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

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.