The writing I received in my first-semester composition class at Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana, the semester immediately following Hurricane Katrina was stunning with respect to both student commitment and narrative sophistication. In this essay, I analyze a representative example of this writing entitled "life During Katrina" by a student I have called "K." The student's essay developed a thesis, documented a chronology, increasingly included detail, naturally included dialogue, and reached a sensitive and sophistication. In this essay, I analyze a representative sincerely reflective conclusion. Moreover, the student (like my other students in that class) was extraordinarily committed to revision, working diligently on issues of both grammar and clarity. My own conclusion to the remarkable post-Katrina student writing I experienced is that our teaching of Freshman Composition can be much more artificial than we really desire it to be. How to make first-year writing courses more meaningful to students is an imperative that I believe we must continue to explore.

Few of my students knew people from either the New Orleans area or those who had moved to Michigan following Hurricane Katrina. I learned of housing problems that arose from slow payment by government departments responsible for the beleaguered New Orleans residents. So like many teachers around the country, I thought that current events would lend themselves to "teaching moments." However, I noted that in order to raise my students' level of civic awareness, it would be important for them to look at their own state and city. Many times by studying the needs of our neighborhoods we can connect to the plight of people who live far from us.

Beginning with the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the author, his students, fellow teachers, and Southeastern Louisiana, the article focuses on lessons learned about writing and teaching through the experience. The article tells the story of Katrina: In Their Own Words, an anthology of storm stories by local students and teachers that the author edited, and what he learned from this experience about the limits of academic writing and the value of voice. The final section focuses on a risky English 101 assignment on writing music that grew out of the storm, how this assignment led to a radio program and anthology, and what this assignment taught him about seizing the "teaching moment."

In 2006, a college professor found herself teaching freshmen composition students during the fall semester at Xavier University of Louisiana. This in itself was not unusual; what was different was that this "fall" semester was starting in January, thanks to Hurricane Katrina. Whether an out-of-towner who rode out the storm on campus or a New Orleans native who lost everything to the disaster, each student had been affected in some way, as had their still-shaken professor who was aware that, in time, not only would the shock wear off but the all-important memories and stories would fade. Throughout the semester Laborde shared her writing and her photographs (most taken in her recovery work as an Exterior Damage Assessor for the City of New Orleans) in order to encourage students to share their own observations and experiences in the form of journal entries and essays.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, writing instructors at the University of New Orleans felt compelled to incorporate personal, social, and political aspects of the storm into their classrooms. In this article, individual instructors discuss a particular pedagogical approach assignment, class theme, or teaching strategy that we adopted, exploring its rationale and reflecting on our students' reactions and responses to place-based and civic-minded pedagogies during a time of crisis.

Review of Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum by Eli Goldblatt.Research in the Teaching of Rhetoric and Composition Series. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007.

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 four books including: Todd DeStigter. Reflections of a Citizen Teacher: Literacy, Democracy and the Forgotten Students of Addison High. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2001. Mark Lyons and August Tarrier, eds. Espejos Y Ventanas/Mirrors and Windows. Philadelphia: New City Community Press, 2004. Lena Sze, ed. Chinatown Lives: Oral Histories from Philadelphia's Chinatown. Philadelphia: New City Community Press, 2004. Mark Salzman. True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall. New York: Vintage Books, 2003.

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.

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 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.

Reflecting upon current research and my own pedagogical practices when teaching and administering client-consultant projects in business and technical writing courses, I outline how critical stakeholder theory can help to establish an ethic of care among the participants in client-consultant projects and connect students’ professional and civic lives.

In response to recent calls for internationalization and greater social relevance in professional communication teaching and research, this article links service-learning pedagogy with participatory action research (PAR) methods. A multi-year collaborative project in Kenya illustrates both the challenges and the positive outcomes of international partnerships, which include increased intercultural communication skills, significant contributions to the literature, invigoration of teaching and curriculum, and the development of global civic awareness among all participants. In their recommendations for faculty interested in developing similar partnerships, the authors highlight the importance of understanding the theoretical foundations of service-learning pedagogy and PAR methods, and advocate for the incorporation of exploratory site visits, pre-departure preparation for both students and faculty, critical reflection, efforts to ensure reciprocal benefits, and ongoing outcomes assessment.

This article is a teacher narrative examining the experiences of a teacher in a correctional facility writing workshop and how those experiences led her to understand that in order to effectively teach the workshop, she had to achieve a deeper understanding of the world of the prison as well as see that the success of the workshop depends on honoring the expertise of all of its members. Inmate work is included in the article that comments on both the importance of writing in their lives as inmates as well as reveals how the workshop setting allows for reflection upon and examination of their lives.

This article discusses a service-learning project for an English Composition class, focusing on the theme of incarcerated women. Through class projects, which included a book drive and research for the group Prison Watch, the students and teacher learned to negotiate the tricky demands of audience and worked to develop a new model of successful service learning.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.