Well fellow convicts and POW’s, it’s been a while since I last jotted something down—so here it is.

In 1983 my associations with prisons began. Since then, I have seen many role models go in and out of the system. My earliest memories are of my real father, James W. Gray. He was incarcerated in the Montana State Prison system. It was at that institution that I had the first birthday I can remember. I recall a lot of the visits beyond that point. But even they were short lived. Within a month or two of my father’s release date, he made the decision to start a new life, away from his present obligations. I feel his decisions had some effect on the way I was raised thereafter.

A hot cupof coffeeanda warm conversationcuddle ushere atWaseca

Review of Marking Time: Letters from Jean Harris to Shana Alexander by Jean Harris. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991

When I speak with people about the juvenile justice system and the youth caught up in it, many of them remind me of tourists browsing a whitewater rafting brochure. Media mantras like “teenage superpredator” and “gangbanger” rely on the ignorance of the reader every bit as much as does “experience nature in a thrill ride that won’t be forgotten.” If you have experienced the power of whitewater or the sensitivity of an incarcerated teen, then you are less likely to buy prefabricated images of those experiences.

I remembered that when I was just a little boy I loved drawing anything I could get my hands on... Seeing and hearing the joy people would get out when I drew something for them gave me a natural high. Next thing you know I was experimenting with all sorts of media/ I became a self-taught artist and I’m still learning. ...Like the artist Robert Bissett said, ‘the very essence of any art form has always been to give expression to the self, the emotional being.’ ...My artwork has gotten me through some rough times. When you come to prison everyone lives by the jailhouse rules. Observe everything and nothing. Keep your ears open and your mouth shut. I couldn’t believe my art work earned me respect without lifting up a finger, without hurting anyone, or doing anything illegal, respect that many work so hard for in here.

Did she or didn’t she?I know I said don’tBut I hope she did.

In writing the original play The Return, I discovered abilities to organize, encourage, and direct, which I never knew I had. From the play’s origin inside of my 8x10 prison cell of solitary confinement, to its inception and encore performance, each and every person involved eventually became totally committed to its success. In this essay, I reflect on the process of play writing in prison.

Drawing by William T. Lawson

Open 7!” The guard grunts to his fat companion sitting in the control booth of the cell block. With a flip of an unseen switch my cell door grinds open. “Welcome back, Ortiz,” the guard sneers with a crooked grin I want to kick down his throat. “Didn’t last too long, did ya?”

Editors’ Note: This photo essay, created by an undergraduate student at Howard University enrolled in a service learning class taught by Arvilla Payne-Johnson, preserves and documents the graffiti at the now closed Washington D.C. area Lorton Prison. The essay highlights a genre of hidden literacies claimed by inmates even in spaces of vast power differentials and exaggerated social control. We suggest that readers inspired by this project to pursue similar work also consult Jeff Ferrell’s Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality (NY: Garland, 1993), Ralph Cintron’s Angels’ Town : Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of Everyday, and Pete Vandenberg et al.’s “Confronting Clashing Discourses: Writing the Space between Classroom and Community” in Reflections 2.2 (Spring 2002): 19-39.

This article explores a unique approach to becoming literate about prisons ––through a dialogical exchange between individuals on both sides of the wall. The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program offers a semester-long course through which college students and incarcerated men or women attend class together weekly inside a local correctional facility. Pivotal to this pedagogy is the power and reciprocity of the exchange between the “inside” and “outside” students. The depth of discussion involved, the collaborative nature of the engagement, and the consideration of the issues (literally from the inside, out)––together encompass an approach to learning that changes lives.

Review of Sing Soft, Sing Loud by Patricia McConnel. Flagstaff, AZ: Logoria Books, 1995.

Between Ivy and Razor Wire describes a capstone senior seminar in rhetoric entitled Writing for Social Justice, Writing for Change, which included direct correspondence between students and inmates around the country. The essay explores some of the many pedagogical challenges of teaching and learning in the long, dark and highly charged shadow of law and order ideology. Excerpts from letters by both students and inmates are presented in the context of analytical reflections on the class.

Bruce Herzberg is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Bentley College. He is the author of several articles on service learning, including "Community Service and Critical Teaching," published originally in CCC and reprinted in a number of anthologies, and "Public Discourse and Service Learning," published in JAC . He is also the author, with Patricia Bizzell, of The Rhetorical Tradition and Negotiating Difference. He began teaching service-learning courses in 1991, and one such course was a research site for Tom Deans's book on service-learning, Writing Partnerships.

This article compares ten English composition courses - six taught with traditional methodologies and four incorporating service-learning. Four instructors, each of whom taught both the traditional and service-learning versions of the composition courses, and one hundred twenty-eight students were involved in the study. The authors demonstrate that service-learning improves students’ attitudes toward civic engagement and social responsibility, sense of personal efficacy, and understanding of the complexity of social issues while enabling students to meet traditional standards for proficiency in the composition course.

Is service-learning of value for community college students who have very limited time and who do not need to “be exposed” to the neighborhoods in which they live? Yes. Service-learning can be a vital bridge connecting community and college for students who frequently are the first of their family or friends to go to college, who have more confidence in their street skills than in their academic skills, and who see real needs in their communities. However, service learning will only benefit these students if it evolves from and responds to the realities of their lives.

This article adopts the perspective of rhetorical theory to examine student, teacher, and client assessments of community service writing projects created by students in a technical writing course. The study compares both students’ and clients’ assessments of the benefits of the service-learning experience and the teacher’s and clients’ evaluations of the documents. It highlights significant discrepancies in the teacher and client assessments stemming from different views of the rhetorical situation. Analysis of these differences leads to recommendations concerning best practices for organizing, evaluating, and conducting classroom research on community service writing in a technical writing context.

This article underscores the importance of examining community-based writing in practice. It traces the evolution of an "International Connections" service-learning project from a well-intentioned add-on to a thoughtful and critical component of a writing course. Distilling best practices from recent service-learning literature, the article concludes with a call for 1) integration of the service-learning project within the goals and activities of the writing course, 2) critical pedagogy and academic rigor, 3) mutuality/ reciprocity, and 4) diverse discourses (personal, civic, and academic) that invite students to write for, about, and with community partners for a variety of purposes.

Professor of Political Science and former Director of the Feinstein Institute for Public Service at Providence College, Rick Battistoni is a distinguished author in the field of political theory with a principal interest in the role of education in a democratic society. As Campus Compact's Engaged Scholar for Civic Engagement, Battistoni has published a recent volume, Civic Engagement Across the Curriculum, and has been involved with the development of their Engaged Department institutes and toolkit. Battistoni currently directs Project 540, an ambitious new program that gives over 100,000 high school students nationwide the opportunity to talk about issues that matter to them and to turn these conversations into real school and community change (www.project540.org).

In his introduction to Life Stories, a collection of New Yorker Profiles, David Remnick confesses that "the Profile is a terribly hard form to get right." Conceived as a form to describe Manhattan celebrities, the genre now travels widely and along all emotional and occupational registers. One quality runs through many of the best Profiles, though, notes Remnick: a sense of obsession. The Book Man is one student's foray into the genre of the Profile. It was written in an Introduction to Creative Nonfiction course and is based on her service-learning experiences for which she earned an optional fourth credit.

In what can be called a "culture of disconnect," students and teachers alike often want to engage in public discourse but do not know where to begin. The newsletters and newspapers produced to support the work of small, alternative hospitality houses and prison ministries reveal the role communication plays in the lives of active participants in democracy and show how communities of people who choose to write and publish learn from each other s examples. These extraordinary words of ordinary men and women, writing for local, often little known causes, offer ways of understanding what may motivate writers to begin to assume a meaningful public voice.

The authors argue that writing-intensive service-learning courses extend the lessons of first-year composition courses by teaching students how to understand and negotiate differences between the discourses of the academy and those of community-based organizations. While first-year writing courses lead students through successive approximations of a generalized academic discourse in the relative safety of the composition classroom, service-learning courses create conditions in which students must confront clashing discourses in action. This article present s vignettes of three different courses, one of which intentionally tapped into the discourse tensions the students faced and the other two of which encountered these tensions as impediments to successful teaching problems that could be overcome in future versions of the courses. The challenge of negotiating competing discourses will inevitably be part of any service-learning course that involves extensive writing, the authors conclude; hence this issue should be addressed explicitly in readings, class discussions, and student papers. When addressed directly, the friction between discourses can become a teachable space where teachers can help students explore options for addressing dissonance, and so provide everyone involved with an opportunity for transformation.

This paper describes methods to study the impact of service-learning on the writing performance of students in first-year college composition. Linguistic and rhetorical features commonly identified as affecting judgments of writing quality are compared to holistic essay ratings to assess the impact of different teaching and learning contexts on writing performance.

Examination of the Compass Learning Community shows that service-learning, when integrated into first-year learning communities, expands each student s ability to determine a college major in an informed manner. The combination of a first-year writing course linked with an academic course in career discovery provided students with a variety of opportunities for experiential learning about ways of understanding work as well as structured opportunities to reflect on their experiences. Students were enabled to think critically about their strengths, predispositions and values and to consider the implications of their self-discovery for college major and career choices. In the Compass program, service-learning provided the crucial experiential link in students critical assessment of their place in the college community and the community at large.

Review of Charting A Hero’s Journey by Linda A. ChisholmNew York: The International Partnership for Service Learning, 2000

Review of Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning in Composition by Thomas DeansUrbana, IL: NCTE, 2000

When service-learning educators of future generations look back at the development of the field, they may well point to three events at the turn of the century as watershed moments in service-learning research.

Carol Weinberg, who passed away this summer after a courageous battle with cancer, played a crucial role in preparing the soil for Reflections to grow and flourish. She was the first professor to hold the France-Merrick Chair of Service-Learning at Goucher College and was nationally recognized for the interdisciplinary service-learning senior capstone course she designed. The winner of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival award for her plays Every Suzie and Sal, Keeping the Faith, and Freedom Summer, Carol was also the author of The Transition Guide for College Juniors and Seniors: How To Prepare for the Future.

Reflections interview with Ira Shor.

Video review of Everyday HeroesDirectors: Rick Goldberg and Abby GinzbergBerkeley, CA: Kovno Communications, 2001

Transcript of interview with Linda Flower.

The critical lenses provided by the author’s framing of the domains of charity, civic engagement and social action highlight the assumptions and implications of different service-learning models. Classroom practices and writing assignments are interrogated for their affinity with each of the domains and their inherent power to shape students’ reading of the world.

At a moment when multiculturalism is inspiring new directions for studying non-fiction, new literary genres are emerging, including the oral history narrative. This essay explores the value of the oral history narrative through its recovery in a service-learning course. Interrogating questions of genre, subjectivity, ethics, and composition, this paper affirms the place of oral history recovery in the composition classroom and proposes innovative strategies to remake a basic assignment into an interdisciplinary event.

This article examines the implications of service-learning educators’ commitments to community literacy for professional development in higher education. It places stories of professional development in composition studies within the context of community literacy needs and of broader debates about tenure and promotion practices. The article proposes a set of questions that challenge compositionists to draw on community-based work to redefine professional development in rhetoric and composition studies.

This essay explores the many benefits of adding a community-based writing component to the first year composition course. It looks closely at the self-selected projects of 25 freshmen at a large suburban university to show how service-learning creates a context in which students can gain greater control over their own literacy and learn more about self and others.

Review of Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts by Patrick Dias, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway, and Anthony Paré Mahwah. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999

This article investigates the successes and failures of an upper-level service-learning composition course on the theme of “literacies” in order to uncover the particular challenges of engaging in community-based critical teaching in a faith-based institution. It identifies a religiously grounded form of noblesse oblige revealed in students’ literacy autobiographies and proposes pedagogical interventions to engage students in considering their own and their institutions’ ideological assumptions about literacy and service.

In the past few years, many English departments have welcomed the burgeoning area of service-learning into their curriculums, a development which Adler-Kassner, Cooks and Watters consider a “microrevolution” in the area of college-level composition (1). While compositionists have become increasingly thoughtful about different models for community-based writing – in Tom Deans’ schema, writing for, about or with the community – the literature has yet to explore the definition of “community” integral to each of these approaches. As Joseph Harris pointed out in his article “The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing” a decade ago, the idea of community has “extraordinary rhetorical power” yet the word “community” has no negative term; in fact, the term “community” is not even found in a college-level thesaurus. What and where is the ubiquitous “community” talked about in the service-learning literature? Is one community the same as the other? Are we all talking about one generic community or does the term vary from writing to writing? By uncovering the over-reliance on this term, we may begin to see why those who write on this subject do little to define the meaning of community.

In the service-learning writing courses I teach at Wright State University, my academic goals seem simple. I want my students to improve their writing skills and to develop civic literacy. The special challenge of achieving these objectives begins to come into focus in defining civic literacy. In my courses, I define it as having the ability to critically examine the complex social situations that create and perpetuate needs in our communities and an awareness of our responsibility as literate individuals to address those needs.

What do I like and don’t like about this program? What I do like about this program is when we read our stories and poems. And I like when we get to draw. It will make you write better and read better because the more you read the better you write. Traci, 7

Based on the belief that students produce better writing when they are personally engaged in the writing topic, the University of Arizona’s Composition program is working to integrate service-learning into a variety of the courses it offers. Research to date suggests that composition students and instructors feel a greater sense of purpose and meaning when they believe that their work will have tangible results in the lives of others.

This essay describes a series of assignments that I have used in Writing and Social Issues, a first-year writing course that features service-learning. These assignments should prove useful to those interested in the relationship between community-based writing instruction and first-year courses that focus on the student’s transition from high school to college.

Tom Deans chairs the CCCC Service-Learning Committee established in 1999. An assistant professor of English at Kansas State University, Deans is the author of Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning in Composition (NCTE, in press).

Editors’ Note: This article originally appeared in COLLEGE CYBERBRIEF, an electronic newsletter sent to members of the Colelge Section of TEACH2000. Reprinted with permission of the National Council of Teachers of English. The list of electronic resources appeared in Adler-Kassner’s CyberBrief; we’ve updated the list a bit and added some print materials.

The title of this article means in triplicate. “True Stories from Philadelphia” is the title of the Project WRITE (Writing and Reading through Intergenerational Teaching Experiences) web site (http://www.temple.edu/CIL/WRITEhome.htm). “True story” also smacks a bit of gossip, the confession of some difficulty. And the phrase “true stories,” itself perhaps an oxymoron, also describes the type of epistemologically self-conscious writing I hope students generate in my service-learning composition classroom.

The State of Maryland requires students to complete 75 hours of service-learning in order to graduate from high school. The mandate also requires that preparation, action and reflection be part of that service. I am a ninth grade English teacher at Sherwood High School in Sandy Spring, MD and the school’s volunteer coordinator. I believe so strongly in the service-learning requirement that I try to incorporate a service-learning project into each ninth grade unit of study.

In the past fifteen years, American colleges and universities have embraced service-learning with active enthusiasm. Campus Compact, the national service-learning organization of university presidents, began in 1985 with three members; today, it has almost 700 member campuses where students annually engage in an estimated 22 million hours of service activities linked to their academic studies. Hundreds of faculty members have found their teaching invigorated as they have observed the impact of service-learning projects on the community and on students’ personal and intellectual growth.

For a few thick moments apricots orbit in sunny colonies, and then, with a whoosh, the tree and fruit whip past. On this country road, row after orchard row disappears behind us and our eyes re-focus, only for a moment, on the fleeting trees, glimmering leaves, and crimson fruits ahead. Alejandro slows down as one by one, signs replace trees. “Private Property, No Trespassing” on the left, “Beware of Dog” and “McMurtry Brothers Fencing” on the right. Gravel grates and crunches under the Chevy’s tires, stating our presence like signal guns. The flatbed’s hooks and boards bounce, clang, and rattle. I imagine an old shopping cart rolling through a cobble-floored monastery. Alejandro eases his truck up the gravel road to the brown, one-story wood and stucco ranch house. We’ve driven up and down old, crumbly edged roads for the last hour, but now he’s sure this is the place. In line next to the house is an immediate family of carport, garage, and three sheds all the same color. He parks near the sheds and I follow his lead as he opens his door.