This essay argues that African American church founder Richard Allen (1760-1831) developed a rhetorical pedagogy that prefigures the community literacy partnerships of later Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). While Allen did not enjoy the material opportunities of institutionalized higher learning, we can interpret passages from his autobiography as a rhetorical pedagogy that affirms the ways of knowing in language of his community, suggests a relationship between language and the truth, and points toward a community pedagogy rooted in language. Allen also figures as a rhetor whose own higher literacy is sponsored by his community, and who returns his rhetorical power to the community for its own betterment. These same dimensions can be witnessed in the pedagogies of later nineteenth-century African American educators, particularly that of Fanny Jackson Coppin of the Institute for Colored Youth, and Daniel A. Payne of Wilberforce University. Moreover, Allen’s very lack of formalized schooling affords us a way of reframing contemporary efforts in university and community partnerships, and offers compelling precedent for Linda Flower’s model of inquiry. For African American higher learning, community literacy partnerships are not merely an additive element of a traditional curriculum; instead, they are the lifeblood of the school itself.

This article discusses Shaw University’s mission and service to African American Communities. The author asserts a definition of community literacy that exemplifies the “communal” relationships of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and African American community literacy partnerships. By analyzing historical and contemporary literacy partnerships and agents of change at Shaw University, the author highlights an insider view of community literacy, as lived experiences that reflect the university’s mission. This insider view draws attention to the shared experience of a people as well as the uplift and education of African Americans. The author believes that this focus speaks to Shaw University’s motto of service to Christ and humanity.

This article investigates service-learning practices and pedagogy at Jackson State University (JSU), a Historically Black University, founded in 1877 to educate underserved and underrepresented African Americans in Mississippi. As a reflection of the university’s motto, “Challenging Minds and Changing Lives,” this research highlights JSU’s concerted efforts to foster students’ participation in school-community literacy partnerships. Since 2009, the university has facilitated academic instruction in first-year English Composition and Literature courses and in second-year Humanities courses. Not only have these efforts enabled JSU students to partner with Elementary schools and African American women’s help initiatives in the Metro-Jackson area, but JSU students have also completed service-learning projects in Limon, Costa Rica. To further illustrate JSU’s commitment to African American literacy partnerships, the authors present a selection of course materials to demonstrate course designs dedicated to service-learning and African American community literacy partnerships.

As promoters of social justice movements adopt digital technologies in order to communicate with their members, it is necessary to interrogate the rhetorical and ethical effects of these new technologies. If connection to a justice movement is as easy as typing and reading a few key phrases, can that connection be expected to prompt the kind of action required for social change to occur? Using student produced writing and responses to websites promoting social justice causes, this essay discusses emerging digital and cultural literacies that demand a re-imagining of rhetorical appeals for both membership in and action by social justice organizations. Although at first glance the electronic environment seems antagonistic to the goals of uniting people toward a cause, once one begins to closely examine what the new platforms for electronic communications are and how they are being used to form interpersonal connections, one finds that they are ideal for the kind of community building past voices of social justice deemed necessary for successful social transformation. Despite any perceived fragility of virtual awareness, digital technology is an extremely beneficial tool for civic engagement, capable of fostering conversation and writing about justice issues in a meaningful and rhetorically sophisticated manner, and individuals can learn to use their voices to shape the kind of inclusive communities they desire socially into those that also seek justice.

Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. In 1998 she founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. Her activism and scholarship engages with Feminism, Marxism, and African American studies. Benjamin D. Kuebrich met with Professor Davis at Syracuse University to ask her about issues of pedagogy, rhetoric, and community literacy.

This article addresses the "problem of speaking for others" in a joint community-based research project between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Reading, Pennsylvania branch and Penn State Berks to uncover, document, and disseminate to the public African American history in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Integrating community partners' and students' voices with her own, Grobman suggests that the Berks County African American History project approached a model of CBR in which whites and African Americans spoke (and wrote) with one another. She argues that this productive, but highly complex collaboration between community partners, students, and faculty reminds us that theoretical understandings of such concepts as hybridity, border-crossing, and blurring of group-based differences and identities do not necessarily occur in practice; rather, the Black-white binary, sometimes for very good reasons, is not dissolved. Grobman recommends strategies that will aid others involved CBR to create venues that approach equal authority rather than paternalistic service.

This paper reports on recent research investigating the effects of service-learning on linguistically and culturally diverse college students enrolled in a first-year composition course. Two separate studies, a pilot and main study involving native (NS) and non-native (NNS) English speaking college students, explore how students from diverse sociolinguistic backgrounds respond to and gain from service-learning. The results were mixed, with the initial study indicating NNS students often experience more difficulty finding and successfully completing work in the community while the main study found a similar group of NNS students to expect and gain more from service-learning activities than a comparative group of NS students. Implications for introducing diverse student populations to service-learning activities are discussed in light of these findings.

This article describes how to set up a course in which students create publications for social justice organizations and non-profits. Careful planning is required, but the news articles, media releases, flyers and newsletters are often crucial to the success of these organizations, and therefore, student rewards are great.

Most discussions of service-learning focus on the potential pitfalls of working with students who inhabit relatively privileged positions. While this crucial concern deserves attention, it has limited our focus by encouraging students to cross borders, to encounter people different from themselves rather than to encounter something different within themselves or within their own communities. This approach may be particularly problematic for students of color whose education for social justice, citizenship, and historical consciousness might best be furthered by a writing, or might I say a “re-writing,” pedagogy that emphasizes recursive spatial movement through place over time—a “writing as the community” service-learning paradigm.

Moving Out/Moving In: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of the Immigrant Experience is a service-learning course created and taught by Mirta Tocci in the Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College in Boston, MA. Tocci describes the five-year history of her collaboration with community partner, lnquilinos Boricuas en Acción, focusing on how Emerson students' study of the psychosocial effects of the immigrant experience inspires art projects created by Emerson students and Latino children aged 5-12 enrolled in IBA's Cacique after-school program.

Victor Villanueva studies the intersections of rhetoric and racism. He is the recipient of the 2009 CCCC Exemplar Award, which honors scholars whose work represents the best our field has to offer. Villanueva also won NCTE's David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English and CEE's Richard Meade Award for Research in English Education for his book, Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, an autobiographical tale that exposes the problems with literacy education in America based on his own experiences as a Puerto Rican growing up in New York. Though Villanueva does not often write specifically about immigration, his work illuminates the connection between rhetoric, racism and xenophobia, and encourages all of us in the field to consider how our conceptions of literacy oppress those not of the dominant culture.

It is time for Latino immigrants in the United States to take back their stories-stories that have been rewritten by people in a campaign to drive them out of the United States. The revised stories read in the press and heard on the streets, promulgated by mayors and legislators and citizens who have a vision of America the Way It Used to Be, go something like this: our towns are being taken over by brown-skinned immigrants who drive our crime rate up and overwhelm the criminal justice system; these immigrants drain our economy, sucking our resources for schools, healthcare and welfare programs; they take away jobs from Americans and drive our wages down; they don't really want to be American-they stick to themselves, won't learn English, and are only here to take advantage of our way of life while refusing to contribute to it; and now, post 9/11, they are a terrorist threat. Citizens, we are being invaded; take back your communities before it's too late.

This paper reports the process and outcomes of a multidisciplinary service-learning project in a major metropolitan area in southwestern Indiana that focuses on determining, then meeting, the needs of our growing Latino/a population. We discuss three service-learning courses involved with this project - one completed, one in progress, and one being planned. Deploying a theoretical apparatus emerging from sociology and intercultural rhetorical theory, we discuss our students' interaction with this rhetorical borderland and the processes of becoming and hybrid thinking that occurred in the process.

Research on early Latino/a immigration in the deep South is minimal largely because of the Black and White racial dichotomy that pervades the South. New Orleans has a rich Latino/a and Spanish presence, yet little research covers Latino/a immigration from the 1700s to the mid- 1900s. This paper will trace the early history of Latino/a immigration in New Orleans to help foster deep Southern Latino/a "roots" for this growing immigrant population. The paper will also focus on the largest New Orleans Latino/a community, Hondurans, tracing their early history and current immigrant experiences after Hurricane Katrina.

I argue that literacy studies needs to define the role of peace in our efforts to pursue social justice. Drawing on the work of Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, I show that promoting peace is the means, as well as the end, of working toward social justice. Further, I demonstrate that the process of transforming alienation into connection is a crucial step in fostering peace. Using this framework, I analyze ethnographic data on one highly successful writing instructor's classroom literate practices to illustrate a pedagogical approach that helped shift both students and teacher from alienation to connection.

This article explores the collaborative experience of a university professor and the coordinator of a local hate crimes project as we developed and taught a service-learning course on public dialogue. We begin by describing dialogic communication and suggest that it can be integrated into other forms of public discourse, such as deliberation and advocacy, in order to enrich them. We then describe our course and analyze data we gathered during the semester to assess how the course affected our students. Our analysis suggests that although we missed some opportunities to optimize our students' learning, the course successfully prepared them to plan and facilitate public dialogues on diversity issues, and motivated most of them to become more engaged with their community as democratic citizens and promoters of social justice. We end with lessons learned and ideas for future research and practice.

This conversation among five activists in Brooklyn, New York, explores the intersections between local anti-war organizing efforts and recent response to issues of gentrification, development, and displacement. Four of the five participants are university professors and members of a neighborhood peace group formed after 9/11; the other participant is an organizer for Families United for Racial and Economic Equality. All five live in the same diverse neighborhood. The central contradiction that emerges in the conversation is between the potential for building a more diverse movement around issues of gentrification and the equally great potential for gentrification to reproduce and deepen the very social divisions that have historically hampered organizing multi-racial movements across class lines.

We discuss how studying and creating zines in our composition classes allows our students to negotiate and explore the complexities of writing without the compulsions of many of the politically problematic commonplaces of composition pedagogy. We use zines to examine the unique ways in which their rhetorical devices address conflicts around questions of audience and diversity, as well as the particular questions that the zines raise about the politics of persuasion, our own writing practices, writing strategies that the zines suggest to us, and the construction of alternative communities.

Becoming “publicly active” as a Ph.D. student in English and Education at the University of Michigan was a slow and at times bewildering process, with periods of frustration punctuated by moments of exhilaration. Consistently I encountered exciting opportunities for public scholarship and then saw these efforts dismissed or ignored. On one hand, I was fortunate to collaborate with scholars such as Buzz Alexander, whose Prison Creative Arts Project facilitates theater and writing workshops in prisons throughout Michigan and puts on a stunning exhibition of artwork by Michigan prisoners every spring. At the other extreme, multiple professors admonished me to pursue social justice in other forums—in other words, they believe the academy simply is not geared for such work. In short, graduate school gave me both the desire for public engagement and considerable anxiety about whether to pursue it within academia.

Being situated on an international bordar allows higher-education institution to explore diverse cultural and linguistic venues for teaching and learning. Such is the case for workplace writing courses at the University of Texas at El Paso. Workplace writing, intercultural communication, service-learning, and bilingualism became the tools for exploring diversity, strengthening student identities, and bridging disciplinary, geographical. cultural, and linguistic borders. This article includes the voices of service-learning students, agency mentors, and faculty involved in an English-Spanish workplace writing course and shows how service-learning empowers students to explore and strengthen their diverse identities.

Review of Diversity and Citizenship Education: Global Perspectives, Edited by James A. Banks. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004

This special issue opens a dialogue among scholars from across the disciplines who are grappling with the theoretical, ethical and practical issues inherent in negotiating difference when interacting with the "Other" in their work in community-based literacy programs. The contributors to this issue help shape a conversation long overdue in service-learning. Given its intentionally interdisciplinary scope and the refreshing range of theories, rhetorical styles, methods of analysis, settings and populations considered in its pages, this issue is, well, diverse.

Meaningful change through service learning can only occur If service learning leaders build "embedded" relationships with community organizations. The paradox is that the mora engaged the relationship, the more intense the issues of race, class and power. Institutional racism tempts white activists to assume they know what Is best for a community. If they give in to this temptation they risk co-opting the community's agenda and diminishing the possibility for legitimate empowerment. Well-meaning service learning professionals must learn to navigate these risks by becoming allies rather than leaders in community organizations.

This article explains the procedure, content, and impact of a unique intergenerational exchange: the service-learning component of a capstone writing course focused on the complex genre of memoir. The investigation of memoir writing was conducted both theoretically and experientially as undergraduate writers worked in pairs to "ghost write" the memoirs of a fascinating group of senior citizens. This exploration of memoir—and of age as a frequently overlooked dimension of diversity—proved a powerful nexus for demonstrating the long-held belief that carefully-structured, community-based pedagogy significantly benefits its participants both affectively and academically.

This article examines a community-based writing assignment that invited first-year students to Intervene in controversies surrounding Chicago's Millennium Park. Despite the apparent diversity of student arguments, a single ideology permeated all student texts. Whether self identifying as liberal or conservative, students deployed almost identical rhetoric to assert that the park either embodied or failed to embody "democratic values." We learned that, however threatening it may be to our own Ideological Investments, we must push students to interrogate their foundational assumptions. Given currant orthodoxy about the morality of any action or idea labeled "democratic," it is important that teachers work to stimulate true diversity of opinion by challenging democracy" as a trump argument.

This article argues that traditional models of WAC too narrowly privilege academic discourse over other discourses and communities shaping the worlds in which our students live and work. Writing Across Communities represents a shift in paradigm informed by Ecocomposition, New Literacy Studies, and Sociolinguistics. A Writing Across Communities approach to writing program reform foregrounds dimensions of ethnolinguistic diversity and civic engagement in contrast to other models or WAC currently institutionalized across the nation. Writing Across Communities, as a resistance discourse, calls for transdisciplinary dialogue that demystifies the ways we make and use knowledge across communities of practice.

This paper describes a model for designing intentional, cross-cultural service-learning partnerships with K-8th grade elementary school students and their surrounding Latino communities. It builds from a local to a global context, working with immigrant populations in Idaho and extending to sister-school partnerships in Jalisco, Mexico. Student voices illustrate the model's ability increase global awareness and intercultural understanding when intentionally applied to a given culture.

In the five years of a newspaper project involving high school and university students that publishes an annual special edition exploring a diversity issue within the local community, several key pedagogical, political, and economic revisions have been made. Nevertheless, the bedrock principles of service-learning and civic journalism have remained constant. The project history shows that a sound theoretical foundation rooted in student and community education and awareness can withstand pressures of censorship by school administrators, ethical and pedagogical concerns that balance student safety with product integrity, and the economic need to become self-sufficient.

Review of Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison by Paula C. Johnson. New York: NYU Press, 2004. Paperback $19.00.

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.