Chalking Up the Future

Armed with only wood, paint and chalk, a group of UCF students created a chalk wall to get their peers engaged and talking about the issues close to their hearts.

UCF Professor Scott Launier’s rhetoric and civic engagement course features an assignment every semester for his students to create something that involves civic engagement.

“I like to tell my colleagues it was a mutiny, [or] maybe more appropriate, it was a coup d’état,” Launier said., “I just happened to show my class this TED Talk called ‘The Before I Die Wall’ and that’s when the mutiny started to happen’ and they started talking about all the ideas they got from that. I just tried to get out of the way.”

For weeks, the class weaved around discussions and bureaucracy for a single day to ask, ‘A Problem That Concerns Me Is…’ to their fellow students. Anyone who happened to walk by the wall was allowed to write on the chalkboard.

The responses people wrote ranged from broad topics such as ignorance and corruption to specific issues including Islamophobia and slut shaming.

“I wasn’t sure what people were going to write. There was ‘$62.50’ written on the board, which is the jaywalking fine. I didn’t even know that at the time,” said Alex Rolette, a rhetoric and civic engagement classmate and junior finance major.

Not everything written on the board was serious, but the class did nothing to discourage people from writing what was on their minds.

“The mix of [humorous and serious suggestions is what] makes it interesting. If everyone was just writing serious issues or everyone was writing serious things, it wouldn’t have the character of the campus,” Rolette said.

The students had spent three classes on just the wording of the question, breaking it down to individual words, their connotative and denotative meanings and fine tuning the rhetoric of it all.

Most important to them, however, was to give people a place to speak up.

“There were so many times where this class is only 50 minutes long and we were discussing something important or was important to me, but everyone didn’t get a chance to get what they wanted to say out, and afterward I would go home and that discussion would kind of get buried,” said Dylan Duncan, a rhetoric and civic engagement classmate and political science senior. “It was really good for me to have a space where I could come and talk — that’s why this became important to me.”

What surprised the class the most was the honesty other students displayed when writing what was on their mind, walking up and writing their own insecurities and fears out in public.

“It gave a lot of people who don’t have that voice an opportunity to speak their mind, and those discussions our classmates and people around the board had were almost like a debate by proxy,” said John Bruce, a rhetoric and civic engagement classmate and senior writing and rhetoric major.

Some students would also walk up to educate themselves on something they didn’t understand.

“Some people were asking me ‘What does misogyny mean?’ or ‘What is transphobia?’. There were a lot of words or issues on the board people didn’t know, and that can be a huge problem,” said Kendra Salter, a rhetoric and civic engagement classmate and junior journalism major.

Bruce, Duncan and Sean Nelson are three students from the initial project who plan to keep the idea alive.

“We’re looking to now possibly start maybe a club or a UCF forum,” said Nelson, a senior journalism major. “We want to do another chalk wall project, but we’re also looking into the possibilities of what else we can do with it.”

The hope is that by creating a more permanent place for open discussion, with different prompts every week or so, the students can help form a stronger sense of community and communication among others.

“It’s very important to us, and we don’t want to let the idea die,” Duncan said.