This Research Brief presents an overview of current research in community-engaged writing, particularly foregrounding the importance of praxis-oriented and collaborative approaches. Here, we articulate collaboration, reciprocity, and accountability as some of the main tenets of community-engaged writing, and we showcase the variety of projects that such work can include (from local food writing to prison literacy work to transnational social justice movements and beyond). Then, we explore some of the methods and methodologies that are central in this scholarship, drawing on examples that engage storytelling, oral history and interview methods, archival methods, ethnographic research, and even public performances and workshops. We conclude with a discussion of future possibilities for research, teaching, and the imperative to see community-engaged work as part of scholarly work in tenure, promotion, and review.

This article reports findings from interviews with twenty college instructors who have facilitated multimodal advocacy projects, identifying their affective significance through reflections. Based on our qualitative analysis of instructor responses, we present the implications of multimodal engagement and what it means for doing social advocacy pedagogies with the community.

Based on a qualitative case study of students’ “theory of writing” essays, this study examines ways that first-year students’ community engagement experiences solidify and disrupt their writing knowledge, beliefs, and practices. Analysis of student writing demonstrates how different community-engaged writing projects inform first-year students’ writing theories and strategies.

The pharmaceutical industry’s corporate responsibility reports illustrate how the liberal rhetoric of civic engagement can be reappropriated to serve the market-driven aims of risk management and public relations. Tracing the ideologic linkage of corporate responsibility and service-learning versions of civic engagement, and contextualizing postsecondary service-learning along a larger neoliberal trajectory, should prompt us to reconsider basic questions about the means and ends of our institutional and pedagogical work.

This article argues for approaching pedagogical outcomes as ends-in-view that guide, but do not determine or limit, pedagogical possibilities. Reflecting on moments from a service-learning literacy course, the writers argue that experiences of chaos in the classroom, while often uncomfortable, can open opportunities for reflection and inquiry.

Heather Lettner-Rust has written a commentary on David Coogan’s article “Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhetoric,” which appeared in the June 2006 issue of CCC. David Coogan responds to Heather Lettner-Rust’s commentary. The full text of the original article is available at http://inventio.us/ccc.

A materialist rhetoric in service learning is needed to teach students how to discover the arguments that already exist in the communities they wish to serve; analyze the effectiveness of those arguments; collaboratively produce viable alternatives with community partners; and assess the impact of their interventions. Through a discussion of a project that attempted but failed to increase parent involvement in Chicago’s public schools, this article shows why rhetorical production needs to be supported by the kind of rhetorical analysis that reveals how institutions exercise power. Materialist rhetoric challenges students, teachers, and community partners to write for social change and define change concretely, in terms of institutional practices or policies that they wish to influence.

Personal narrative embeds the expertise of subordinated groups in stories that seldom translate into public debate. The authors describe a community writing project in which welfare recipients used personal narratives to enter into the public record their tacit and frequently discounted knowledge. The research illustrates the difficulties and possibilities “rhetorical, emotional, and material” of constructing narratives that “cross publics.”

This essay turns to feminist ethnography and postcolonial theory to address how the figure of “the stranger” haunts the project of community service learning. By explicating the immediate and broader relations of power that structure these “strange(r) encounters,” we are more likely to produce the kind of agitated pedagogy that creates opportunities for progressive practices and effects.

Community service learning in college-level composition has been widely proclaimed as a microrevolution in higher education. Advocates enthusiastically assert that both faculty and student participants report radical transformations of their experiences and understanding of education and its relation to communities outside the campus (Adler-Kassner et al. 1). This pedagogy, they argue, addresses writing as a situated, social act and points us toward a curriculum of textual studies based on [rhetorical] inquiry into variation in discourse (Bacon 53). Students write about the community in journals and rhetorical analyses of mission statements, or with the community in an urban

By addressing race and class through the stories we tell about service-learning in the classroom and in our scholarship, I argue that we can more effectively negotiate the divide between the university and the community and work toward social change.

In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subject-object, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses.

In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subjectobject, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses. I begin with a scene written by a student in my service learning course, U.S. Literacy Politics. The scene, taken from her final paper for the course, recounts her first night at a downtown community center, where students likeJanis serve as literacy partners and mentors. Shifting back and forth between present and past tense, Janis writes:

The role of the professor in community service writing courses factors into the teaching, research, and overall institutional viability of these initiatives, yet too little has been written about the role of the professor in service learning. Through an analysis of recent publications on service learning and data gathered during an outreach initiative at University of California, Berkeley, this article reveals a few of the obstacles that hinder the sustainability of community literacy programs. I find that professors in service learning courses can better sustain these initiatives when they view the community site as a place where their research, teaching, and service contribute to a community’s self-defined needs and students’ learning.