Abstract In this article, we share our reflections as a teacher, students, and community organization on establishing an international community partnership course that drew United States’ Virginia Tech University students into dialogue with the Nepal-based Code for Nepal (registered as a non-profit in the US), an organization that serves rural communities by enhancing digital literacy… Continue reading COVID-19, International Partnerships, and the Possibility of Equity: Enhancing Digital Literacy in Rural Nepal amid a Pandemic

“What is a zine? ⭐︎ My definition: For me a zine is not just a self-made and self-published booklet but it is also situated within DIY culture. This means it is non-profit, non-commercial, low-budget, and non-competitive. Topics and style can vary but it’s important that zines remain accessible … (everyone can afford them) and to… Continue reading More Than Paper Islands: The Pandemic Circuitry of Quaranzines

Abstract Compositionists are committed to social justice in classrooms, in academia, and in our communities, but we must also respond creatively and strategically to the structural consequences of precarity capitalism, even more urgently so in the wake of Covid-19. Precarity has shaped both composition studies’ and community literacy’s histories, and compositionists have often had little… Continue reading Community Literacy as Justice Entrepreneurship: Envisioning the Progressive Potential of Entrepreneurship in a Post-Covid Field

Abstract 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… Continue reading Embracing Disruption: A Framework for Trauma-informed Reflective Pedagogy

As the emergency of the spring 2020 semester ended and the uncertainty of the summer began, we commiserated—in text messages, on Zoom calls, and sitting many feet apart in each other’s yards—about our feelings of disconnection and our inability to focus on anything other than the pandemic. The scholarship we had started before the pandemic… Continue reading ISU Quarantine Journal Project: Reflective Writing, Public Memory, and Community Building in Extraordinary Times

Introduction 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… Continue reading Writing Historical Fiction Online: Community Digital Literacies in Regional Australia

Failure, as rendered by a straightforward Google search, is defined quite simply as a “lack of success.” Despite this seemingly simple definition, failure, and failure as explicated within the realm of pedagogy, is much more complex, working within varied situations, subtexts, and power structures. This nuanced analysis of failure is explored with dynamism throughout the… Continue reading Book Review: Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What It Means to Fail, edited by Allison D. Carr and Laura R. Micciche

Service projects or community partnerships? Charity work or reciprocal collaboration? Those participating in community-university collaborations, intellectual partnerships between university affiliated researchers and those outside of universities, have long troubled the ways that this work can be—and is—ethically fraught, messy, and risky. One common suggestion for working against these issues, on the other hand, is to… Continue reading Book Review: Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning by Rachael W. Shah

After a period being away from our time editing Reflections, we were pleased to step in to fill the gap between the end of Deborah Mutnick and Laurie Grobman’s editorship and the beginning of Laura Gonzales’ term. It soon became apparent that under Deborah and Laurie’s leadership, Reflections had extended its scholarly profile, expanding categories… Continue reading Editors’ Introduction

Who is an activist? What actions define a scholar-activist, an artist-activist, or community activist? How do community members, as non-academics, serve their community as advocates as well as intellectuals? And, finally, what is the impact that scholars and advocates make when they join with one another for social justice efforts within their respective communities? These… Continue reading Guest Editor’s Introduction: Activism and Academia in Community Work

Since 2016, we have borne witness to an authoritarian leader who has wielded words to shape our national consciousness about people of color, women, immigrants, and disabled people in ways that have ignited the extreme right, resulting in a rise in hate crimes, the loss of protections for LGBTQ+ people, and, harrowingly, the indefinite detention… Continue reading Response to Activism and Academia in Community Work

Video Transcript —————————————— “I don’t like how he treated my son on one of his blogs,” wrote a friend’s mom on a Facebook post about me in 2017. I stared at the post, unsure what she meant by the comment. I knew her son for years and consider him a good friend of mine, even… Continue reading On Being an Activist in your Hometown

We attempt to deliver our vision; a vision that depicts how theories by Gloria E. Anzaldúa can offer us ways to help people of color (whom we identified as broken under current political rhetoric) to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems that can lead toward healing. We argue Anzaldúa’s theories and her Coyolxauhqui imperative, that… Continue reading Healing Broken Bodies and Cultivating Hope through Gloria E. Anzaldúa

This essay was composed on the historic territories of the Akokisa/Orcoquisa and Karankawa peoples. In 2016, a Bloomberg poll revealed that what bothered voters most about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was his mocking of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski during a campaign rally in South Carolina. The previous November, Trump had ridiculed Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis,… Continue reading #CripTheVote: Disability Activism, Social Media, and the Campaign for Communal Visibility

Introduction Located in Austin, TX, Latinitas describes itself as one of the only bilingual tech organizations in the U.S. and prides itself for creating the first digital magazine made for and by Latina youth. In 2002, Latinitas was developed as a project by a group of undergraduate students in a Latinos in Media course at… Continue reading Embedding La Cultura: Digital Engagement by a Latinx Nonprofit Organization

Chicanx Consciousness Chicanx filmmakers are consciously aware of negative reproductions or unproductions (meaning no representations) of themselves in mainstream motion pictures. It is a fact that Chicanx are underrepresented in mainstream cinema. Although Hispanics represent 18% of the U.S. population and contribute 21% percent of U.S. box office revenue, only about 5% percent of actors… Continue reading Chicanx Filmmaking: Producing the Next Generation of Resilient Cinema

When teaching first-year composition, I noticed how uncomfortable students became at the prospect of talking about politics in the classroom. The science majors were vocal in proclaiming the importance of limiting the use of plastic bags, and the nursing students vehemently argued for the necessity of vaccinations. These impassioned voices, though, quieted when faced with… Continue reading Book Review: From Thought to Action: Developing a Social Justice Orientation by Amy Aldridge Sanford

April Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy (2020) urges literacy teachers and researchers to recognize and understand how Anti-Black Linguistic Racism oppresses Black Language-speakers in the classroom. Anti-Blackness is a deeply-rooted problem in education that is exacerbated by educators upholding white linguistic hegemony. Despite the effort by scholars and educators to dismantle… Continue reading Book Review: Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy by April Baker-Bell

The two of us writing this review of Aja Martinez’s (2020) Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory have been colleagues with offices next door to one another for seven years at the University of Delaware. As a White and deaf tenured faculty member with expectations for research built into her workload, Stephanie’s… Continue reading Book Review: Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory by Aja Martinez

Drawing on methods of composite counterstory, specifically to “derive sources from existing literatures, social commentary, and the author’s professional/personal experiences,” (Martinez 2014, 69) this review will feature and weave throughout the text its composite character Dani, whose story begins at her first encounter with Aja Martinez. Setting. Dani, a first-year graduate student, arrives with great… Continue reading Book Review: Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory by Aja Y Martinez

During the final semester of my junior year of college, I connected with my advisor about the prospect of graduate school. I entered his office on a sunny spring afternoon and sat down beside his desk, staring at the intimidating rows of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and John Donne books on his bookshelf. The professor, Dr. Little,… Continue reading Book Review: Counterstories: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory by Aja Martinez

This isn’t a book about Donald Trump. In Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era, out from Routledge in 2020, editors Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks, and Jessica Pauszek set their sights on pushing against neoliberalism, a nebulous term that has gained favor in the past few years in articles… Continue reading Review of Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era by Brian McShane

Americans are becoming increasingly mobile. As it becomes common to frequently relocate for work, suburbs have sprung up to accommodate transient families (Brooke 2015, 11). More students grow up in communities created for temporary, mobile populations, which as a result are often disconnected from their cultural and physical regions. Link to PDF

This article describes a case study of an inclusive Summer Lunch Program, focused on nutrition, community engagement, and literacy programming. The Summer Food Service Program is a federally-funded, state-administered program designed to meet the needs of children from lowincome families who qualify for free and reduced lunches during the school year. Link to PDF

The unique perspective that adult learners have on writing and its instruction in low or no-cost education programs offers valuable information to both instructors of written components in these courses and to scholars exploring how writing in adult education functions as community literacy. After conducting interviews with instructors and students at six adult education programs,… Continue reading A Curriculum of the Self: Students’ Experiences with Prescriptive Writing in Low and No-Cost Adult Education Programs by Alison Turner

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. Link to PDF

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. Link to PDF

This article celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Reflections Journal, as a premier publication in service learning, public writing, rhetoric, community literacy, and activism. The author applauds Reflections as a space that nurtures emerging voices and professional development, even prior to the printing of individual volumes and issues. Link to PDF

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 communityengaged work over the last decade alongside a reading of this journal and its continued… Continue reading Community Engagement for the Graduate Student Soul: Ruminations on Reflections by Ashanka Kumari

In this interview, Paula Mathieu reflects on the twentyyear history of Reflections. She discusses how the journal has influenced her teaching and research, and she talks about being the co-editor of Reflections as Rhetoric and Composition was developing newer understandings of community-engaged relationships and practices. Link to PDF

The research in the area of community literacy has flourished along the lines of activist and curricular work. The field explores these lines in journals such as Reflections and Community Literacy Journal, a bi-annual conference The Conference on Community Writing, and with the formation of a non-profit professional society The Coalition of Community Writing. It… Continue reading Intersectional Community Thinking: New Possibilities for Thinking About Community by Abbie Levesque DeCamp & Ellen Cushman

I became Editor of Reflections in 2008, soon joined by Brian Bailie as a graduate intern in 2008 and, then, as an Associate Editor beginning in 2009. Just prior to this moment, Reflections had been transformed from a saddled-stapled publication for engaged dialogue to more formal academic journal binding with more extended articles. The move… Continue reading Are We Still an Academic Journal?: Editing as an Ethical Practice of Change by Steve Parks & Brian Bailie

As the reach of community engaged writing has expanded, it has come to offer a uniquely powerful contribution to a college education, well beyond service. We have the opportunity to make a visible, cross-disciplinary case that embraces this remarkable diversity in a compelling public argument—one that can link vision with new evidence of genuine educational… Continue reading The Consequences of Engaged Education: Building a Public Case by Linda Flower

This interview is not the first in Reflections for Tom Deans, a Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at the University of Connecticut. His first interview appeared in issue 1.1 of Reflections and focused on his work as chair of the recently created CCCC national service-learning committee dedicated to creating “disciplinary momentum”… Continue reading ‘You’re Not Alone’: An Interview with Tom Deans about Supporting Community Engagement by Eric Mason

In our call for submissions for the Reflections’ 20th anniversary issue, we invited shorter considerations about the journal’s impact to be published as a textual roundtable. As is usually the case, we got what we asked for: a number of short pieces that praise, situate, look backward in order to predict going forward, illuminate, and… Continue reading Reflections’ 20th Anniversary Roundtable: What Was, What Is, What’s Coming by Isabel Baca, Tobi Jacobi, Tom Deans, Heather Lang

This essay recounts the origins of Reflections and considers the first seven years of the journal’s publication from the perspective of its first editor. Arguing that Reflections serves as a barometer of changes in our field, the academy, and the production of knowledge over the past two decades, it recounts the journal’s initial mandate to… Continue reading The Art of Learning Our Place by Barbara Roswell

We are thrilled to introduce this 20th anniversary issue of Reflections. Our tenure as coeditors has taught us a great deal about the journal, the growing subfield of community-engaged writing, and the pleasures and pitfalls of editing a biannual publication. As we embarked on editing this issue, we assumed we would learn a lot about… Continue reading Looking Back to Look Ahead: Reflections Turns Twenty by Laurie Grobman & Deborah Mutnick

More people speak Spanish as their home language in the United States than in Spain. In fact, when considering the numbers of bilingual Spanish speakers, the United States has the second-largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, after Mexico—58 million in the United States and 123 million in Mexico, respectively (Instituto Cervantes 2017). Link to PDF

Editors’ Note: With this interview, we inaugurate a regular feature of the journal focused on interviews and articles about community-based writing projects unaffiliated with higher education. Discovering the genesis, evolution, and meaningfulness of such projects illuminates theories and practices of writing as a potentially transformative social activity that fosters creativity, communication, equity, and justice. It… Continue reading Everyone is a Writer: The Story of the New York Writers Coalition by Aaron Zimmerman

Since the 2016 U.S. election, faculty, staff, and students at more than 200 colleges and universities have petitioned for their campuses to be declared as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants, a preemptive move that pits academic institutions against federal authorities. Like many in academia, I first became aware of the sanctuary campus movement in the weeks… Continue reading I Never Intended It To Become a Symbol of Resistance’: An Interview with Xavier Maciel about the Sanctuary Campus Movement by Jens Lloyd

Megan Faver Hartline: I am the director of community learning at Trinity College, a small liberal arts college in Hartford, Connecticut, where I work to create and strengthen institutional structures for community engagement by designing opportunities for students, faculty, and community partners to build relationships and work together. This work builds on my research examining… Continue reading Early Career Scholars’ Encounters, Transitions, and Futures: A Conversation on Community Engagement by Jessica Pauszek, Charles Lesh, Megan Faver Hartline, & Vani Kannan

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… Continue reading Beyond Management: The Potential for Writing Program Leadership During Turbulent Times by Casie Fedukovich & Sue Doe

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… Continue reading Linguistic Pluralism: A Statement and a Call to Advocacy by Ligia Mihut

With increased interest in communityengaged course design, instructors across the United States are looking for ways to encourage their students to become more connected with their local contexts and the larger communities surrounding their university’s walls. Moving beyond a “feel good” approach to making college courses more meaningful, I think it is crucial that educators… Continue reading Community-Based Writing with Latinx Rhetorics in Milwaukee by Rachel Bloom-Pojar, Julia Anderson, & Storm Pilloff

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… Continue reading Learning to Value Cultural Wealth Through Service Learning: Farmworker Families’ and Latina/o University Students’ Mutual Empowerment via Freirean and Feminist Chicana/o-Latina/o Literature Reading Circles by Georgina Guzmán

As we prepare to publish our second issue as coeditors of Reflections, we find ourselves pondering the semantics of names, the power of design, and the importance of circulatory reach. We began our term as editors with several questions: whether the title of the journal accurately expressed its evolving mission, whether the website was agile… Continue reading Editors’ Introduction by Laurie Grobman & Deborah Mutnick

As we prepare to publish our second issue as coeditors of Reflections, we find ourselves pondering the semantics of names, the power of design, and the importance of circulatory reach. We began our term as editors with several questions: whether the title of the journal accurately expressed its evolving mission, whether the website was agile… Continue reading Introducing Reflections 18.2

The articles centers on haunting genealogies and literacies. It asks the question, what lurks in the beyond and that is already present in and around? Working at the tension between inheritances and responsibility, I argue that a framework of hauntings invites a modality of a different kind of “scholar.” It calls for a careful reckoning,… Continue reading Haunt(ed/ing) Genealogies and Literacies by Romeo García

The future of higher education in prison remains a pressing question more than twenty years after incarcerated students were denied access to Pell grants. We are still considering questions about who should be incarcerated and why. The forces were different in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, but we still have much to learn from those who… Continue reading If We Knew Our History: Building on the Insights of Past Prison Teachers by Laura Rogers

This article suggests that the framework of prison abolition in prison literacy studies should be developed through the relational potential of queer community literacy practices among incarcerated writers. To that end, the author presents findings from a critical discourse analysis of a newspaper by incarcerated LGBTQ+ writers. Three primary forms of audience address and rhetorical… Continue reading (Anti)Prison Literacy: Queering Community Writing through an Abolitionist Stance by Rachel Lewis