This project describes three pedagogical practices that use storytelling to engage students in exploring and inventing their shared community. Through service-learning stories of community members, self-analyses, stories of work, and TED-style multimodal talks, students at the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University South Bend expand and disturb the meaning of their local community and, in doing so, help to rewrite the haunted story of South Bend, Indiana.

This project explores the dynamic impact of student employment on classroom discourse and on students “long-term academic and professional success. Using student surveys, institutional data, and scholarly research, I demonstrate that students” everyday workplace experiences play an integral (and potentially integrated) role in their liberal arts education and in their ability to negotiate future workplace literacies.

Taking the 1969–74 classroom “dramedy” Room 222 as a case study, and setting it in the context of a range of portrayals of teachers and teaching from the period, the author raises the questions about the positive portrayals of committed teachers. These portrayals, along with positive views of community involvement and a multicultural environment, might have progressive aspects not allowed for by assumptions that such realist commercial productions inevitably co-opt any urge toward radical critique. She argues that such a rethinking might also offer teachers a way to reconsider and communicate with our students about current popular culture.