What does it mean to teach civic engagement in the 21st Century writing classroom? In our digital and networked and globalized world, college composition instructors need to redefine literacy in ways that reflect the actual communication practices we and our students engage in. To this end, many compositionists are now integrating multimodal projects (that is, “texts” composed with digital/new media technologies so as to include images, video, audio, and alphabetical writing) into their classroom designs. These multimodal projects provide new opportunities for students to communicate with and for a public audience outside the classroom, and to foster community connections and engagement. In Spring 2010, I taught my first multimodal civic engagement class, an upper division writing and rhetoric course that included a community-based experiential learning project in partnership with a campus organization. I hoped that a project using a variety of media, technologies and modalities with a purpose and audience beyond the classroom would foster in students a sense of connection to their campus and teach them that they can use composition, rhetoric, and design skills to participate in public conversations around issues that matter to them and their community.

This article investigates the parameters of civic engagement through digital writing. Specifically, it examines the differences between slacktivism and activism against changing citizenship styles and definitions of civic action. With the goal of rethinking the relationship between civics, digital technology, and slacktivism, it outlines a digital writing project that uses social networking technologies to enact social change by increasing students’ awareness in terms of what counts as civic action in digital spaces. In particular, it draws upon student reflections from a digital writing class to illustrate how engaging Stuart Selber’s three components of computer literacy—the functional, critical, and rhetorical—can afford young citizens an aware and ultimately agentive role in terms of their online civic participation, as well as an opportunity to increase their social capital as digital citizens.

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.

Service learning presents students and teachers alike with emotionally fraught moments. Before these moments shape ideologies and worldviews, they give us sensations. Understanding these sensations is part of what theorists label the affective domain. Affect is a notion garnering much critical attention from compositionists writ large but little attention in the service learning literature. The field has much to gain from acknowledging that students and teachers both experience civic engagement rationally as well as affectively. One of the potential benefits is a more sensitive understanding of how various modes of civic engagement (e.g., volunteerism and activism) are socially, ideologically, and emotionally constructed.

Review of The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning by Editors Randy Stoecker and Elizabeth Tryon, with Amy Hilgendorf. Temple University Press, 2009.

Here are the major writing assignments, sequenced from English 101103, that Jonathan developed for his service-learning course on HIV and AIDS.

An (Em)bodied Workshop: When Service Learning Gets Bawdy explores the ways a student's perception about which bodies are and are not sexualized creates problems for that student when she attempts to run a writing group for senior citizens with Alzheimer's disease. This essay suggests that students engaging in service learning may import constructions of a mind/body split common in school settings to service learning sites as a way to authorize their presence in these sites. Students engaged in service learning need to be pushed to examine the ways their constructions of their work may erase the body.

In Queer Rhetorics, an upper-division service-learning writing course taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005, students used queer theory to frame their engagement with local LGBTQ non-profit organizations in Boulder. In their journals, students moved from responding personally to the course material and their volunteer work to generating their own critical inquiries into queer discourse, as well as community-based service projects. This essay argues that self-reflecting on their own sexual citizenship in the context of community engagement fosters students' critical understanding of the public rhetoric of sexuality and gender and the social norms that delimit our sexual worlds.

We know the drill: service learning is good. It's good for you, it's good for your students, and it's good for the community partners and the communities they serve. We know the drill but we still want to hear it, and we want to hear why.

This article presents an interdisciplinary advanced honors course: Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Marginalized Communities. Through this ' course and its service-learning applications, students discovered that discourses of gender, sexuality, and race are not simply theoretical—ultimately, they impact people's lives. I include an explanation of the curriculum and the service-learning applications in my design and facilitation of the course, as well as samples of student work and a partial "showcase" of the student's final community event. In addition to describing one course in particular, this article aims to explore service-learning in activist, educative, and research formats and the implications for our students, our own research and knowledge, and our communities.

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 essay examines Katrina's impact on service-learning pedagogy, in particular how the instability of the storm's aftermath has generated alternate approaches to service project planning and implementation. Tulane's mandatory service-learning requirement following Katrina led the authors to develop a joint project at New Orleans City Park, which combined five sections of writing students who worked clearing storm debris. The weekly movement from an idealized campus space through devastated areas of the city and park served as the basis for two complementary pedagogical approaches, one treating Katrina's disruption of space; the other treating the storm's disruption of time.

Rhetoric and composition now has a history of teaching, research, and engagement with communities. We also have a number of terms for describing this work, each with its own history: community literacy and service learning are but the two most common. The historical roots that led to community literacy have also yielded shoots of growth in the areas of public rhetoric, cultural rhetoric, ethnography, research, and professional and technical communication. Central to all these areas is the fundamental understanding that writing matters; it can make a difference for peoples, organizations, and institutions. Depending on the purposes and exigencies for writing in these contexts, community-based writing can mobilize people, inform policy, seed new initiatives, draw audiences to events and forums, allow for greater participation in decision making, and make decision making transparent. For the last decade and half, scholars in rhetoric and composition have worked hard to define our roles in facilitating writing in the public interest, though we have not often done so in ways that create a synergy around shared research interests or theoretical projects.

Review of Service-Learning in Technical and Professional Communication by Melody Bowdon and J. Blare Scott. New York: Longman, 2003.

Review of Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement by Linda Flower. Southern Illinois University Press, 2008.

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.

This essay explores student-authored ethnographies written by undergraduates in four sections of a service-learning course taught at Wayne State University in Detroit. I argue that the introductory sections of students’ ethnographic narratives provide particular insights into the relationship between the service experience, ethnographic inscription, and student subjectivities. Following a discourse analysis of student writing, I offer some thoughts about how instructors might improve the pedagogical pairing of ethnographic writing with service-learning experiences.

Service-learning pedagogies attempt to bridge the often-distant realms of work in the academy with that of the surrounding community. However, in practice, a true partnership among stakeholders can be challenging to achieve. For this project, I invited three former students and the director of a local non-profit to partner with me in an important aspect of academic work: course redesign. Through the lens of standpoint theory, we see that students and community partners hold unique standpoints, yet all too often their voices are marginalized. I assert that their standpoints offer essential contributions to the course re-design process.

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.

This article examines what it means when a university makes a multifaceted commitment to migration, taking note of both what can be accomplished through such a commitment and what tensions remain. At Fairfield University, engagement with migration is expressed in the curriculum, service-learning projects, faculty research, and in efforts to influence the national debate on immigration through the University's Center for Faith and Public Life. The philosophical context for this work on migration reflects, in part, the Jesuit Catholic tradition of the University. Service-learning courses across the curriculum involve work with immigrants. In a course on literacy, students assist children of immigrants at an adult literacy center.

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.

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.

My experiences teaching a service-learning composition class entitled Writing Women Safe that dealt with sexual violence against women point to a missing link between course content and community-based activism. Students in my all-female class wrote about and discussed the reality of rape, sometimes in the context of their own lives. However, for all the real talk about a real crime, our well-intentioned service component, the design of informational pamphlets for a rape crisis center, did not draw on students' personal resources, nor evoke a believable sense of "change agency." Greater engagement with avenues for action through writing, perhaps via the community partner's work in the local justice system, as well as deeper reflection on students' strengths and positioning, are central concerns as I revise my approach to the course. Faced with the prospect of one day implementing Writing Women Safe at my new institution, I argue that, as educators and scholars committed to community-based learning, we must develop partnerships that push all involved more deeply into honest assessment of needs, resources, and perspective.

Although conventional academic wisdom discourages young scholars from becoming involved in community-based work, the growing interest in service-learning and community literacy reflected in contemporary scholarship in composition and within the larger academy suggests that these are now viable paths to pursue throughout the trajectory of a scholarly career. Ellen Cushman maintains that by using service-learning and activist research methods to bridge the gap between university-based knowledge and community-based knowledge, “faculty members can have readily apparent accountability, and their intellectual work can have highly visible impact” (“Public Intellectual” 335). The growing visibility of community-based scholarship and practice has allowed emerging scholars to set an agenda that our scholarly work must become legitimized and that the climate of resistance to conducting community-based work early in our professional careers must change. I suggest that we work toward mainstream acceptance of the scholarly value of community-based work to support young scholars’ careers while maintaining the edginess of this type of work by addressing key critiques.

While community literacy and service-learning are now established areas within the larger field of Composition and Rhetoric, I have been in the field long enough to remember when these were new areas – a not so long ago period where what counted as “scholarship” and “appropriate sources” was still very much in flux. During this period, our work wasn’t quite so comfortably situated within the mainstream and our very marginality pushed us to invent (and re-invent) the work our scholarship and, perhaps, ourselves as scholars.

This essay explores the ways in which narratives pieces (beginning with my own personal narrative, moving to the community outreach project that I have been working with, and finally through the narratives of my students) fit together to inform my work and I hope the work of other emerging scholars interested in community outreach. Ultimately, when read in conjunction with and respect to one another the narratives help to illustrate the ways in which community partnerships provide a wonderful merging of civic engagement and situated practice that makes the triad of teaching, outreach and scholarship dynamically interact and complimentary.

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.

Community is a tricky word: although it often connotes an inclusive and harmonious collaborative space, too often it signifies a site of struggle and negotiation, an attempt to find a common framework for conflicting and seemingly contradictory impulses. One of the marks of those active in "community literacy studies," "service-learning" and '"engaged scholarship" is the desire to place themselves in the struggle to build a common framework for collaboration and, within that architecture, to move forward towards building a shared notion of educational, social, and/or political rights.

If service education is to avoid the many cultural pitfalls that have been signaled to date in the literature, it seems crucial that town-gown articulations be nurtured as organic, reciprocating, knowledge-producing endeavors that position the ethnographic encounter at their epistemological center. For these articulations to be organic, they must grow from encounters between graduate students and community organizations that begin very early in students' scholarly careers—perhaps even as undergraduates in the same locale. This organic relationship should be grounded in writing with the organization or for the organization. My decades of embedding service learning in an undergraduate course in technical communication and in many internships I have directed have shown me that writing with and/or for the organization is a key step in the ethnographic encounter that community-based education involves. Students come to know the local culture first as one of its discursive agents, the better to discern if they want to pursue this agency in further scholarship.

Rejecting the conventional academic wisdom that tells us to “put community-based programs and partnerships on hold or on the side until we achieve tenure,” I resolve this day to hold my multiple subjectivities together by remaining holistic, committed, concerned, connected, and compassionate, but most importantly, centered in the constellation of my community. I will not be (re)moved. I will not be situated in an Academic Siberia – cold, isolated, alone, without connection, without story, without experiential memory. Upon traversing the borderlands of the Academy, I cling to my bundle – the intricacies and nuances of my personal landscape, my contested identity, and the artifacts of that contestation, recognizing that validation and reward lies in the confluence of Civic Engagement and Holistic Academic Practice—the meta-language of significant contribution.

The goals of community-centered courses in universities are often in tension with ensuring that a community acquires tools and knowledge useful to its own development and preservation. In Community Cultural Development, an undergraduate seminar taught at Tulane University, the attempt was made to harmonize these goals through creating profiles of elders and tradition bearers of the Treme Community in New Orleans. Included are responses of students to the class and their work in the community, along with examples of the community profiles they created. This work is framed by an overview of the course and its project that places it in the context of emerging tensions in Treme and the civic engagement movement in higher education.

Mercy College professors in Toledo, Ohio responded to Hurricane Katrina through a disaster pedagogy. Students in composition classes created research wikis and participated in email dialogues and exchanges with University of New Orleans students. A new course, Service in Action: The Sociological Impact of Hurricane Katrina, was also created involving an alternative, volunteer-based spring break trip. This reflection explores how communal engagement is shaped, augmented, and challenged by the use of emergent technologies, and how, through the lens of service-learning, students may find their own voices, coming to recognize that they have the power and where-with-all to effect change.

The article describes two service learning projects that engaged our Delgado Community College students in a sense of community that transcended their personal trials. A regional accrediting agency afforded local conference registrants the opportunity to participate in a Habitat for Humanity construction project; more than a hundred volunteered. What had been a diaspora of historical proportions effected a new community spirit, one borne of mutual loss and committed to restoration and rebuilding.

Two problems catapulted Wendy Rihner into service learning: Hurricane Katrina's destruction of Louisiana's coast and the lack of context plaguing so many college composition courses. Rihner undertook a service-learning project with an English  Composition II course in the spring of 2007 that radically changed her pedagogical philosophy. "Providing Context" discusses Rihner's desire to provide her students with a context for writing argumentative essays while raising awareness of the ecological disaster that is unique to Louisiana.

In this essay, I focus on the service in service learning. I consider what might happen if the term "service learning" was inverted--to learning service. I wonder if such an inversion can help instructors, students, and community partners critically evaluate the service they do. I describe "reading service as text" as a tool for learning service. To read service as text, learners question the goals, values, forms, and assumptions embedded ln distinctive forms of service. The guiding questions fer this essay are: (1) What does it mean to learn service, (2) how can service be read as text, and (3) how can best practices be reconsidered as standards for service?

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.

This essay examines the impact of difference in the service-learning classroom and offers an overview of three approaches to creating community while engaging students in dialogues on difference. The authors reflect on the local pedagogies they create in response to the anger, tensions, and challenges that arise In the classroom and at the service learning site. By composing this essay together, the authors hope to embody the collaborative nature of service learning courses.

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 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.

This article describes the development of a community writing and publishing program, the DiverseCity Writing Series, from 1998 to 2005. Starting as a one-time workshop between a community college English service-learning course and a local women’s advocacy organization, the DiverseCity Writing Series has grown into a year-round partnership between the SLCC Community Writing Center and multiple organizations throughout the Salt Lake City metropolitan area. This mutually beneficial collaboration for the college and the community has been achieved through critical inquiry regarding issues of ownership and discourse as well as the dedication of community members and organizational partners.

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.

Our goal for this special issue was to gathersome of the most experienced teacher-scholars of community-engaged writing and rhetoric and ask them how they tend and refine their courses in order to keep them meaningful, relevant, and sustainable. In a sense we view this volume as a way to maintain the momentum created by such collections as the 1997 Writing the Community edited by Linda Adler-Kassner, Robert Crooks, and Ann Watters, which helped launch the American Association for Higher Education's effort to increase institutional awareness of service-learning through intra- and interdisciplinary scholarship, and the 2000 special issue of Language and Learning Across the Disciplines edited by Ellen Cushman, which emphasizes matters of institutionalization. Both publications pay special attention to the situated practices of educators in long-term programs and partnerships. We extend that discussion with a collection that foregrounds pivotal pedagogical decisions and generative questions.

Review of The Measure of Service Learning: Research Scales to Assess Student Experience, Edited by Robert G. Bringle, Mindy A. Phillips, and Michael Hudson. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association (APA), 2003

This article connects the author’s practice, Fulkerson’s “map” of composition studies, and insights from critical race studies, specifically whiteness studies, to argue that even though many or even most community-based writing courses fit into a critical/cultural studies-type philosophy, such an orientation is limited. The article argues for “community-engaged procedural rhetorical,” in which students would learn in community-engaged writing courses the meta-skills to analyze what strategies and tactics worked rhetorically and materially to make change in a given situation, and to extrapolate this learning toward the future.

From its beginnings in 1992, the Service-Learning Writing Project at Michigan State University has viewed the composition classroom as a place where rhetorical processes and democratic practices naturally converge. A number of core democratic principles, pedagogical challenges, ongoing conversations, and shared convictions about education for democracy continue to animate and energize the Project’s faculty—including a consistent emphasis on encouraging democratic discourses and learning practices in the writing classroom, a search for pedagogical techniques that connect theory and practice, and efforts to reinvigorate the teaching of the Humanities as important and necessary cultural work in the public interest.

This article chronicles changes in the author’s service-learning pedagogy, concentrating on his recent attention to genre and its consequences for course design. The cumulative influences of rhetoric, discourse community theory, collaborative assignments, and genre theory are traced. The core claim, however, is that instructors should help students grasp the concept of genre as social action. Included are descriptions of assignments for first-year and advanced courses, plus student samples of genre analysis memos.

This article traces the development of a sophomore composition service-learning course, using data gathered from a formal qualitative study as well as subsequent teacher reflection. Course redesign has been guided by the need to balance the initial emphasis on and measurement of academic outcomes with exploration of the ethics of service. The author shares her emerging set of best practices, in which successful critical reflection is best supported by an explicit, front-loaded discussion of ethical terminology and student standpoints.