The power of participation: Don Moore
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In an office decorated with mementos of his travels with the Grateful Dead, Don Moore keeps a cardboard box containing an old Burger King cup, a plastic knife, and a stack of ashtrays. The box is the toolkit he takes along when he routinely picks up cigarette butts on the grounds of the Liberal Arts Center as a member of The Butt Crew he founded to address the problem of litter on campus.
“It takes me about 10 minutes once a week to go around the LA Center,” the English instructor said. “On a nice day, it’s great to be outside doing something for the University. On a nasty day…it’s still worth it.”
Moore deposits the butts in the Burger King cup, itself formerly litter, and pries the butts out of the brickwork on the Liberal Arts Center patio with the knife, another ground score. He hands out the recycled, biodegradable, and reusable ashtrays to smokers in hopes they will deposit their butts there instead of on the ground.
After months of this, the continued presence of cigarette butts on the ground and in the landscaping surrounding the LA disappoints him. “It just goes to prove that there has to be a continuing education effort to get people to change bad habits. I can’t pick up butts one day or one month and expect people to stop littering.”
Moore traces the genesis of The Butt Crew to an epiphany he had while watching a documentary about folk singer/activist Pete Seeger. The documentary tells of how Seeger sailed the sloop Clearwater down the Hudson River to draw attention to its pollution. “Seeger says that participation will save the human race; that we have to think globally and act locally.” Similarly, he said, “If the Liberal Arts Center was a model for the USI campus, than we could be a model for other campuses around the state.”
The service learning (or “activist learning,” as he likes to call it) component of his classes requires that students join a campus organization of their choice. Last fall, four of his students formed Green Life, a group inspired by The Butt Crew that helps pick up litter around the LA and is planning other projects. Green Life outlasted the class and now boasts 15 members, with more joining each week. It has inspired other campus organizations to “adopt” buildings on campus. Recently, Phi Delta Theta fraternity adopted the University Center. A sorority is talking with Green Life about adopting another campus building.
Green Life members in his English 201 course will join students in classes taught by Moore’s English colleagues Dominic Micer and Brianne DiBacco for Public Sphere Week in April. Students will choose an issue of concern to their organization and pursue conversations with people on the Quad. The students will use materials such as flyers and posters to get the attention of passersby.
Students will first write a formal academic paper making an argument, and then translate it into common language in order to engage people during Public Sphere Week. “The goal is to bring people in to participate in the solution of the issue using language that all students can understand,” Moore said. “You can’t have a public sphere if you don’t engage people. You can’t engage people with academic discourse. Outside of the academy, that kind of discourse is rarely used to persuade people effectively.”
Students will write a reflective essay on the experience and turn in a portfolio containing the materials they’ve created for the project. Public Sphere Week will be held April 20-25.
“My goal is to create civic-minded people while teaching the concepts of rhetoric,” Moore said. “The byproduct is that students who are engaged stay engaged and stay with the University.” Increased retention is “just a happy coincidence, not something I planned when I had the Peter Seeger epiphany.”
Moore joined USI in 2005. A native of Sparta, Illinois, he holds a Master of Arts degree in English from Southeast Missouri State University. For more information about The Butt Crew, contact him at 812/464-1750 or dmoore2@usi.edu.
Wendy Knipe Bredhold
News & Information Services
812/461-5259 or wkbredhold@usi.edu
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