partnership promotional materials, press releases, grant writing, business plan drafts, digital (organization-specific) storytelling, lesson plans for specific books, and a discourse analysis of the word “sustainability.” What I wouldn’t give to see a syllabus she helped build!
House explained that community engagement has been a shared interest at Colorado University, and acknowledged that not all faculty receive institutional support for community engaged work. This is in part how the Conference on Community Writing was formed in 2015!
Take a look at some of Veronica House’s scholarship:
The Virginia Community Writing Collaborative 