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… Continue reading The Affective Dimensions of Service Learning by William DeGenaro

Organized into ten chapters and an epilogue, the book focuses on recurrent themes that the research uncovered: organizations’ motivations for taking part in service learning partnerships, issues of timing, fit, management, communication and diversity. Chapters One, Ten, and the Epilogue are written by the editors, while the individual chapters are authored by the graduate students… Continue reading Review of The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning by Randy Stoecker and Elizabeth A. Tryon reviewed by Paula Mathieu

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.… Continue reading Composing Cultural Diversity and Civic Literacy: English Language Learners as Service Providers by Adrian Wurr

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… Continue reading Toiling in ‘the land of dreamy scenes’: Time, Space, and Service-Learning Pedagogy by Joe Letter & Judith Kemerait Livingston

This article offers both a theoretical underpinning and a case study of practice as exhibits of a more democratic community engagement praxis for rhetoric and composition educators. The case study featured in the article suggests re-positioning the importance of collaborative and democratic engagement as the cornerstone of successful community engagement work. While the case is… Continue reading Inception to Implementation: Feminist Community Engagement via Service-Learning by Johanna Phelps-Hillen

Since I began teaching a course titled Writing in the Community, I have been fascinated with how narratives deepen students’ service-learning experiences. In their article “Narrative Learning in Adulthood,” M. Carolyn Clark and Marsha Rossiter say that stories “draw us into an experience at more than a cognitive level; they engage our spirit, our imagination,… Continue reading The Role of Narrative in Student Engagement by Sarah Hardison O’Connor

Co-authored by a professor and two undergraduates and drawing on interviews with community partners, this essay analyzes a community writing project to document the Civil Rights Movement in a northern city. In collaboration with a local African American history museum, students interviewed 22 African Americans ranging in age from 62-90 years old who lived in… Continue reading Counternarratives: Community Writing and Anti-Racist Rhetoric by Laurie Grobman, Elizabeth Kemmerer, & Meghan Zebertavage

Scholarship in community writing and service-learning has called attention to the lack of community partner voices in the assessments of writing partnerships. This article foregrounds those missing perspectives by reporting on the consequences of a community literacy program, Writing for Change, from the perspective of the high school youth involved. Analysis of high school student… Continue reading What Changes When We “Write for Change?”: Considering the Consequences of a High School-University Writing Partnership by Heather Lindemann & Justin Lohr

As our first volume as co-editors of Reflections goes to press, we look back at the journal’s achievements and forward to shepherding it through an exciting period of growth in the subfield of community-engaged writing. We are at once committed to upholding its history of quality, cutting-edge scholarship—which has contributed significantly to new ways of… Continue reading Editors’ Introduction by Laurie Grobman & Deborah Mutnick

Coeditors Laurie Grobman and Deborah Mutnick seek submissions for the Fall 2018 volume of Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning. Continuing a nearly 20-year history of leading writing and rhetoric’s scholarly and theoretical study of service learning, public rhetoric, community writing, civic writing, and community literacy, the journal publishes wide-ranging… Continue reading Call for Submissions Fall 2018 (Closed)