Meaningful change through service learning can only occur If service learning ladder, build “embedded” relationships with community organizations. The paradox is that the more 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… Continue reading The Art of Knowing Your Place: White Service Learning Students and Urban Community Organizations by Steve Zimmer

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… Continue reading Introduction by Adrian J. Wurr

Over the last several years, service-learning has become a burgeoning area in technical and professional communication studies. In addition to offering pedagogical strategies and theoretical approaches, the scholarship in this area to date points to several concerns for the continuing growth of high-quality service-learning in our field: 1) building reciprocal, sustained community partnerships, 2) developing… Continue reading Taking Root: Seminal Essays in Service- Learning and Professional Communication by J. Blake Scott

Drawing on the work of experiential learning experts such as John Dewey to show that one of the foundational objectives of service-learning is to encourage civic engagement, this article argues that students who undertake work in a business environment can develop a strong sense of their roles as citizens. It offers a case study of… Continue reading Cultivating Democratic Sensibility by Working with For-Profit Organizations: An Alternative Perspective on Service-Learning by Sean D. Williams and C. Renee Love

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… Continue reading Selling Peace in a Time of War: The Rhetorical and Ethical Challenges of a Graduate-Level Service-Learning Course by Kathryn Rentz and Ashley Mattingly

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.… Continue reading Pentadic Critique for Assessing and Sustaining Service-Learning Programs by Amy Rupiper Taggart

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. Link to PDF

Insights from activity theory—specifically, David Russell’s synthesis of activity theory with genre theory—suggest ways to understand and ease problems of clashing expectations encountered in professional writing classes that use a client-based assignment model for service-learning. Link to PDF

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… Continue reading Technical Communication, Participatory Action Research, and Global Civic Engagement: A Teaching, Research, and Social Action Collaboration in Kenya by Robbin D. Crabtree and David Alan Sapp

In a recent study of Harvard University students, Richard Light documents that for the over 400 students he interviewed the “most important and memorable academic learning [occurs] . . . outside of classes.” His findings are not surprising. Evidence is mounting that courses and activities that link service and learning in some kind of reciprocal… Continue reading Introduction: Service-Learning and Professional Communication by Jim Dubinsky and Melody Bowdon

The “street” occupies a literal and figurative place in contemporary composition pedagogies. Increasingly, teachers of college writing ask their students to “take to the streets,” providing learning opportunities that range beyond the boundaries of the college classroom. The call for compositionists to engage with the “streets” is not a new one. In fact, the 2002… Continue reading Review of Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition by Paula Mathieu reviewed by Eileen Schell

Little did I know how fascinating a group of workers pouring concrete could be. Yet Dale Cyphert’s rhetorical analysis of the practice makes it so. Really. Her interpretation of the “dance of decision-making” that workers perform as they shovel, pour and level reveals a cultural logic of cooperation that stands in sharp contrast to middle-class… Continue reading Review of Who Says? Working-Class Rhetoric. Class Consciousness. and Community edited by William DeGenaro by Tom Deans

Writing centres do not often publish the work of people who attend them. Perhaps this is a paradoxical omission that this anthology may help to remedy, since it demonstrates the value of showcasing workshop writing. The pieces in Sine Cera: A DiverseCity Writing Series Anthology are, as Series Coordinator Jeremy Remy says, “pieces that might… Continue reading Review of Sine Cera: A DiverseCity Writing Series Anthology: Two Old Guys From Brooklyn by SLCC Community Writing Centre by Nick Pollard

In the fall of 2007 I taught an evening college course at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Such evening courses often serve returning adult students and this course was typically diverse. Ten of the seventeen students were Black, four had home languages other than English (Chinese, Turkish, Spanish, Patois), three were born outside of the… Continue reading Review of Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum by Eli Goldblatt by Ann E. Green

Delgado pond in early spring Still littered with Katrina-downed tree limbs, Dead and rotting storm tossed branches … Continue reading Delgado Pond: Early Spring, 2006, a poem by David Robert Cook

I am writing from the position of what Stephen North categorizes in The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field as a practitioner.’ For practitioners, knowledge in composition is generated not only theoretically or through research-quantitative, qualitative or historical-but also (in fact, primarily) through reflective practice in the classroom. In this paper… Continue reading When Life Gives You Lemons: Katrina as Subject by Bonnie Noonan

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… Continue reading Is There Civic Community in America? by Luisa Connal Rodriguez

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… Continue reading Disaster Pedagogy/Building Communities: From Wikis and Websites to Hammers and Nails by Holly Baumgartner and Jennifer Discher

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… Continue reading Writing the Wrong: Choosing to Research and Teach the Trauma of Hurricane Katrina by Daisy Pignetti

In the last ten years, projects designated as “service-learning” experiences have become enormously popular. Unfortunately, that popularity has also led to a certain amount of confusion about what service-learning is. Service-learning is different from “community service.” At its core, it involves linking the subject of a class with work in a nonprofit community organization and… Continue reading Service-Learning at a Glance by Linda Adler-Kassner

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… Continue reading Providing Context: Service Learning in a Community College Composition Class by Wendy Rihner

Two years ago, I took a community-based service-learning course (required at CSUMB) that connected me with the Rural Development Center (RDC), a local small farm education program. The RDC teaches Spanish-speaking individuals and families how to start and manage their own organic farming businesses. It’s an incredible empowerment program here in the Salinas Valley where… Continue reading Terreno by Zachary Knapp

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… Continue reading The Challenge of Community: From Culture to Learning in New Orleans by Amy Koritz

This paper examines how first year students at a South Texas Gulf Coast university became engaged as researchers and writers in investigating the multi-dimensional issues that impact hurricane victims and their communities. Working with a number of faculty from their learning community and beyond who helped them see the cross-disciplinary implications of Hurricane Katrina and… Continue reading When Students Care: The Katrina Awakening by Cristina Kirklighter

Based on the belief that students produce better writing when they are personally engaged in the writing topic, the University of Arizona’s Composition program is working to integrate service-learning into a variety of the courses it offers. Research to date suggests that composition students and instructors feel a greater sense of purpose and meaning when… Continue reading The Impact and Effects of Service-Learning on Native and Non-native English Speaking College Composition Students by Adrian Wurr

In recent decades, higher education has increasingly relied on contingent faculty to teach multiple sections of composition courses with low pay and few benefits. Administrators have argued that institutions need these faculty to protect tenure-track faculty in times of financial difficulty and to manage fluctuating enrollments. When Hurricane Katrina forced universities and community colleges to… Continue reading Flushing Out the Basements: The Status of Contingent Composition Faculty in Post-Katrina New Orleans-and What We Can Learn from It by Nicole Pepinster Greene

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… Continue reading Broadening the Community: Service-Learning Connections to the Writing Classroom by Risa P. Gorelick,

The CITYbuild Consortium of Schools is a consortium of design and planning schools based at the Tulane City Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. This group came together after Katrina through common interests in grass roots neighborhood recovery support. The article looks at the context in which such a consortium came to be, some of the… Continue reading CITYbuild Consortium of Schools: From Disaster Response to a Collaborative Model for Community Design and Planning by Sarah Gamble and Dan Etheridge

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… Continue reading Juggling Teacher Responsibilities in Service-Learning Courses by Cathy Sayer

on seeing the flooding after Hurricane Katrina Thirty years after departing · the stucco house in Gentilly, for a moment this morning chatter ceased, an internal space opened, like the stillness when a dog’s bark ceases. Link to PDF

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… Continue reading Infusing Service-Learning into the Language Arts Curriculum by Kathy A. Megyeri

How can we nurture children’s creative ability as writers outside the academic context, celebrating their unique voices, teaching them to trust their ears and value the creative process? It can be set up simply: A group of young students in an after school center. Some adults acting as mentors to help them do creative writing.… Continue reading Merging Voices: University Students Writing with Children in a Public Housing Project by Michael John Martin

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.”… Continue reading Writing the Blues: Teaching in a Post-Katrina Environment by Gwen Robinson

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… Continue reading True Stories from Philadelphia by Hannah M. Ashley

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… Continue reading Making It Up As We Go: Students Writing and Teachers Reflecting on Post-K New Orleans by Doreen Piano, Reggie Poche, Sarah DeBacher, Celeste Del Russo, & Elizabeth Lewis

This essay describes a series of assignments that I have used in Writing and Social Issues, a first-year writing course that features service-learning. These assignments should prove useful to those interested in the relationship between community-based writing instruction and first-year courses that focus on the student’s transition from high school to college. Link to Full… Continue reading Community-Based Writing Instruction and the First-Year Experience by Mary Vermillion

Even though Lafayette, Louisiana is 150 miles to the west of New Orleans, the city was affected by Katrina, and its twin, Rita, in significant ways. While the eye of neither storm passed directly over Lafayette, we experienced a cosmology episode as the effects of back-to-back severe hurricanes made the world, if only for a… Continue reading When the Wind Blows: The Search for Normalcy During the Hurricanes of 2005 by Melissa Nicolas

Reflections: What prompted CCCC to create a national service-learning committee? Deans: There were short-term and long-term goals. As for the short term, last spring Campus Compact issued a request for proposals to national disciplinary associations offering the possibility of grant money to support teaching and research in service-learning. A committee officially sanctioned by NCTE and… Continue reading CCCC Institutionalizes Service-Learning by Tom Deans

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… Continue reading Show and Tell by Katheryn Krotzer Laborde

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… Continue reading What Then Must We Do by Nancy Richard

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,… Continue reading Katrina in Their Own Words- Collecting, Creating. and Publishing Writing on the Storm by Richard Louth

Departments of English are generally known for the storms within and their failure to calm the seas with minimal casualties. Even in times of fair weather, they often appear rudderless. What can be said about English can at times be said about other disciplines. What happens to a department, really a university, when external forces… Continue reading Facing the Flood: The English Department as a High Axle Vehicle by Thomas Bonner Jr.

“And what a congress of stinks! . .. Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath. “-Theodore Raethke, “Root Cellar” Our house sits in mud, no Pompeii. Nearly everything’s awry: the shampoo is wedged in the blinds; the beds lie on their sides; thick water stands in cups, sheetrock droops… Continue reading Mourning Station, a poem by Angelle Scott

Hurricane Katrina shut down nine colleges and universities in the New Orleans area right at the beginning of the fall 2005 semester, as students, faculty, and staff scattered across the country. Despite often severe damage from flooding, fires, and wind, all nine institutions reopened the following January, sometimes using FEMA trailers, hotels, and cruise ships… Continue reading In the Wake of Katrina: A Brief Overview of New Orleans Colleges and Universities by James McDonald

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… Continue reading Reflections: Defining Community/Building Theories by Steve Parks

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… Continue reading “Welcome to Reflections” by Nora Bacon & Barbara Sherr Roswell

Carol Weinberg, who passed away this summer after a courageous battle with cancer, played a crucial role in preparing the soil for Reflections to grow and flourish. She was the first professor to hold the France-Merrick Chair of Service-Learning at Goucher College and was nationally recognized for the interdisciplinary service-learning senior capstone course she designed.… Continue reading Remembering Carol Weinberg by Megan Cooperman

I’d watched MTV’s The Real World, and I remember thinking, ‘This is kind of compelling, and these people aren’t even doing anything. What if you had people who were doing something interesting with their lives?’ -Rick Goldsmith, co-director of Everyday Heroes Most students know The Real World of MTV, but a new “Real World” is… Continue reading The Real World of Young People and Service Video: Review of Everyday Heroes by Glenn Hutchinson

“The hero…is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations. His solemn task and deed…is to return…to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed.” – Joseph Campbell This quote from Joseph Campbell appears before the preface in Charting A Hero’s Journey… Continue reading Review of Charting a Hero’s Journey by Rachel Rigolino

Writing Partnerships is an unusual mix of enthusiasm and scruple. Thomas Deans writes as an advocate of service-learning in writing courses—and also as a scholar who explores a number of differing ways in which “service” is imagined as part of the work students do in the community and in the classroom. The result is a… Continue reading Review of Writing Partnerships by Joseph Harris