This article offers a retrospective case study of a service learning project in a technical writing class. For this project, students were asked to develop a communication tool with information about consent rates in organ donation to use in an academic medical center. In contrast to the service learning literature, which notes that students often resist the professionalizing move that service learning offers, this study shows that students in this project actually overprofessionalized, constituting themselves as one more party vying for control over the communication of organ donation. This embrace of professionalism via service learning raises as many issues as the resistance to professionalism that is more commonly documented.

Many technical writing programs across the country have their students go out into the community and do writing projects for local businesses, campus organizations, government agencies, or nonprofit organizations. Few, however, take advantage of the increasingly popular pedagogy known as service learning. This article describes how to set up such service-learning courses and how to anticipate certain types of problems. Also discussed are some of the many benefits, both pedagogical and civic/humanitarian, that this truly real-world approach brings to the teaching of technical writing and, potentially, to the teaching of other forms of professional writing.