Front matter for Reflections Special Winter Issue, 2017 to 2018.

This article offers a case study of the development and implementation of a free activist and leadership course for members of the community planning on running for elected office. The article describes how the course was developed, including an explanation of the partnership between the Latino Leadership Institute (LLI) and the University of Central Florida’s United Faculty of Florida (UCF-UFF), which resulted in the creation of an Orlando LLI chapter. The Electoral Activism and Leadership Academy (EALA), as the course was called, was motivated by two disability methodologies: first, a “madness narrative methodology” (Fields), wherein “representations are fragmented and nonrational,” even “resisting objectivity, linearity, and rational progression,” and secondly, a “nothing about us without us” methodology (Fields), which advocates the need for open discussions about action with populations who would be affected by such action. These methodologies helped reduce anxiety around the subject, offering a space for instructors and participants to participate as and when they could, share their stories, and get advice. This paper demonstrates that when oppressive cultural and political climates fragment bodies and identities of marginalized people, that fragmentation becomes the catalyst for opportunities of resistance. These fragmentations ultimately are representative of the cracks in oppressive systems, giving rise to the urgent need for the inclusivity of underrepresented or neglected perspectives, voices, and bodies to achieve everyday rhetorical resistance.

This article explores the dynamic practice of inviting community members to grade college students on their work in community-engaged partnerships. The authors articulate theories of writing assessment with theories of reciprocity to argue that community-based student evaluations can be a valid and ethical form of assessment, and discuss a case study in which local youth graded college students to offer eight best practices for implementing community-based assessment. As reciprocity is often underemphasized in practice, community evaluations provide a strategy for shifting power toward community members, potentially reinvigorating applications of reciprocity to make them more substantial and meaningful.

Review of Genre and the Performance of Publics by editors Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi.

Review of Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy by Eric Darnell Pritchard.

“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” —Iowa Representative Steve Kin

Review of South Asian in the Mid-South: Migrations of Literacies by Iswari P. Pandey.

Review of Collaborative Imagination by Paul Feigenbaum.

#Charlottesville. In the moment of transition between summer and fall, the events in Charlottesville called into question the United States’ commitment to equality, equal rights, and racial justice.

This essay focuses on the pedagogical implications of teaching Atatürk’s “Address to the Youth” for a more inclusive and diverse understanding of global rhetorics in the U.S. writing classroom. We propose that the public work of rhetorical instruction includes helping students develop as global citizen leaders by allowing them to explore and critically become aware of various national cultures and rhetorical traditions across the world. Integrating non-Western public rhetorics into the U.S. writing classroom challenges students in this context to write outside of the classical conventions of rhetoric and affords students to mobilize a new discourse for civic action.

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 Reading, Pennsylvania during the 1960s and 1970s Civil Rights Movement. Beyond the 22 oral histories recorded, transcribed, and housed at the museum, students, community members, and the professor researched, wrote, preserved, and shared a history of the Civil Rights Movement as experienced by African American members of the local community. Aligned with the “political turn” in community-writing partnerships advocated by Shannon Carter and Deborah Mutnick (7), the coauthors argue that collaboratively producing and studying local civil rights history is a form of anti-racist writing pedagogy. The rhetorical, historical project under study illuminates the rhetorical and powerful nature of current narratives of race and racism. As we and all our collaborators documented Civil Rights era history together, we began to circulate layers of counternarratives that both expose and challenge racial realities in productive ways.

Well, this is it. My last introduction as editor. Soon it will be time to pass the editor’s baton to our incoming co-editors, Laurie Grobman and Deborah Mutnick. I wish them well, and I look forward to working with them during this transition stage until Fall 2017.

This study examines the intersection of the “bootstraps” American Dream1 and the América envisioned by four first-generation U.S. Latinx sixth graders in an urban English Language Learners class. The students participated in a joint Photovoice writing and photography project about the American Dream with students from a liberal arts college and articulated the importance of the journey toward their dreams. Sharing their narratives and photographs in public forums, the students challenged the individualist American Dream discourse, underscoring a collective approach instead. The outcomes foreground previously-silenced voices and provide an example of culturally relevant pedagogy within a structured literacy curriculum.

This article describes the value of cross-campus collaborations for community-based learning. We argue that community-based learning both provides unique opportunities for breaking academic silos and invites campus partnerships to make ambitious projects possible. To illustrate, we describe a course “Writing for Social Justice” that involved created videos for our local YWCA’s Racial Justice Program. We begin by discussing the shared value of collaboration across writing studies and librarianship (our disciplinary orientations). We identify four forms of cross-campus collaboration, which engaged us in working with each other, with our community partner, and with other partners across campus. From there, we visualize a timeline, turning from the why of cross-campus collaborations to the how. Finally, we underscore the need to name and claim—to value and cultivate—cross-campus collaborations for community-based learning.

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, our heart, and this engagement is complex and holistic.” Narratives give broader context to students’ service, foster critical consciousness, help students believe they can make a contribution in their own communities, and contribute to making service-learning a transformative experience, all outcomes that remind us of the importance of the humanities in forming active citizens.

The proportion of young women in the juvenile justice system has increased substantially since the nineties, yet the rhetoric surrounding them remains under-studied and under-critiqued. The oppressive nature of this rhetoric thwarts the achievement of gender equity in juvenile justice, undermining the reforms that have been recommended over years of research. The following analysis examines this rhetoric for the ways in which it silences women and furthers gendered oppression in system; it also offers critical cautions regarding existing approaches to gender-responsive programming. By acknowledging the subalternity of young justice-involved women, further studies and community collaborations can be taken up to close the distance between the actual experiences and knowledges of young women and the rhetorical constructions of them that have long informed policy, programming, and daily interaction.

Review of From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help: Critical Perspectives on White-Authored Narratives of Black Life by editors Clare Oberon Garcia, Vershawn Ashanti Young, and Charise Pimentel.

Review of Democracy’s Education: Public Work, Citizenship, & The Future of Colleges and Universities by editor Harry C. Boyte.

Review of Historias de Éxito within Mexican Communities: Silenced Voices by Octavio Pimentel.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 17, Issue 1, Spring 2017 issue.

This paper uses interviews with five publicly engaged, university-employed sociologists or folklorists in Houston to illuminate ways that rhetoric and composition scholars studying composition history can connect our research projects to nonacademic communities near our campuses. Drawing from covenantal ethics, it argues that we stand to re-see our work’s significance if, starting with general education classes like first-year composition, we share our research with members of nearby nonacademic communities and allow members of those communities to give our research new interpretations and uses.

Review of Civic Work Civic Lessons: Two Generations Reflect on Public Service by Thomas Ehrlich and Ernestine Fu.

Review of Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean by Kevin A. Browne.

“Walk out, dance, rise up, and demand an end to violence,” serves as a prompt for One Billion Rising, Eve Ensler’s Global V-Day: Stop Violence Against Women Movement. One Billion Rising asks women and those who love them to gather in dance, protest, and voice in a globally staged effort to demand an end to gender-based violence. This essay analyzes a One Billion Rising installation with particular focus on ways a campus community engages with and understands personal trauma as impacted by publicly staged trauma movements. Cvetkovich’s (2012) “public feelings” project and Berlant’s (2011) “cruel optimism” provide a theoretical framework to consider ways One Billion Rising constructs private bodies as representations of public opposition to violence and its aftermath. Closing thoughts consider how reproducers of civic engagement and resistance, and those most intimate with sexual violence and its trauma, interact with the One Billion Rising charge.

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 situated in technical and professional communication, it affords an interdisciplinary representation of community engagement.

Four examples of Iraq veterans’ self-sponsored writing and media compositions are reviewed in order to develop a rhetoric of “witnessing” (Oliver, “Witnessing and Testimony” 80) with which to engage veterans’ writing. Particular attention is paid to how this rhetoric can help reframe anxieties that accompany faculty work with veterans in composition classes and in higher education more generally.

Review of Warrior Writers: A Collection of Writing & Artwork By Veterans editors Lovella Calica and Kevin Basl.

This essay supplements previous studies on effective strategies for instructing veterans in the first year writing classroom. Those studies typically focus on students who identify as veterans, but there are many veterans entering American universities who do not reveal their past military experiences. This essay explores one approach of developing a first year writing course that responds to the experiences of “stealth” veterans while simultaneously meeting the educational needs of all the students. I contend that a rhetorical education approach to writing instruction allows veterans to connect their writing with both citizenship and their former military service, and may reduce the divide between veteran and nonveteran students. I focus on how a citizenship pedagogy could allow veterans to see a stronger purpose for their academic work and to develop an understanding of how citizens can make decisions through inquiry.

Poem by Jenny Pacanowski.

Review essay of When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans by Paula Caplan and See Me For Who I Am: Student Veterans’ Stories of War and Coming Home by David Chrisinger.

The CCCC position statement on student veterans (2015) reminds writing program administrators (WPAs) of their responsibility to prepare faculty to understand not only the challenges these returning students may face but also the assets they bring with them. This essay argues that writing programs must develop faculty education programs that go beyond solo workshops to articulate what it means to be veteran friendly. Specifically, this essay identifies and describes a special-interest-group (or SIG) model for instructor education. This SIG relies on a micro-curriculum to promote a mode of “uncoverage” in learning about student veterans (Reid, 2004). Instructor reflections from a pilot program identify and define characteristics that help to articulate what veteran friendly means in local contexts including awareness of student-veteran issues, empathy toward student veterans, and confidence in working with student veterans.

During the post 9/11 period, veteran writing programs—led by grassroots movements such as Warrior Writers and the Combat Paper Project—have proliferated across the US. Clinical and anecdotal evidence shows writing is an effective means to address the trauma of warfare; focusing on the unnatural experience of combat, PTSD and moral injury. Most importantly, the writing groups provide an informal, supportive and communal environment in which veterans share stories with each other, and with the civilian population. This essay follows the story of Nathan Lewis, an Iraq War veteran and an influential (and beloved) member of the veteran writing community. It blends journalism, by a writer following the “Solutions Journalism model, with academic inquiry—from the perspective of the soldier/veteran and the journalist/witness. Nathan’s story of war trauma and writing (through multiple interviews) is threaded through seminal moments in post-war literature, trauma theory and the concept of witnessing

The authors offer an introduction to the special issue on veterans’ writing, highlighting the four major areas of work that emerge in the issue: 1) veterans’ writing in extracurricular settings, whether in community projects and writing groups or specific programs based on veterans’ wellness, healing, and recovery; 2) veterans’ writing in the composition classroom on university campuses or at military bases; 3) faculty development initiatives that help prepare university faculty, instructors, and TAs for their work with veterans in the classroom. A fourth area centers around veterans’ creative works—poetry, in particular—and reviews of the literature of veterans studies and veterans’ writing.

In this paper, the authors introduce the voluntary education center (VEC), which is a multi-school campus located on military bases in the United States and worldwide that offers accredited undergraduate and graduate degrees to service members and their families. The VEC combines military and higher education elements, offering a productive site of study for the complex interactions between writing instructors and student-veterans in this community of practice. Findings from interviews with five VEC writing instructors offer perspectives on teaching student-veterans in a non-traditional academic environment and illustrate the strategies faculty deploy as they engage with student-veterans, as well as the resources and support they seek. Implications for faculty in traditional higher education settings who work with increasing numbers of veterans are explored.

While many colleges and universities have earned a “military friendly” designation, too few offer opportunities for faculty to learn about military culture and the specific issues facing student veterans as they transition from active duty to student status. This article chronicles the authors’ experiences with and approaches to a workshop series, “Working with Post-9/11 Student-Veterans: A Faculty Primer,” which we have facilitated over the last several years at Colorado State University. Stressing the importance of a strength-based (versus deficit) model for the workshops and the integral role of student-veterans’ participation in the workshops, the essay offers an overview of strategies, common themes, materials and outcomes for faculty development workshops about this important issue.

This article describes a community outreach project for veterans with spinal cord injury and disease (SCI/D) that was particularly effective as a short-term veteran writing group. Sponsored by a grant from the Paralyzed Veterans of America, The University of Arizona hosted an outreach project for veterans with SCI/D in October 2013. When situated in a trusted community of veterans with spinal cord injury and disease, reflection afforded a space for reauthoring experiences wherein veterans were able to make meaning from military experiences. In this manuscript, we highlight reflective writing as a fundamental component of the community outreach because reflection was essential for identifying and sharing strengths to carry forward.

Review of Generation Vet: Composition, Student-Veterans, and Post-9/11 University by editors Sue Doe and Lisa Lanstraat.

In the fall of 2014, Troy University partnered with the Alabama Humanities Foundation, working in conjunction with the Maine Humanities Council, to provide a veterans’ reading group to wounded warriors at the Warrior Transition Battalion at Fort Benning, GA. The program, Story Swap: Literature and the Veteran Experience, consisted of five, ten-week sessions. During weekly meetings, veterans came together to share dinner and swap stories. While reading and discussing short stories, novels, poetry, essays, and art, the veterans learned much about each other and themselves. In this article, Paige Paquette, an assistant professor of English and the group facilitator, will discuss her involvement in the planning and implementation of the program. Six of the participating veterans will share their experiences in a literary program that allowed them to realize they all have a story worth telling.

Ecological engagement is about attending to the possibilities of dwelling in a place; skunkwork is a way of orienting this dwelling. Skunkwork refers to creative, self-coordinated, collective work in informal spaces of learning and reminds us that ecologically attuned work in the world can promote unexpected, yet collectively desired, change. In this essay, we describe how we used skunkwork to orient our ecological engagement in two workshops on ‘community resilience.’ In both workshops, Boulder Creek became our commonplace, with its history of flooding and abatements as well as one city’s planning and management of crisis and sustainability. We draw from our respective home ecologies and our collective experiences in these workshops to highlight how four attributes of skunkwork and ecological engagement, namely proximity, movement, ecological narration, and weak theory, contribute to community engagement scholarship and advocacy.

Engaged public science communication can support community resilience as policymakers, resource managers, and citizens come to terms with the effects of environmental disturbances, natural disasters, and climate change. Drawing upon field-based ethnographic research of public-facing outreach and education at Fire Island National Seashore (FIIS), the researcher considers how, in the wake of a catastrophic storm, the evolving ethical science communication and public engagement strategies of park rangers might contribute to and strengthen community resilience. A rhetorical analysis of science communication and interpretive practices at FIIS illuminates some affordances and constraints of rhetorical models of science communication and of pedagogies of play for community-based work.

Review of Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse by editors Richard D. Besel and Bernard K. Duffy.

In the process of creating portraits that document the lives and knowledge of community leaders who are engaged in food access work and urban farming in Chester, PA, students in a first year writing course at Widener University are introduced to a rhetoric of social change and the multivocality and creativity that characterizes food justice work in Chester. The Food Justice Portrait Project is community writing created collaboratively with the goal of reciprocity that provides an archive of biography and institutional history. The exhibition of the portraits challenges the problematic charity model of addressing need in a community and supports community agency.

Introduction to Reflections 2016 Fall issue by Editor Cristina Kirklighter.

Review of The Politics of Pain Medicine: A Rhetorical-Ontological Inquiry by S. Scott Graham.

This article describes how I incorporated an AR-based community media project into a recent undergraduate course on environmental rhetoric, which featured a partnership with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS). With the support of DMNS staff in Creative Technology and Exhibits, students in the course researched and wrote curated materials designed for the museum’s extensive Wildlife Exhibits. Built with readily available mobile technologies, their projects augment the Wildlife Exhibits’ existing print-based text panels (which convey scientific information about the animals) with additional layers of digital texts and multimedia that speak to ways in which these animals have inhabited the human imagination in art, film, literature, and mythology.

This article provides a framework for using digital game spaces in college writing classrooms to help students develop environmental awareness. Drawing on a range of relevant theories, the author argues that digital game play offers simulated experiential learning opportunities that allow students to locate virtual representations of the environment that potentially mirror, critique, or even promote new ideas regarding material-world environmental concerns. By mapping critical, rhetorical, and ethical literacies onto digital gaming practices, this article advances a creative pedagogical approach to engagement with environmental rhetorics, narratives, and ideologies. Through an extended example of the popular mobile app The Sims Freeplay, the author brings together the disciplines of rhetoric and composition, environmental studies, and game studies in a productive conversation about the ways gaming can increase students’ rhetorical and ethical engagement with both writing and the environment.

In this study, I consider how public participants respond to institutionalized representations of environmental risk related to fracking. I am particularly interested in moments where participants, reporting marginalization when they attempt to understand or represent risk through environmental regulatory institutions, find or attempt to find agency to shift discussion points about environmental risk.

Environmentalist David Orr lamented some twenty years ago that universities “still educate the young for the most part as if there were no planetary emergency” (27). This emergency, as Reflections readers are well aware, refers to the shifting and collapse of massive ecosystems and agricultural systems because of human-caused pollution and climate change coupled with exponential population growth. The planetary shifts call on us to reconceive our positions as activists, scholars, and teachers in relation to our communities, to the earth, and to one another. These shifts provide an opportunity for us to rethink the stark and often arbitrary distinctions between our research, teaching, and service or between our colleges and universities and our communities. Students and fellow community members need to be prepared for, and feel agency in, our changing world. In many ways, higher education has heeded Orr’s call.

This article examines the metaphorical confluence between notions of ecology and economy to argue that there is a deep connection between taking care of our spheres of belonging (ecology) and organizing our resources for our spheres of belonging (economy). Invoking the principles of gift-giving economy, this article offers this story of Writing Across Communities as a representative anecdote toward reconsidering the cultural and economic arrangements by which we instantiate community writing programs.

The erosion of Indigenous food systems as part of European and Euroamerican colonization has resulted in a parallel erosion of Indigenous health, lands, and cultural knowledge. In rural southeastern North Carolina, residents of Robeson County are primarily Lumbee Indians who have been impacted by economic, ecological, and health concerns resulting from colonialism’s historical legacy, even as many have worked to safeguard select traditional ecological knowledge. To highlight sustaining community health as fundamental to Native sovereignty, I include service-learning in the Introduction to American Indian Studies (AIS Intro) course I team-teach at The University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Service-learning activities at Hawkeye Indian Cultural Center—the only organic farm in our region—strive to underscore to students, service-learning’s potential to foster university-community partnerships, to recuperate and sustain local ecological knowledge and Indigenous food traditions, and to enhance the health of our students and community members.