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.

What is the origin of oppression? Why do we hear so much about it from some circles, and yet can rarely identify it when it confronts us in our everyday lives? Charlie Manter and I, April Maltz, set out to answer this question within the context of our Honors Seminar, Gender, Sex, Race, and Marginalized Communities. We focused on rhetorically analyzing oppression as it occurs in American society using Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory, which states that our reality is represented through the use of symbols and that it is created by the terministic screens through which we view these symbols and by drawing on Tracy Ore and Marilyn Frye's theories of oppression. Tracy Ore claims that oppression is institutionalized, and that there are five types of institutional oppression: family, media, education, state and public policy, and economy.

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.

In a 2002 article, Patricia Roberts-Miller asked if rhetorical theory has a place for what she then called "principled dissent and sincere outrage." This article addresses that challenge, as the author follows a year of living in and writing for a community in Atlanta that works with the homeless in that city. In it, she argues that, if there is a place for dissenting rhetoric, it is taking place in marginalized movements and publications like the one published by Atlanta's Open Door Community. Hers is a follow-up of two previous discussions (both written with Paula Mathieu of Boston College) on what these authors are calling "a rhetoric of dissent."

This essay establishes a context for discussing how community literacy pedagogy can benefit from critical engagement with the rhetorical actions of a grassroots social movement. Drawing from ongoing community literacy work in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, I detail the prospects of speaking truth to power in relation to composition studies’ ongoing skepticism of rhetorics of social protest. I end by arguing that there are central aspects associated with oppositional rhetorics that can be encountered in community literacy initiatives and used to support forms of social change often excluded from conciliatory rhetorics.

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.

This article presents interviews with six composition and rhetoric teachers who teach writing in prison. Mina Shaughnessy’s 1976 article “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” is used as a heuristic with which to look at this material. As little work is available on the experience of teaching writing in prison, these interviews are a preliminary step in describing and understanding this transformative experience. The differences between the prison writing teachers and the teachers Shaughnessy describes illuminates how much the field of composition has grown in the last forty years. The interviews with these six teachers speak to the experiences of teachers in community outreach teaching situations and may be a step in understanding and articulating these experiences.

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

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.

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.

Writing assignments carry political ramifications even when they attempt neutrality; students should learn that all writing occurs within larger contexts of power. To accomplish this goal, I advocate instruction derived from practices of critical rhetoric, critical revision, and critical discourse analysis. Rhetoric education, based on Donald Lazere's Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy, trains students not only for academic writing, but for citizenry. Students write what David Bartholomae calls "practical criticism," critically revising their own texts. Also, students may practice the methodology of critical discourse analysis, as prescribed by Thomas Huckin, in a course that integrates civic literacy with introductory CDA assignments.

"Educating Future Public Workers: Can We Make Inquiry Professional?" begins with an observation: students in CIT 300: Communicating in the Helping Professions are preparing for the very human service careers that caused community residents in Ellen Cushman's The Struggle and the Tools such grief. Exploring options from community literacy research for addressing this contradiction, the paper commends a problem-based pedagogy focused on collaborative inquiry and knowledge building designed to represent the agency and expertise of others. The paper dramatizes this model of rhetorical education through the work of a pre-professional named Hillary who interned at a shelter for women and children seeking sanctuary from domestic abuse. The paper follows Hillary conducting a series of "rival readings" on the shelter's no dating policy with theorists, professionals, and, most importantly, those most directly affected by the rule: the shelter's residents. "Educating Future Public Workers" argues that community-based rhetorical research can offer faculty and students outside of English both a theoretical frame and a practical guide to community partnerships.

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.

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.

Review of Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics by Elenore Long. Parlor Press, 2008.

As I am a New Orleans native and doctoral candidate in the field of rhetoric and composition, Hurricane Katrina has forever impacted both my personal and academic lives. Relying upon the work of Sandra Gilbert and other trauma theorists, this essay presents a microcosm of my dissertation. It offers examples from New Orleans bloggers who chronicle their post-Katrina rebuilding efforts, and analyzes how writing in generative, on line spaces calls worldwide attention to a city still suffering. It also reflects upon my attempts to make Hurricane Katrina a teachable moment, and discusses the lessons I have learned when students react without empathy to assigned readings.

Review of Who Says? Working-Class Rhetoric, Class Consciousness, and Community by William DeGenaro, editor University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007.

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.

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.

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.

Drawing on Donald Schön’s concept of the reflective practitioner and the classical rhetorical concept of stasis, this article observes the habits and tactics of experienced communityengaged instructors of writing and rhetoric. It suggests that a complete reflective practice, combining reflection in and on action, contributes to sustaining effective programs and practices. In moments of tension or apparent crisis, effective reflective practitioners identify critical stasis points effectively, creating opportunities for positive change. The stases of media, language, repertoire, theory, appreciative systems, and role frames are explored.

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.

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 describes a service-learning-based capstone course for MA students in Professional Writing and Editing at the University of Cincinnati and illuminates the potential advantages of service-learning on an advanced level. Of particular benefit are the rhetorical and ethical challenges that partnerships with nonprofits can raise, requiring students to draw not only on their writing and design skills but also on their informed judgment. Our experience suggests, however, that, for students preparing for writing careers, the goals of “doing good” or “becoming good citizens,” often cited as desirable outcomes for service-learning, should be secondary to the goal of developing a strong professional ethic.

Early, theoretically informed program assessment can be particularly beneficial for professional and technical writing programs that seek to incorporate and sustain service-learning approaches. This article adapts Burkean pentadic analysis for use as a form of institutional critique and illustrates the power of this method through a case study of its application at one state university. The method helps practitioners to understand and respond to the complex motives that drive service-learning programs within their local scenes as they extend their work beyond the university into the community.

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.

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

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