This profile features the authors' shared work to co-create both a community literacy project, Stories from the Flood, and the undergraduate community-based learning courses that supported the effort. Stories from the Flood works to assist community members in southwestern Wisconsin to share their flood experiences, aiming to support community healing and serve as a resource for future conversations about flood recovery and resilience. Our collaboration on Stories from the Flood demonstrates the importance of non-university expertise and aims to daylight and correct structural asymmetries that render these rural watersheds both particularly vulnerable to flooding and absent of government intervention.

ust as musical codas persist beyond the end of musical work, Coda-a new sec- tion of the Community Literacy Journal devoted to creative writing-offers space for the representation of the lingering effects of community engagement, public engagement, and activism. Beginning with this, our inaugural effort, Coda will publish creative writing in a range of genres and voices in a move to expand conversations about writing studies, to document and preserve the work of community writing, and to encourage more creative writing. We invite readers and writers who are eager to create knowledge in new ways to join us in enacting writing as a form of communion.

In the era of a global pandemic, this article claims that community literacy scholars are well poised to support challenges currently facing healthcare providers. To demonstrate this, I offer one example drawing on my work with The ART of Infertility and explain how I repurposed patient art and stories to curate emotional literacy amongst healthcare professionals. I argue that "rhetorical curation" is an innovative method that can support public engagement around stigmatized or underrepresented health experiences. I end with an invitation for community literacy scholars to build upon their expertise and design innovative public projects that contribute to improvements in healthcare.

A Critical Field Scan of Theory and History, Practice and Place. " Our idea for this issue was a simple one. As the title suggests, we hoped to generate a "field scan, " illustrating the ways in which community literacy programs draw upon theory, along with their respective regional geographies, past practices, and collective histories, to create community-engaged writing and literacy centers.

Colleges and universities across the United States are recognizing the public memory function of their campus spaces and facing difficult decisions about how to represent the ugly sides of their histories within their landscapes of remembrance. Official administrative responses to demands for greater inclusiveness are often slow and conservative in nature. Using our own institution and our work with local Indigenous community members as a case study, we argue that students and faculty can employ community-engaged, public-facing, digital composing projects to effectively challenge entrenched institutional interests that may elide or even misrepresent difficult histories in public memory works. Such projects are a nimble and accessible means of creating counter-narratives to intervene in public memory discourses. Additionally, by engaging in public discourses, such work helps promote meaningful student rhetorical learning in courses across disciplines.

This snapshot describes and reflects upon two case studies of community writing projects between Emerson College and Boston Public Schools. Emerson College students were asked to tutor 10th grade BPS students for the English Language Arts portion of the state standardized assessment. Through both quantitative results and qualitative reflection, this paper suggests that approaching such standardized tests as a distinct genre of writing can not only help students to gain awareness for multiple genres, but also to recognize their own writing as an empowered and meaningful political form of social action.

Partnerships between writing across the curriculum (WAC) and civic engagement (CE) programs are not given much attention but these partnerships improve each program significantly. CE programs can borrow models from WAC for professional development and obtain support for specific kinds of writing assignments; WAC programs can find among CE instructors a willing audience for critiquing the structural oppression inherent in literacy and for valuing dialectical, linguistic, and genre diversity. This snapshot focuses on a faculty writing retreat that emerged out of a WAC/ CE partnership and demonstrates how such partnerships can open the door for critical WAC pedagogy.

We proudly present this special issue of Community Literacy Journal on "Building Engaged Infrastructure." Our vision for this collection begins with the inaugural Conference on Community Writing (CCW), which took place at the University of Colorado Boulder in October 2015 1 and attracted 350 scholars, students, activists, and community members representing forty-two states, three countries, 152 colleges and universities, and forty-eight community organizations.This large group was drawn to a vision of higher education that connects with local, national, and international communities by using writing for education, public dialogue, and social change.The overwhelming response to the conference underscored a desire by those working in community writing (a growing subfield within rhetoric and composition that includes genres such as service learning, community-based research, community literacy, community publishing, advocacy and activist writing, and more) to have opportunities to network, share best practices, and receive mentoring.This event brought together academics and community members to explore the relationships between communication, writing, and social action.According to CCW founding chair Veronica House, a conference goal was "to build a national network of people, ideas, resources, and support structures-an engaged infrastructure-to make the work we do in and about our communities more sustainable, impactful, rewarding, and rewarded." 2 In the pages that follow, we turn our attention to the scholarship and practice of community writing that emerged from, or was reflected in, presentations and conversations at CCW.We realize, and want to highlight in this special issue, the obstacles, challenges, and paradoxes of working in community writing.For one, as the astute reader will no doubt notice, definitions of community range widely.The same is true for what counts as writing.An exploration of engagement and infrastructure is no less complex.However, we believe that the inclusion of multiple viewpoints, and the deferral of a precise definition of terms, effectively identifies the fluid boundaries of this thing we call "community writing." Those who attended CCW, or previous events like the 2008 "Imagining Community Literacy" meeting in Philadelphia and the 2011 "Writing Democracy" conference in Commerce, Texas 3 , or who are energized by work that engages the ethics and populations outside of the traditionally defined borders of the university share enthusiasm for engaged work and an optimistic belief that the study and practice of writing can lead to a more just world.We also share concerns about the risks embedded in this work.In April 2016, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) published an official "Position To this end, they hosted a conference of about 150 librarians, public historians, community leaders, and teachers and scholars from our field and beyond at Texas A&M-Commerce in March 2011 and have held pre-conference workshops at the CCCCs every year since.In July 2012, Michelle Hall Kells hosted about 25 leading scholars in community literacy in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the Summit of the National Consortium of Writing Across Communities.Clearly, the desire to establish a collaborative unit of some kind is high.3.

This essay considers the difficulty of seeing systems of oppression—a challenging first step of writing for social change. I argue that service-learning faculty and public writing scholars have relied on outdated ways of thinking about racism and oppression, treating social issues as isolated instances of discrimination. Instead, by drawing from Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, I argue that we need to recognize that mass incarceration has created a new a racial caste system and is the root cause uniting many social problems. Mass incarceration and neoliberalism work together to exclude millions of people from economic and civic life, stain them with moral condemnation so that they remain invisible to the majority, and divert public attention from the flaws in our political and economic structures. I use examples from a local nonprofit to illustrate how this framework offers a new approach to servicelearning and public writing.

This article discusses the successes and vulnerabilities associated with combining the pedagogical methods of Theater, Composition, and Community Literacy in the Composition classroom. It examines how the ideas of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed can be combined to support an innovative approach to Composition teaching, one that additionally employs engaged scholarship and service learning. The essay describes how methods and cycles of story gathering, playwriting, and rhetorical analysis have been used with various community partners, including an adult day care for dementia patients, an HIV/AIDs clinic, and Public Health outreach programs that address Health Disparities. The article explains how the ready audience of community-written plays and the inherent characteristics of theatrical production enable finite and clearly definable communication moments and products—especially in the autobiography-fantasy fused genre I have termed magical memoir—while engaging and empowering the voices of students, teachers, community partners, and audience members alike. All human beings are actors (they act!) and spectators (they observe!) They are spect-actors. … Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, instead of just waiting for it. –Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors

It is not typically the bent of infrastructure to be continually responsive in a way that is expansive and inclusive; instead, for newcomers or those with alternative histories, aims, vision, values, and perspectives, the inertia of infrastructure is more likely to be experienced as infrastructural breakdowns. We ask: What might wisdom look like in these “structured” encounters? That is, what is the intellectual work of rhetoric on those thin ledges where institutional chronos shapes and limits possibilities for knowledge work and working relationships among people who likely would not have otherwise met? In response, we advance a framework for a constructive approach to infrastructure—one that prizes deliberation over rationalization and actively attends to the warrants underlying calls for public engagement. We first consider the relationship between infrastructure, rhetorical wisdom, and the imagination of possibilities, then lay out a framework for cultivating rhetorical wisdom in response to infrastructure breakdowns.

Organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the WPA Federal Writers’ Project, as well as publications like The New Masses can be seen as “literacy sponsors” of the U.S. literary left in the 1930s, particularly the young, the working class, and African American writers. The vibrant, inclusionary, activist, literary culture of that era reflected a surge of revolutionary ideas and activity that seized the imagination of a generation of writers and artists, including rhetoricians like Kenneth Burke. Here I argue that this history has relevance for contemporary community writing projects, which collectively lack the political cohesiveness and power of the national and international movements that sponsored the 1930s literary left but may anticipate another global period of struggle for democracy in which writers and artists can play a significant role.

This is a snapshot of a service learning course founded on narrative medicine, a clinical practice designed to replace impersonal care with empathic listening. By utilizing poetry therapy techniques among nursing home populations, a program called HPU LifeLines promotes a community literacy of illness and provides psychological and physical benefits to elders and students alike through intergenerational relationships sustained by a community writing infrastructure.

At our workshop at the inaugural Conference on Community Writing on the rhetoric of the corporate university, participants noted that the values espoused by community literacy “in the community” are being eroded at the university. Furthermore, they noted the underlying rhetorics of missionary zeal, whiteness, and privatization in community literacy and service learning work. The authors build on these critiques by examining two successive administrations at Syracuse University. The first presented a model of “engaged infrastructure” with progressive rhetoric but oppressive outcomes; the second shed the façade of community partnership for an explicitly corporate and militaristic vision of higher education. Through this comparison, the authors interrogate foundations that community literacy has been built on with the hope of opening new possibilities.

Young people have the potential to transform public perspectives about pressing social issues—if their audiences listen deeply to what they have to say. This article examines the ways that high school student participants in a community-university writing partnership employ self-disclosure, or emotion sharing, to encourage audiences to listen empathically to performances about complex social issues. Our analysis of two student performance pieces reveals rhetorical strategies that might promote empathic listening. We argue that empathic listening is a necessary precondition for the kind of collective community listening that can lead to social change.

This provocation reflects on Sound Off, a community writing project with listening as its central activity and storytelling as a key component. Understanding Sound Off as an experimental site for community listening, I highlight the need for listening in localized contexts, while exploring how we might design community writing projects as listening spaces. Perhaps most provocatively, I identify challenges that teachers, scholars, and activists need to address for community writing to become fully multimodal and reflect reciprocity among participants.

When community literacy partners work to gether with academic organizers, both groups recognize the uncertainties of risk, the importance of trust, and the necessity of clear communication in accomplishing their goals.Likewise, professors who use service learning must help their students negotiate experiences that are often unpredictable or uncomfortable.In both scenarios, conversations that spark reflection, untangle problems, and guide action are vital.These objectives, and their reliance on open, guided conversation, are central to a new offering by mother-daughter team Nel Noddings and Laurie Brooks: Teaching Controversial Issues: The Case for Critical Thinking and Moral Commitment in the Classroom.In this book, Noddings, an emerita Professor of Education at Stanford and prominent contributor to feminist care theory, and Brooks, a member of the board of Provident Financial Services and advisory boards for North Carolina State and Rutgers universities, point out that teachers today must help students cultivate critical awareness while navigating a minefield of highly controversial issues such as authority and obedience, religion, race, gender, and socioeconomic class.While Noddings and Brooks intend to target K-12 teachers, administrators, and parents, many community literacy scholars and practitioners will appreciate the ideas the authors suggest that enable their readers to more thoughtfully create room for co-inquiry, conversation, and examining resources across different disciplines and perspectives.Noddings and Brooks' core purpose with this text lies in their dedication to helping students "prepare for active life in a participatory democracy" (2).To achieve this, they insist that adults not shy away from joining forces with students to examine complex and challenging questions.The authors advocate for critical thinking bolstered and emboldened by moral commitment, which, in their words, is "to bring people together-to help them understand each other in the fullness of their humanity" (159).Noddings and Brooks approach this task from an interdisciplinary lens, one that enables them to reach across and through traditional divisions among disciplines, genres, and media.This text provides specific suggestions for educators

s someone who regularly encourages students in my technical writing and first-year composition courses to participate in public writing projects, I have often turned to scholarship based in service learning-often not writing-course specific-to look for pedagogical direction and even evidence that these approaches to teaching are meaningful for students.Fortunately, as more and more rhetoric and composition specialists teach public-oriented writing courses, the emergence of related discipline-specific scholarship, conference presentations, and workshops provides necessary assistance for compositionists whose teaching and work conflate the borders between the

espite my best efforts, I frequently found myself in the position that I feared most: sitting and being present with the family . . . In my other volunteer experiences, that isn't usually a requirement . . . I think that "doing" makes my encounters with injustice bearable for me. "Being" is hard, but maybe the act of being present with this family and allowing myself to be seen by them was a gift. It was a gift for me and it is something that will be with me for the rest of my life. -Student participant in Grassi and Armon, Chapter 16.

Drawing on interviews with writing teachers, this article highlights some of the affective responses that may arise for students, community partners, and teachers when we situate our pedagogies in public sites beyond the classroom. I analyze a teacher-narrated moment of student distress to demonstrate how theories of transformative learning might help us productively theorize affect in service-learning and community-based education. To conclude, I offer a reciprocal model of care that employs tenets of feminist pedagogy, such as transparency and decentering of authority, and that acknowledges the valid emotions students, teachers, and community members may experience. I call for community literacy practitioners to see the power of all participants to both give and receive care in transformative education.

In fields such as sociolinguistics and composition and rhetoric, communication is increasingly understood as translingual, that is, as negotiated socially across languages. Those of us engaged in community literacy can and should recognize the deeply multilingual nature of the communities in which we work, and we should understand, embrace, and forward the translingual approach. Here I reflect on my first conscious attempt to teach translingually in a college course with a community-based learning component. I present an overview of the translingual orientation, reflect on the decisions I made as I prepared a college community-based learning course with translingual intentions but not overt translingual objectives, and examine some the students’ reflections that reveal their language attitudes at the end of the course. I argue that small, intentional decisions made towards a broader translingual orientation towards language and literacy make an immediate difference in how students think about language, and that those engaged in community literacy partnerships are in need of a theory of communication that the translingual approach can provide.

Service learning has become a feature in higher education in courses ranging from computer science and graphic design to English and the humanities. These courses are designed to provide "internship" experience and enable students to use skills they learned in the classroom in "real world settings. " These "real world settings, " however, exist in some rather well-defined economic, social, and political system. Tania Mitchell suggests that traditional approaches to service learning either assume that such projects are already inherently related to social justice or are simply concerned with other issues such as the teaching of some rather acontextual "workplace skills. " There exists, however, a growing recognition that service learning could enable students to recognize and more deeply understand the social and economic structures they are asked to work within. The aims of this "critical service-learning" approach include the redistribution of power in the service-learning relationship, the development of authentic relationships between the university and community, and an unapologetic movement toward the goal of social change. At my university there is an interest in providing service learning in more traditional workplace settings, but there are also faculty members who are attempting to use these projects to help students understand the contexts in which they live and work. This keywords essay details some recent scholarship in literacy and critical service learning. It is by no means a complete picture of the efforts in this area but, rather, presents some interesting service-learning projects that might be duplicated at other institutions. All the projects provide opportunities for students to gain an understanding of the economic, social, political, and, in one case, environmental contexts in which they live. Writing plays a primary role in facilitating such understanding. Lisa Rabin's article "The Culmore Bilingual ESL and Popular Education Project: Coming to Consciousness on Labor, Literacy, and Community, " details a servicelearning project featured in a Spanish class at George Mason University. The project offered an alternative to more "market-based" service learning. In 2009, Rabin had been contacted by labor organizers from the Tenants and Workers United (TWU) in Culmore, Virginia to possibly have some of her bilingual students offer an ESL course for day laborers who were also new immigrants

A case study of a graduate-level community literacy seminar that involved a tutoring project with adult digital literacy learners, this essay illustrates the value of community outreach and service-learning for graduate students in writing studies. Presenting multiple perspectives through critical reflection, student authors describe how their experiences contextualized, enhanced, and complicated their theoretical knowledge of public rhetoric and community literacy. Inspired by her students’ reflections, the faculty co-author issues a call to graduate programs in writing, rhetoric, literacy studies, and technical communication to develop a conscious commitment to graduate students’ civic engagement by supporting opportunities to learn, teach, and research with community partners.

With neither national nor local-level discussions of Senate Bill 1070 adequately addressing bottom line issues such as marginalization, access, and civic engagement, an exploration of marginalized rhetorical acts can provide an informative lens for understanding challenges among marginalized people, their rhetorical tools, and their relations to public spheres. Through an exploration of anti-Senate Bill 1070 graffiti, this article examines how the practice of graffiti points to difference manifesting and playing out in the wider public sphere. It calls for scholars and activists to recognize graffiti as a rhetorical tool worthy of study and cross-cultural discourse.

As a WPA and a service-learning director and practitioner, the author suggests connections between food studies, rhetoric and composition studies, and critical service-learning theory that involve mobilizing students to join in or help lead community efforts surrounding the local, organic food movement, food justice, and food literacy. The study is framed by questions of how composition instructors can create courses around issues related to the global food crisis to embed students in community-centered food literacy initiatives, and, more generally, how practitioners and WPAs can effectively promote and explain community-engaged pedagogies to higher-level administrators who question the value of the practice.

Educators focused on community literacy and public engagement have access to a unique critical platform from which larger social issues that impact us both as a whole and on very personal levels are open to exploration. Being particularly situated to have significant impact on community, literacy work in this area may require uncommon pedagogical strategies. Based on its comprehensive focus on sustainability, ecological literacy, sociopolitical factors that affect communities, and a multitude of other factors that underpin social injustice, ecopedagogy may be uniquely positioned to offer a more holistic view than other composition pedagogies such as place-based education and ecocomposition.

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement spotlights her experiences with Pittsburgh's Community Literacy Center (CLC), an innovative project in community literacy initiated in 1990. The 2008 book details a rhetorical model of engaging the privileged and marginalized voices of community leaders, academics and urban teens into meaningful dialogue that values all perspectives and embraces differences as valuable resources. According to Flower, the discourse of academic cultural critique has taught "us how to speak up [and] speak against" (2 original emphasis). However, what we lack and what this text provides is a model that teaches us "to speak with others [and] to speak for our commitments [] for a revisable image of transformation" (2 original emphasis).

This article offers an extended treatment of two social justice efforts in a rural university town as historical examples of civic engagement with contemporary implications for Writing Democracy and similar projects. The article begins with an analysis of local activism initiated by John Carlos in 1967 while he was still a student at our university and the year before his heroic, silent protest against racism with Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. The author then turns to a linked effort five years later by local activist MacArthur Evans, a university student from Chicago. In 1973, Evans and other university students established the Norris Community Club (NCC) in partnership with residents of Norris, the historically segregated neighborhood, to provide what they called “a clear channel of communication” between Norris and city officials. Both were successful, albeit it in very different ways. The author uses “a clear channel” as both the object of study and interpretive lens to examine these local efforts and their many implications for today.

This essay presents perspectives on the range of potential reciprocity in literacy research and service learning, focusing attention on opportunities for individualized and institutional reciprocation, as observed by Takayoshi and Powell. Researchers and students involved in community-based research or service programs have several opportunities to give back to their research participants and service organizations. The more they are aware of these opportunities or can make these entities aware of these benefits and act upon them, the more productive such research and service can be to the field of literacy studies as well as to those who participate.

Prompted by Cushman’s and Grabill’s call to “ask and answer the difficult questions” about service learning (Reflections 2009), this article addresses the difficult question of “what happens when service learning goes wrong.” Authors engaged in family history writing and service learning with a local historical group. When the project was unable to be sustained, authors theorized a three-part methodological continuum of expectation, reality, and rectification to articulate the merits of failed attempts at service learning.

In Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum, Eli Goldblatt shares his experiences with community-based learning and encourages readers to "pay attention to the problems of the people among who we live" (6). The unique, self-

Why, if service learning has “come a long way,” has it not had the impact on the university or on the community that proponents expected? This article details interviews with eight teachers at Virginia Tech who use service learning in their classrooms, with particular attention to the convergence of literacies that occurs when teachers, communities, and students all attempt to work together. While these eight teachers seemed to have a good grasp of the expectations faculty and communities bring to this three-way relationship, they seemed unable to define the expectations students bring to the experience. This mirrors the current scholarship on service learning, which highlights faculty and communities but downplays the role of students. As we continue to work toward sustainable, reflective community partnerships, literacy studies like Barton and Hamilton’s Local Literacies can help us further examine the expectations students bring to service learning projects.

This qualitative research article explores how youth create multimodal rhetoric during a service-learning course at a local youth media organization. The study takes a detailed look at how a group of teens wanted to gain access to the Discourse of the documentary making process but struggled with the confines of conventions of film as were represented by the professional documentary maker who was their instructor. The research combines sociocultural and cognitive research traditions while investigating the teens’ and instructor’s relationship and interactions concerning the production of rhetoric.

Abstract  Hidalgo County, Texas, is one of the poorest in the country. The population in the Lower Rio Grande Valley is 85% Mexican-American. Underprepared for college and juggling full time jobs, their own children, and sometimes dysfunctional extended families, students often do not expect to succeed. I recently taught a Creative Writing course which applied writing projects to social problems. This paper looks at the work of the course, the pedagogy applied, student and teacher reflections, and lessons learned through the lens of class, oppression, and power and argues that these elements ought always be a component of service learning education.

This essay explores the intersection between writing studies and civic engagement through the action projects developed in E465: Prison Literature and Writing. Such literacy activism creates immediate opportunities for advanced undergraduates to more fully understand the work of literacy in contested spaces like jail and extends a call to action for writing teachers to acknowledge the possibility of community-based writing collaborations.

This essay describes service learning as a space for civic dialogue. In the project-oriented course discussed below—an oral history of a south-side African American neighborhood in Chicago—civic dialogue took shape when middle class students from a range of backgrounds at the Illinois Institute of Technology interviewed residents of different generations and experiences, transcribed, contextualized, and published these interviews in print and online, and reflected on the process. As a tethering of “community” across the material and discursive boundaries that typically divide us, the project performed a political critique not through issue-oriented advocacy but through a rhetorical activism more locally attuned to the absence of critical exchange, empathy, and understanding in public life.

This case-study examines the ways citizens took up, and in some ways resisted, city planners’ assumptions about their lived experience of “Portstown.” While it is necessary to acknowledge the coercive properties of institutional documents and genre-systems, community-literacy workers must not efface the epistemic potential of everyday compositions, for this quality creates opportunities for strategic interventions in the solicitation and reception of civic writing.