Review of Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy by April Baker-Bell.

This piece explores a recent change in pedagogy for a professional communication program at a U.S. university. The Covid-19 pandemic prompted a reevaluation of the program’s service-learning curricula. Students’ pre-pandemic challenges are described and compared to their exacerbated struggles post-Covid, especially the impact of misinformation and artificial intelligence upon critical thinking skills. Service- learning clients’ struggles too are analyzed. Intersecting service-learning pedagogy with thought from public pedagogy scholarship can address these challenges by enhancing reciprocity in service-learning relationships. A nuanced understanding of reciprocity in service-learning roles can address power dynamics and break free from restrictive academic conventions, fostering a more equitable learning environment. The piece includes an example of how a revised service-learning curriculum in grant writing affected students’ critical thinking skills and enabled client partners to advocate for their organizations’ constituents.

Drawing from my experiences as a Haitian Church of God (HCG) member, this article explores multilingual linguistic acquisition practices that support literacy development among church members (of multiple generations) of the Haitian diaspora. I examine how languaging and translanguaging shape identity, expression, and resistance across generations in the HCG. By sharing five moments of multilingual linguistic acquisition, I show how academic pedagogical theories inherently unfold in HCG settings, revealing the church as a preexisting informal literacy space. This work recognizes HCGs as sites of linguistic resistance, where heritage languages are preserved, adapted, and passed down.

To advance our understanding of how community engagement is actualized in writing classes, I use qualitative content analysis to analyze how community partners and community partnerships are described on all 26 English syllabi posted on Campus Compact’s syllabus library. The findings reveal a wide range of terms that English instructors use to describe community work in their courses, a diverse array of the types of projects that are taught, and the types of community organizations that instructors partner with, as well as a noticeable disconnect between students’ community projects and the course’s learning objectives and assigned readings. This exploratory survey of syllabi in the field of community writing offers an opportunity for instructors to notice trends in their own syllabi, and this article offers recommendations for how instructors can redevelop their syllabi to center community perspectives and community work on this important contractual document.

In this reflective piece, poet and Writing Studies scholar Saurabh Anand honors the legacy of Peter Elbow's student-centered pedagogy. Through a villanelle poem, Anand explores Elbow's enduring impact on his development as a teacher and scholar. Written in the wake of Elbow's passing, this poetic tribute from an Anglophone writer and writing center personnel working in the US highlights the enduring impact of Elbow's work on inclusive, writer-centered classrooms globally. The piece invites writing educators to reflect on how Elbow's legacy shapes their teaching practices today.

This article introduces and explores a cultural rhetorics project created by Clara Lechowski, a then-senior English Education major, with guidance from Alexander Slotkin, an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition. Clara’s honors project—a zine-style cookbook—blends storytelling, family history, and culinary tradition, code-meshing Polish and English to reflect the author’s Polish American identity. We situate Clara’s work within the pedagogical framework of the course in which it originated and present her zine as a model for culturally responsive writing practices. Her zine not only showcases recipes from her community but also serves as a rhetorical space where cultural identity, memory, and writing intersect. By sharing this work, we invite educators and students to see writing as a means of honoring and engaging with their own home communities.

VOICES is a digital, student-led publication at Morehouse College that showcases the rhetorical choices African American men in an HBCU setting make in communicating issues of importance to them. I believe that activism, like leadership, begins at home. For these Morehouse College students, activism and leadership begin at “The House,” inside the Composition Classroom, where these young men engage in the writing process—from brainstorming to outlining, to drafting, to peer review and revision, and ultimately to publishing their work. From their choice of photos to the essays, short stories, poetry, and sketches they chose to include in this publication, VOICES shows how writing communities foster confidence, nurture scholarship, and provide a positive space for Black male voices, which is where Black activism ultimately begins.

Students are often clamoring for assignments that connect to real-life situations. This paper will highlight various projects assigned in my classes, including the midterm and minor writing submissions, which cover both modern and historical cases, student responses, and student feedback regarding the assignments, along with how and why I continue to incorporate the importance of resistance in my first- year writing courses as well as the role that exploring social justice continues to play in my pedagogy.

This article interrogates the political contexts leading up to the University of Arizona’s designation as a land grant and Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). As a white settler teacher, I reflect on how researching this history helped me confront how increasing access to the university was met by exclusionary gatekeeping mechanisms that function more generally in higher education. While historicizing this tension between access and exclusion at the University of Arizona, I recognized how racist and classist gatekeeping mechanisms emerged in the nineteenth century in ways that are continually recycled in the composition classroom. This case study provides an example of the sort of local historical research that encourages educators to unearth the colonial and racist infrastructure of FYW born from nineteenth-century educational policies and engage with the collective responses of BIPOC student activists from the civil rights movement. In this way, composition instructors can interrogate their universities’ institutional history to reimagine the role they might play in creating a more socially and linguistically just future.

In this article, I chart my efforts in teaching a first-year writing class centered around mutual aid at a predominantly white institution. After contextualizing mutual aid and explaining my local institutional context, I describe the course I taught, “Rhetorics and Literacies of Mutual Aid.” In particular, I detail the Mini Solidarity Campaign, one major assignment that asks students to work collaboratively as an entire class to engage a campus issue in their lives. After doing so, I conclude by reflecting on the limits and challenges of doing mutual aid work in mainstream educational settings.

In our changing educational environment, understanding the way students experience community-engaged writing pedagogy has become more important than ever. Following a semester-long qualitative study examining the reflective writing of students and conducting interviews with those students about their experiences, three students were invited to elaborate on their experiences with a critical community-engaged writing and oral communication course. This article will detail the course, discuss the role of emotion in community-engaged writing pedagogy, and share the experiences of these three students. Each student will discuss their experience with critical community-engaged writing, focusing on the impact, both positive and negative, of working in a group community-engaged writing and oral communication project and on the impact, both positive and negative, of previous life experiences and worldviews on community-engagement.

For Reflections readers, the lines between “teaching,” “research,” and “service” have always been fluid. The community-engaged work that some consider “service” is central to the research identity and trajectory of many Reflections readers. In the same way, Reflections readers also understand that  “teaching,” and pedagogy more broadly, takes place in many areas beyond a single classroom.

Although we had not shared ideas before the 2021 ATTW conference, we noticed during our panel that we had considerable overlaps in our pedagogical approaches and goals for encouraging students’ social justice advocacy. This reflection discusses those overlaps while acknowledging how our different positionalities affect our approaches. One takeaway of this article is deliverables from our presentations, including citation lists and illustrations that might help other educators. The other takeaway is seven of our overlapping pedagogical approaches (three that affect course structure and four that concern day-to-day interactions) that we hope will provide other TPC educators with ideas on how to adapt to students’ positionalities while fostering students’ ability to see themselves as social justice advocates.

This article reports on the three sessions of the 2021 ATTW Virtual Conference including the Keynote Address and connects them to three other sessions through the lens of social justice to navigate the intersections of language, access, material ecologies, and social infrastructures. Echoing the conference theme, I suggest that those sessions attend to material complexities and local conditions and help us recognize culturally and locally responsive approaches to discursive activities in research and pedagogy in the field of TPC and that this work helps technical communicators and educators sustain and advance disciplinary identities of which social justice scholarship is a central part. By using my reflections on the observed ATTW sessions, I conclude that we can adopt what I term ethical pragmatism as an actionable takeaway, which refers to practical approaches grounded in each community’s history, culture, and sociomaterial conditions.

In this collaboratively composed article, we both theorize and dramatize the act of paying attention to scalar dynamics. In particular, we draw on the concept of transacting scales in order to complicate how “ethics” materialize in technical and professional communication (TPC). Because ethics materialize in relation to particular contexts and events, in the second half of this article, we show affordances of our approach for TPC through case studies animated by personal stories. We hope this will encourage readers to stay attuned to the particularities of embodied experiences as we theorize with unwieldy complex systems. Our cases speak to international student enrollment, matriculation, and retention in TPC programs and also general education TPC pedagogy.

In this article, we describe how technical communication students explored user advocacy and coalitional action by creating trauma-informed, intimate partner violence (IPV) awareness campaigns for our campus. The nature of this project required us to develop a trauma-informed approach to teaching at the undergraduate level. To create a supportive community of practice for instructors and students, we used a lesson study methodology in which a team of teacher-researchers collaboratively designed, observed, analyzed, and revised a sequence of lessons. We provide the larger context for our lesson study project, the lesson study structure including preparatory material for students, trauma-informed teaching strategies, and reflections on the lesson. To effect meaningful change and learning, we needed to have difficult conversations with students; this required us to acknowledge the presence of trauma in the classroom and then work to support the students who have experienced trauma. Finally, we offer a reflective critique of our experience as a heuristic for instructors to use as they implement and reflect on trauma-informed pedagogy in their own classes. Content Notice: The content of this article references rape and refers to violence against women in a way that relates to, but does not directly reference, transgender and non-binary individuals. We acknowledge, respect, and honor the many varied ways in which individuals respond to traumatic content. If you would like to speak with someone for support, please consider using the RAINN National Sexual Assault Crisis Hotline by calling their anonymous toll-free hotline (1-800-656-HOPE (4673)) or using the confidential online chat: https://hotline.rainn.org/online

This article presents a trauma-informed integrative reflection framework to make a case for prioritizing reflection during learning disruptions, especially in community-engaged learning environments. I begin by describing a community-based service-learning course “TESOL: Theory & Practice” which includes a community-engaged learning partnership between a university English department and the Adult Basic Education division at a local community college. Then, I articulate two aspects of the TESOL course developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: first, a framework for integrative reflection that supports adaptation and student learning throughout the semester, and second, the structures of trauma-informed reflective practice that I integrated throughout the course design. Finally, I highlight three takeaways of embracing disruption: adapting partnerships, disrupting routines, and keeping reflection at the center. Together, these themes point not only to the need for trauma-informed reflective pedagogy, but also the need to keep complicating how we live out this approach to teaching.

This article details a flood-focused, community-based writing course that was derailed by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis to argue that despite major challenges, the course helped to prepare students to face some of the fear and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, offered them a space through weekly reflection responses to process their isolation, and positioned them to more capaciously empathize with community members who had lived through the trauma of persistent, catastrophic flooding. The stunted community-based learning course still allowed students to contribute to the work of the community partner and offered unexpected chances for students to process their own trauma. By the end of the semester, students emphasized the importance of community-based learning for cultivating the kinds of empathy and critical civic responsibility they felt would become necessities in a COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 world. We detail some of the important lessons of adapting the course to the COVID-19 crisis and suggest pathways for other faculty and community partners to build flexible, long-term collaborations that can not only ride out traumatic interruptions but actually provide students with the equipment they need to navigate these challenges.

The COVID-19 outbreak impacted regional Australia in ways yet to be measured; for many of the country’s regions, the pandemic immediately followed natural disasters including droughts and bushfires. In such affected regional communities, activities such as writing offer opportunities for pleasure, engagement, and connectedness. Yet the restrictions developed in response to COVID-19, such as the need to move traditionally face-to-face learning online, significantly disrupted the usual way of undertaking these activities. For the New England Writers Centre (NEWC), a productive community writing organisation operating in the North Western part of the state of New South Wales in Australia. These restrictions required both quick responses and more long-term consideration of the ways writing instruction is delivered to the community it serves. This profile provides an example of a community-based writing project, an online course in writing historical fiction, developed in response to COVID-19 restrictions. The profile offers three distinct perspectives on the course: Chair of the New England Writers Centre, Sophie Masson, gives an overview of the Centre’s role in the region, the effect of the pivot to online teaching on the centre’s programming, and the initial learnings that impact the centre; online workshop facilitator Ariella Van Luyn provides an overview of the pedagogical design principles and learning objectives underpinning the design of the course and her observations of participant engagement; and NEWC program director and workshop participant Lynette Aspey reflects on her experiences learning online. Together, these three perspectives offer initial findings about online community writing instruction useful to other regional writing organisations.

Since its inception in 2000, Reflections has functioned as a site of synthesis for community-based writing pedagogy, service-learning, public rhetoric, and community-engaged research. Such a diverse range of influences leads to the formation of a journal that is ever shifting in its identity, scope, and mission. This complexity is what ultimately defines Reflections: a publication that constantly pushes the boundaries of knowledge creation and strives to remain receptive to topics and voices that are often excluded from other academic sources. The following collaborative article offers a content analysis of all publications in Reflections’ twenty-year history (2000-2020). Though not exhaustive, this analysis highlights unique aspects of the journal’s history, methods, non-traditional genres, pedagogical and disciplinary impact, and evolving interactions with power and privilege that have made it the public conscience for Writing Studies.

This article is an experimental collaboration that blends qualitative data, archival research, and rhetorical theory with autoethnographic writing. Utilizing Jenny Edbauer’s (2005) conceptualization of rhetorical ecologies, we engage strategic contemplation and critical imagination (Royster and Kirsch 2012) to explore Reflections’ past, present, and future rhetorical landscapes. We designed, distributed, coded, and analyzed a fifteen-item questionnaire to discover the journal’s readership demographics, its archival contents, and its reverberating effects/affects on issues of public rhetoric, civic writing, service learning, and community literacy. We identified four themes—inclusivity, advocacy, pedagogy, and discovery—as the most salient features of Reflections’ twenty-year legacy. Amplifying our participants’ voices, we discuss the ways in which these four themes work to cultivate an affirming space of theoretical inquiry and ethical intervention—a networked community of mutual reciprocity that continues to transform the field of rhetorical studies today. Altogether, this article offers unique insight into Reflections’ rhetorical ecology, including its professional legacy and the ways in which the journal has innovated the genre of writing scholarship.

Reflections offers a plethora of stories, strategies, and applicable content for community-based writing projects as well as considerations for our pedagogy within institutional walls. In this piece, I, a first-time contributor, reflect on a few of my own endeavors in community-engaged work over the last decade alongside a reading of this journal and its continued impact on my pedagogy and research. Specifically, I discuss the value of community engagement efforts for graduate students developing as teachers and scholars in the discipline. Through this writing, I contribute to and build upon the ongoing knowledge-making practices at the heart of this journal.

During the Summer 2019 semester, Writing & Rhetoric students at Florida International University, a public Hispanic-Serving Institution in Miami, Florida, engaged with Muted Group Theory to both understand and challenge the silencing of immigrant voices. Specifically, the FIU students, the majority of whom identified as Hispanic, created video messages for a local third grade class predominantly made up of immigrant students. The videos spotlight the students’ personal experiences with immigration, incorporate multiple languages, and explore themes such as cultural diversity and welcoming immigrant students into the classroom. Following the creation of the videos, the college students participated in a video chat with the third graders. This article offers an overview of the video project, student reflections, and guidelines for future pedagogical implementation. In addition, I reflect on the importance of pedagogical flexibility in the classroom and the ways in which multilingualism can expand our understanding of multimodality.

Higher education research has demonstrated the positive effects of service-learning on students, with particular attention to the increased attaintment of institutional outcomes such as retention and graduation. However, traditional assessment models, focused on measuring outcomes, offer few strategies for developing a holistic understanding of service learning environments. In response, this article outlines the process of heuristic tracing, a generative assessment strategy, which can be used to make visible the experiences that can not only support students’ learning gains but also value the engagement of all service learning participants—including instructors and community partners. Heuristic tracing can help stakeholders better understand the habits, attitudes, and experiences of learning that are central to service learning pedagogy.

Over the last roughly twenty years, or between 2000 and 2019, scholarship on community writing has built upon a focus on service-learning composition courses to include the roles of writing and rhetoric in community engagement more generally, including necessary inquiry into the ethics of community engagement altogether. In this time, the longer-term effects of service-learning writing courses, specifically on college students, have gone unexamined. This study looks at three former students who took service-learning composition courses at the University of Connecticut to determine what, if any, long-term effects the experience had on them. The three former service-learners differ in how they recall their experiences, but they overlap in key places, such as their awareness of rhetoric as social, their commitment to effecting community change, and their belief that the service-learning experience affected them in subtle ways that nonetheless influenced their approaches to community action. This three-participant study, part of a larger project based on retrospective interviews with students formerly enrolled in service-learning courses, shows that such courses may not create dramatic change in students’ rhetorical awareness or approach to community action, but the subtle changes they can promise informed the subjects in my study in unexpected ways over time.

This profile examines “Writing for Advocacy,” a pair of Spring 2018 courses designed around community engagement and project-based learning. Supported by a grant from Conexión Américas and the Tennessee Educational Equity Coalition (TEEC), Christian Brothers University (CBU), a regional leader for educating undocumented students, provided a fertile space for a course that leveraged student voices to lobby the Tennessee General Assembly for in-state tuition for undocumented students at Tennessee public universities. Responding to the political moment of uncertainty surrounding DACA and immigration policy, we designed a course focused on meaningful projects designed for public dissemination and presentation, and our group-based learning approach allowed us to meet both institutional learning outcomes for effective writing and research, as well as softer outcomes for socializing and professionalizing first-generation and DACA students. This course offers a model for other community-engaged writing courses to support student efficacy and student persistence.

Community writing partnerships between university and incarcerated students typically focus on developing critical reading and writing skills through shared assignments, peer review exchanges, and group discussion. This article examines a prison-university writing partnership between two semester-long yoga classes, one at a maximum-security women’s prison and one at a competitive university, that privileges building community over building academic skills. The yoga students shared reflective writing on yoga-related topics—from philosophy, to tips and modifications for poses, to personal experience—in a monthly newsletter called “The Om Exchange.” The sound of “om” in yoga symbolizes the universal “oneness” of all living beings. The purpose of the newsletter was two-fold: to support reflective writing for deeper engagement with class material and to connect with the larger yoga community beyond classroom walls. While the yoga students only met in person once, the newsletter enabled them to build a sangha, or a local community with shared values that offers members motivation, guidance, support, and accountability in practicing those values. I suggest that the intersections between contemplative practice and feminist rhetorical listening facilitated these students, who may appear distinct, in finding “oneness” with each other; with its focus on building community, this writing project affords visibility to the power of forming partnerships around explicit shared values through the lens of sangha, and offers transferable methods for more conventional community literacy projects. A contemplative approach fosters social and emotional learning, including civic and democratic values, that bridges institutions, cultures, and differences for a more equitable society. As one incarcerated yoga student reflected: “If what we do for the good inside these walls doesn’t reach beyond these walls, then what’s the point—[this partnership] is the point and a start.” Read more at https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/19Sp_KINE_1410-1_Yoga/.

Applying the framework of coalitional rhetoric, this paper seeks to consider the rhetoric of prison literacy work and its implications for university-community relationships. Through an examination of four academic publications— three peer-reviewed articles and one published conference paper—that advocate or reflect the possibility of coalition-building between prison education programs and prison abolition. The selected texts represent how scholars of prison literacy and public rhetoric bridge abolition and prison education ideals by (1) mobilizing other scholars to join the prison abolition movement as well as (2) making a case for how prison education programs can contribute to the prison abolition movement. This essay explores how activist prison education scholars employ and adapt coalitional rhetoric within their scholarship, such as publishing incarcerated students’ writing to challenge dominant narratives, encouraging students to critique the PIC through critical pedagogy, helping other prison educators recognize the ways in which we are complicit, and much more. Considering the role of coalitional rhetoric in our work suggests the continuation of such coalition-building in directing prison education work to create social change beyond the university.

This essay presents the trajectory of a syllabus statement on linguistic and cultural pluralism and its role in the articulation and revision of a pedagogical approach that foregrounds students’ linguistic diversity and partnerships with local communities. In recounting the steps and stakeholders involved in crafting the statement, the author argues that this statement functions as an activist text. The author also contends that the field of composition studies should take on an activist agenda when it comes to language rights. Composition studies needs to go beyond merely accepting language pluralism to actively engaging and dismantling oppressive discourses and normative practices. By establishing explicit values and ideologies, the linguistic and cultural pluralism statement has the potential to promote and foster a culture of cross-cultural and global perspectives in the classroom through students’ ties to local communities.

This paper traces strategies and successes—for both students and community partners—in the implementation of service learning within my English 353: Chicana/oLatina/o Literature classes at California State University Channel Islands. In order to bridge university culture and the farmworker communities that work and live alongside the university, in consultation with community partners, we created bilingual reading circles where students went in to read and discuss works of Chicana/o literature with residents in low-income farmworker housing. Using a critical framework of Freirian pedagogical practice in the classroom and in the community, I explore how first-generation Latina/o students’ participation in service-learning enabled them to counter a cultural deficit model of thinking about farmworkers. In the process, students learned how to value their own rich cultural wealth and the familial assets they bring to the university and society as a whole.

Grounded in the authors’ dissatisfaction with academic leadership after the 2016 presidential election, this article complicates the idea of the WPA-as-manager by introducing the framework of feminist, transformational, and intersectional writing program leadership. As writing program administrators, the authors identify the problems with calls for civility and neutrality post-election, particularly as these calls came down to the many nontenure-track faculty and graduate students teaching first-year writing. The authors introduce two methods of moving beyond writing program management to include greater attention to community engagement and leadership post-Trump: through revising curricula and course materials and by diversifying professional development opportunities. WPAs may find themselves in a rare moment where the pedagogical approaches for which we have long advocated—attention to marginalized voices, representation of complex arguments grounded in material realities, validation of the rhetorical import of nonacademic texts—are immediately practicable as a condition of civic engagement. Curricula and course materials may convey these commitments beyond the classroom. Further, the authors address the need for greater attention to professional development for faculty, particularly focusing on addressing the needs of vulnerable populations. They discuss two professional development resources beyond individual campus resources: the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) and the University of Michigan’s Program on Intergroup Relations (IGR). By grounding this renovated image of the writing program administrator as a writing program leader, situated theoretically in leadership studies, the authors extend the work of scholars who see the WPA as a site of radical advocacy.

Review of Class in the Composition Classroom: Pedagogy and the Working Class by editors Genesea M. Carter and William H. Thelin.

This paper presents some of the difficulties and challenges that a writing instructor faced when integrating themes of race, gender, and sexuality into her pedagogy, as well as strategies that she developed to address those challenges. The author discusses the merits of building a pedagogy from what Alcoff (2000) refers to as “social location,” despite evidence that women in academia are already subject to gender bias in the classroom. Finally, the author presents a feminist writing pedagogy developed from her research on YouTube’s beauty community, a diverse community that includes many women of color entrepreneurs, in which she asks students to use their experiences, rhetorical knowledges, and feminist theories to question the nexus of professionalism and identity. A sample assignment is included.

This essay focuses on the pedagogical implications of teaching Atatürk’s “Address to the Youth” for a more inclusive and diverse understanding of global rhetorics in the U.S. writing classroom. We propose that the public work of rhetorical instruction includes helping students develop as global citizen leaders by allowing them to explore and critically become aware of various national cultures and rhetorical traditions across the world. Integrating non-Western public rhetorics into the U.S. writing classroom challenges students in this context to write outside of the classical conventions of rhetoric and affords students to mobilize a new discourse for civic action.

Co-authored by a professor and two undergraduates and drawing on interviews with community partners, this essay analyzes a community writing project to document the Civil Rights Movement in a northern city. In collaboration with a local African American history museum, students interviewed 22 African Americans ranging in age from 62-90 years old who lived in Reading, Pennsylvania during the 1960s and 1970s Civil Rights Movement. Beyond the 22 oral histories recorded, transcribed, and housed at the museum, students, community members, and the professor researched, wrote, preserved, and shared a history of the Civil Rights Movement as experienced by African American members of the local community. Aligned with the “political turn” in community-writing partnerships advocated by Shannon Carter and Deborah Mutnick (7), the coauthors argue that collaboratively producing and studying local civil rights history is a form of anti-racist writing pedagogy. The rhetorical, historical project under study illuminates the rhetorical and powerful nature of current narratives of race and racism. As we and all our collaborators documented Civil Rights era history together, we began to circulate layers of counternarratives that both expose and challenge racial realities in productive ways.

This study examines the intersection of the “bootstraps” American Dream1 and the América envisioned by four first-generation U.S. Latinx sixth graders in an urban English Language Learners class. The students participated in a joint Photovoice writing and photography project about the American Dream with students from a liberal arts college and articulated the importance of the journey toward their dreams. Sharing their narratives and photographs in public forums, the students challenged the individualist American Dream discourse, underscoring a collective approach instead. The outcomes foreground previously-silenced voices and provide an example of culturally relevant pedagogy within a structured literacy curriculum.

Four examples of Iraq veterans’ self-sponsored writing and media compositions are reviewed in order to develop a rhetoric of “witnessing” (Oliver, “Witnessing and Testimony” 80) with which to engage veterans’ writing. Particular attention is paid to how this rhetoric can help reframe anxieties that accompany faculty work with veterans in composition classes and in higher education more generally.

This essay supplements previous studies on effective strategies for instructing veterans in the first year writing classroom. Those studies typically focus on students who identify as veterans, but there are many veterans entering American universities who do not reveal their past military experiences. This essay explores one approach of developing a first year writing course that responds to the experiences of “stealth” veterans while simultaneously meeting the educational needs of all the students. I contend that a rhetorical education approach to writing instruction allows veterans to connect their writing with both citizenship and their former military service, and may reduce the divide between veteran and nonveteran students. I focus on how a citizenship pedagogy could allow veterans to see a stronger purpose for their academic work and to develop an understanding of how citizens can make decisions through inquiry.

The authors offer an introduction to the special issue on veterans’ writing, highlighting the four major areas of work that emerge in the issue: 1) veterans’ writing in extracurricular settings, whether in community projects and writing groups or specific programs based on veterans’ wellness, healing, and recovery; 2) veterans’ writing in the composition classroom on university campuses or at military bases; 3) faculty development initiatives that help prepare university faculty, instructors, and TAs for their work with veterans in the classroom. A fourth area centers around veterans’ creative works—poetry, in particular—and reviews of the literature of veterans studies and veterans’ writing.

In the process of creating portraits that document the lives and knowledge of community leaders who are engaged in food access work and urban farming in Chester, PA, students in a first year writing course at Widener University are introduced to a rhetoric of social change and the multivocality and creativity that characterizes food justice work in Chester. The Food Justice Portrait Project is community writing created collaboratively with the goal of reciprocity that provides an archive of biography and institutional history. The exhibition of the portraits challenges the problematic charity model of addressing need in a community and supports community agency.

This article provides a framework for using digital game spaces in college writing classrooms to help students develop environmental awareness. Drawing on a range of relevant theories, the author argues that digital game play offers simulated experiential learning opportunities that allow students to locate virtual representations of the environment that potentially mirror, critique, or even promote new ideas regarding material-world environmental concerns. By mapping critical, rhetorical, and ethical literacies onto digital gaming practices, this article advances a creative pedagogical approach to engagement with environmental rhetorics, narratives, and ideologies. Through an extended example of the popular mobile app The Sims Freeplay, the author brings together the disciplines of rhetoric and composition, environmental studies, and game studies in a productive conversation about the ways gaming can increase students’ rhetorical and ethical engagement with both writing and the environment.

This essay theorizes a pedagogy of responsibility as an alternative to place-based and critical pedagogies that offers to ground students in deep ethical obligation. Using Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, I suggest that place may function as a trace of the Other that reminds the self of her responsibility. By analyzing a case study of a place-based college writing assignment, I demonstrate how a pedagogy of responsibility cultivates students’ responsibility for engaging others in ethical, rhetorical response.

This article makes two arguments. First, the article argues that threshold concepts provide a useful lens for thinking about how faculty learn service-learning pedagogy. Second, the article illustrates how particular kinds of support can help faculty learn the pedagogy’s threshold concepts by helping them make sense of the challenges they face in teaching through service-learning. The author uses autoethnography to trace her thinking throughout a yearlong fellows program, during which she developed and taught a new service-learning writing curriculum. She describes how the fellows program helped her to turn several challenges into threshold experiences that resulted in key shifts in thinking.

Review of Code-Meshing as World English: Pedagogy, Policy, Performance by editors Vershawn Ashanti and Aja Martinez.

Near the end of the 19th century, literacy manuals were marketed to African Americans who sought to improve their reading and writing skills outside of a traditional classroom setting. I argue these texts had a worthwhile goal of providing literacy instruction for learners, but they were problematic in that they also served as a source for assimilation into the dominant white culture. Via archival research methods, I examine three of these manuals to discuss how they taught literacy in addition to assimilating students regarding family, politics, and religion—a marked difference from more traditional literacy instruction in the classroom. The lessons represented the idea that discrimination was not necessarily a problem caused by whites but the result of a moral deficit on the part of African Americans. One selection, “Politics,” published in Hall’s Moral and Mental Capsule (1905), edited by Josie Hall, an African American teacher, instructs, “I think it would have been better far/If the Negro had let politics alone/For the first thing he needed was a home/An education and clothes” (173). Another text Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge (1897), written and published solely by James T. Haley, an African American publisher, seems to be the exception, emphasizing a sense of community through point-counterpoints on language used to reference African Americans. These texts raise questions of how writing instruction past and present may assimilate students through the complicated idea of bettering oneself through education. I conclude that the texts represent a still-present paradox in education; the social advantages students seek are often unattainable without some adoption of dominant social mores, even though it may unknowingly imply a student’s own cultural identity is somehow deficient.

We focus on the long-term impacts of service-learning pedagogy on an oft-overlooked assessment group: graduate instructors. We describe the civic engagement program we participated in as graduate student teachers, the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program, and we illustrate how our early experiences with community-based pedagogies led to formative and long-term impacts on our approaches to research, teaching, and service and on our professional and personal work and identities. Based on our experiences, we offer a set of best practices that can serve as a foundation for the intentional design and assessment—both formative and summative—of forward-thinking graduate instructor objectives and outcomes.

An accessible society,” crip theorist Robert McRuer argues, “is not one simply with ramps and Braille signs on ‘public’ buildings, but one in which our ways of relating to, and depending on, each other have been reconfigured” (94). Using McRuer’s definition as a starting point, in this article I seek to work toward creating a more accessible society of teacher-scholars by exploring interdependency as an ethic for intellectual work. Toward this end, I will first argue that creating such a public requires a reconceptualization of the term “pedagogy,” one that moves beyond the boundaries of the classroom such that learning emerges as a dynamic process of recognition and interrelation. I will then review the concepts of independence, dependence, and interdependence as they have been taken up in disability studies and conclude by using these meanings to map out how interrelations on multiple levels make our intellectual work possible.

Many community stakeholders are experiencing increased pressure to enter the digital arena in order to be heard by new audiences, but many such stakeholders lack the technical expertise to do so. To meet this demand, some service-learning teachers are turning to digital media production as a new method of service. This approach to a service-learning pedagogy brings with it inherent complications, however. We believe these complications call for a re-orientation of service-learning projects around a model of distributed knowledge work. This model asks students to view themselves as budding professionals entering into community networks that preexist them. It also requires students to deeply share their knowledge-making practices with community stakeholders.

It is well known that in the United States White European American (WEA) cultural practices are the norm. These ideologies appear ubiquitously, but are especially prevalent in spaces like universities, where WEA cultural practices have a long history of normalcy. For example, although not often stated, university classes are heavily guided by WEA ideologies. This manuscript examines how these practices appear within writing classrooms, and how the curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher biases (re)produce these racist practices that often marginalize people of color.

This essay explores the pedagogical lessons of student-inmate peer reviews conducted during a prison outreach project in a first-year composition class. Collaborative writing between inmates and students reveals the positive outcomes that can result from strong mutuality in community-based learning relationships. Through a qualitative analysis of student reflection papers and prisoner oral reflections, this essay shows how an emphasis on the personal during this project did not preclude systemic considerations, but rather produced productive, political outcomes. This essay concludes with a response from my community partner—a prisoner in a medium security facility and participant in the peer reviews. We hope to demonstrate how a reciprocal, relationship-based orientation can facilitate not only productive community-based learning outcomes for students and communities, but also a new type of scholarship—one more thoroughly enriched by community voices.