Review of The Ecologies of Writing Programs: Program Profiles in Context by Mary Jo Reiff, Anis Bawarshi, Michelle Ballif, and Christian Weisser.

This essay theorizes a pedagogy of responsibility as an alternative to place-based and critical pedagogies that offers to ground students in deep ethical obligation. Using Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, I suggest that place may function as a trace of the Other that reminds the self of her responsibility. By analyzing a case study of a place-based college writing assignment, I demonstrate how a pedagogy of responsibility cultivates students’ responsibility for engaging others in ethical, rhetorical response.

Review of Participatory Critical Rhetoric by Michael Middleton, Aaron Hess, Danielle Enders, and Samantha Senda-Cook.

Recent research suggests that climate change is a “tribal” issue. That is, some audiences deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change because of their group identities, not because they misunderstand the science. In this essay, I offer a case study of two Christian climate science communicators and their efforts to persuade religious and conservative audiences who are skeptical of the need to respond to climate change. I analyze three of their rhetorical moves that may be of interest to those who teach and practice public rhetoric. As I analyze these moves, I consider both their persuasive potential and tradeoffs.

Review of Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere by Robert Cox and Phaedra Pezzullo.

Review of composing(media) = composing(embodiment): bodies, technologies, writing, the teaching of writing by editors Arola, K. l., & Wysocki, A. F.

This article makes two arguments. First, the article argues that threshold concepts provide a useful lens for thinking about how faculty learn service-learning pedagogy. Second, the article illustrates how particular kinds of support can help faculty learn the pedagogy’s threshold concepts by helping them make sense of the challenges they face in teaching through service-learning. The author uses autoethnography to trace her thinking throughout a yearlong fellows program, during which she developed and taught a new service-learning writing curriculum. She describes how the fellows program helped her to turn several challenges into threshold experiences that resulted in key shifts in thinking.

This article presents data from a 10-month case study of a critical literacy writing group for parenting and pregnant young adults. The author focuses on the efficacy of the program to foster the critical literacy skills of two participants. Drawing on field notes and written artifacts and using case study and discourse analysis, the author suggests that, although they redefined their figured identities in the program, the two women’s ability to take action in their lives—their selves-in-practice—was contingent on other factors beyond the influence of the Program, such as familial and significant others’ influences, which were definitive and integral to who the participants were. Thus, how the participants figured or positioned themselves inside and outside of the program was fluid and sometimes contradictory and greatly influenced by the symmetry between competing figured worlds, in which they participated and the strategic and practical gender needs that informed their positional identities in their day-to-day lives.

I will begin this introduction with one of my favorite quotes written by Maya Angelou. I have shared this quote with many friends, family, and colleagues, and I’ll share it again. The quote is this one: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” In another quote she says we are not born with courage, but we develop it “by doing small, courageous things.” As I reflect on my years of editing this journal, I admit I’m drawn to courageous authors— those willing to take risks and put themselves out there—those who admit to their failures and courageously learn from these failures to better themselves and those around them— those who challenge what we might initially celebrate. Courageous authors help us in our quest for “doing small, courageous things.” Courageous authors consistently check their virtues. Courageous authors make up what you’ll read in this issue.

Review of After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics and the Citizen Bricoleur by Frank Farmer.

Review of Code-Meshing as World English: Pedagogy, Policy, Performance by editors Vershawn Ashanti and Aja Martinez.

This article enacts the transgenre resources of the personal academic essay to examine the politics of gender and questions of privilege across academic and public spheres. The author interweaves prose, poetry, criticism, and argument to interrogate the practice of transcultural citizenship and the transdisciplinary project of Writing Across Communities.

Review of Reclaiming Poch@ Pop: Examining the Rhetoric of Cultural Deficiency by Cruz Medina.

“Visualizing Street Harassment” is a digital map project prompted by the question of how and where activists have repurposed the format and characteristics of the YouTube video “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” to build public conversations about street harassment and to critique the public rhetoric surrounding it. The project was developed and funded through a Cultural Heritage Informatics Graduate Fellowship at Michigan State University and presented as a digital poster at the Conference on Community Writing in October 2015.

In this complicated world of drones and melting ice caps, copper mines and waste heaps, pipelines, sawmills, and sweatshops it’s hard to know if you can do any good at all.

Near the end of the 19th century, literacy manuals were marketed to African Americans who sought to improve their reading and writing skills outside of a traditional classroom setting. I argue these texts had a worthwhile goal of providing literacy instruction for learners, but they were problematic in that they also served as a source for assimilation into the dominant white culture. Via archival research methods, I examine three of these manuals to discuss how they taught literacy in addition to assimilating students regarding family, politics, and religion—a marked difference from more traditional literacy instruction in the classroom. The lessons represented the idea that discrimination was not necessarily a problem caused by whites but the result of a moral deficit on the part of African Americans. One selection, “Politics,” published in Hall’s Moral and Mental Capsule (1905), edited by Josie Hall, an African American teacher, instructs, “I think it would have been better far/If the Negro had let politics alone/For the first thing he needed was a home/An education and clothes” (173). Another text Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge (1897), written and published solely by James T. Haley, an African American publisher, seems to be the exception, emphasizing a sense of community through point-counterpoints on language used to reference African Americans. These texts raise questions of how writing instruction past and present may assimilate students through the complicated idea of bettering oneself through education. I conclude that the texts represent a still-present paradox in education; the social advantages students seek are often unattainable without some adoption of dominant social mores, even though it may unknowingly imply a student’s own cultural identity is somehow deficient.

As the Editor of this journal, I am delighted to have interviewed Dr. Cassandra Simon, founding editor of the Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship. Some of you who were at the Conference of Community Writing may have heard me enthusiastically talk about this journal as I showed you a copy of an issue. Some of you know our journal is about “Getting on the Bus” as we pay homage to the young civil rights student activists did many years ago. We strive to walk the talk as a social justice and racial justice activist journal. The Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship also walks the talk through a founding editor who had this vision guided through her life experiences and made it into a reality with one of the most successful journals in our area. We know our journals are different from the mainstream. We encourage our authors to take risks with their research and writing, work against an ivory tower mentality, and strive for inclusivity by embracing the voices of academics, students, community partners, and others. I am pleased to interview a sister editor and share her inspiring insights on what it means to be a journal editor who celebrates community engagement and scholarship.

Review of Women, Writing and Prison: Activists, Scholars, and Writers Speak Out by editors Tobi Jacobi and Ann Folwell Stanford.

Hurricane Katrina had a tremendous impact not only on the Gulf Coast but on individuals who lived and worked in her disastrous aftermath. I was an assistant professor of social work at LSU when Katrina disrupted my life and career. I recall vividly the first hours, days, and weeks after the storm. I was asked to volunteer in a local hospital emergency room with highly traumatized evacuees, and I, not unlike many other relief workers, developed Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) symptoms. To cope and heal, I turned to scholarship and research. This is a reflection on how Katrina has defined my professional life for the past 10 years.

Introduction to Reflections Fall 2015 issue, by Editor Cristina Kirklighter.

While service learning can be compatible with feminist objectives, if the service does not contribute to structural change or help students understand their role in facilitating change, it can replicate patriarchal goals and run counter to feminism (Ludlow). In this article, we show the way we utilized a feminist lens when designing and implementing a service learning project designed to tackle the problem of dating violence on our campus community. We argue that the feminist lens enhanced student learning and ensured the students make a more lasting and meaningful contribution to a community.

Review of I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric by Frankie Condon.

After reviewing some of the manuscripts for this issue, we, as editors, thought it would be appropriate to interview Steve Parks’ regarding his perspectives on graduate students and community projects. Steve has worked with graduate students for many years, including Jessica Pauszek, our Assistant Editor. He was also the past editor of this journal for a number of years, and we have benefitted through his guidance. As he says at the end of the interview, the interview format cannot capture the spirit of “collaborative discussion” that comes from this work. However, given our close relationship with Steve over the years, the questions we did develop come out of our conversations with him and thus is a product of previous listening and dialoguing. An interview with a friend, mentor, and colleague is a different type of interview—one grounded in the familiar.

Welcome to another issue of Reflections. We are particularly pleased to begin the issue interviewing Steve Parks, someone who the editors have worked with for a number of years. Given we have a couple of articles focused on graduate student experiences with community projects and service-learning, we thought asking Steve Parks to reflect on this particular area would add continuity to this issue. For many years, Steve has mentored many graduate students, including Jessica Pauszek, our Assistant Editor. He is also the previous Editor of Reflections and someone I’ve known for years.

Review of Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. HarperCollins, 2014.

The author conducted a seven-month ethnography of literacy practices in Mexico in 2003-2004 and returned in 2013 to conduct a follow-up inquiry. This essay traces both the researcher’s disillusionment with traditional, school-based literacy programs, curricula, and assessment consortiums as practiced in many postcolonial countries, and her growing interest in what she calls “ecological literacy.” The study narrates the lives of two Mexican students’ engagements with ecological literacy to argue that literacy as tested and valued in international organizations (PISA, UNESCO, etc.) is highly overrated; indeed, it is a “literacy myth” that success in autonomous literacy has any redeeming effect on the majority of material lives in countries such as Mexico, who suffer from uneven effects of the global economy. In ecological literacy, students have opportunities for action—affordances that alter lives if perceived and utilized. The author argues for a new narrative about literacy, one that understands literacy as ecological by tracing the embodied and experienced literacies of two students, ultimately elaborating on what literacy might look like if we open ourselves to the multiple literacies of most of the world. This essay also argues that traditional literacy assessments neglect to consider how individuals use literacy to navigate an environment impacted by certain global economic policies.

Review of Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times by Amy J. Wan. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.

We focus on the long-term impacts of service-learning pedagogy on an oft-overlooked assessment group: graduate instructors. We describe the civic engagement program we participated in as graduate student teachers, the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program, and we illustrate how our early experiences with community-based pedagogies led to formative and long-term impacts on our approaches to research, teaching, and service and on our professional and personal work and identities. Based on our experiences, we offer a set of best practices that can serve as a foundation for the intentional design and assessment—both formative and summative—of forward-thinking graduate instructor objectives and outcomes.

Review of Working with Multimodality: Rethinking Literacy in a Digital Age by Jennifer Rowsell. Routledge, 2013.

This paper draws on our time working together in a community literacy organization in New York, NY. In it, we describe the strengths of the program while also detailing our questions about how our “mentor/mentee” relationship was represented in the organization’s mission statement and fundraising rhetoric: specifically, the term “at-risk,” which was applied to the “mentees.” We describe the difficulties we faced when we proposed a writing workshop that challenged the organization’s mission statement and raise questions about the rhetorical tension inherent in education nonprofits’ reliance on funding. We ask community literacy nonprofits to consider whether their mission statement and fundraising language inadvertently individualize and/or racialize systemic inequities in public education and argue in favor of community-defined mission statements.

For five years of graduate school, I avoided studying disability because I thought it would require confronting the idea that I have a disability. I was first introduced to disability studies during my master’s coursework. I mustered the courage to take the course on disability because deep down, I knew that this thing I was calling a “vision problem” or what the doctors told me is a degenerative retinal disease called retinitis pigmentosa, might actually be a “disability.” I left the course feeling stimulated but no less intimidated by the idea of looking at myself in the mirror and thinking “disabled.” I resolved that my interest in disability studies was purely personal—it would allow me to learn about my own experiences, but I would do it privately, and I would publicly study something more obviously related to my profession as a writing instructor.

“All visualizations of disability are mediations that shape the world in which people who have or do not have disabilities inhabit and negotiate together. The point is that all representations have social and political consequences. Understanding how images create or dispel disability as a system of exclusions and prejudices is a move toward the process of dismantling the institutional, attitudinal, legislative, economic, and architectural barriers that keep people with disabilities from full participation in society” —Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography (75)

On Christmas Eve, 2012, I participated in a service event with Occupy Sandy on Rockaway Beach in Queens, New York City. Several local charities gathered together to provide Christmas gifts and food for Rockaway residents who had lost everything in the storm and the flood two months before, at the end of October. My spouse and I had worked in a church kitchen in Brooklyn, the day before Christmas Eve, in collaboration with others, cutting apples, arranging dough in massive baking pans, to prepare apple crumbles for this holiday event.

Review of Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference by Stephanie L. Kerschbaum. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2014.

Review of Signs And Wonders: Religious Rhetoric and the Preservation of Sign Language by Tracy Ann Morse. Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2014.

As the field of disability studies expands, a question that is cropping up in theoretical discussions more and more often is whether or not Fatness falls into the category of disability. Theorist April Herndon gives a compelling argument for the inclusion of Fat within disability studies, making an especially interesting connection between the idea of “elective disability” in the Deaf community (associated with a refusal to undergo procedures for cochlear implants or similar surgeries) and the idea that Fat people actively “choose” to be Fat by foregoing medical treatment. Herndon states, “[B]oth Fat and Deaf people are often considered morally blameworthy when they choose not to adopt recommended treatment. Similarly, both fatness and deafness are routinely recognized as medical conditions but seldom as the counter-hegemonic identities of Fat and Deaf, especially within the contexts of law and medicine” (128). The connection Herndon is making is that, rather than recognizing Fat and Deaf as identities that many people embrace, both are seen as defects that could and should be fixed. Thus, Herndon is making a clear connection between Fat studies and disability studies—that of medicalization, perceived choice, and normalization.

An accessible society,” crip theorist Robert McRuer argues, “is not one simply with ramps and Braille signs on ‘public’ buildings, but one in which our ways of relating to, and depending on, each other have been reconfigured” (94). Using McRuer’s definition as a starting point, in this article I seek to work toward creating a more accessible society of teacher-scholars by exploring interdependency as an ethic for intellectual work. Toward this end, I will first argue that creating such a public requires a reconceptualization of the term “pedagogy,” one that moves beyond the boundaries of the classroom such that learning emerges as a dynamic process of recognition and interrelation. I will then review the concepts of independence, dependence, and interdependence as they have been taken up in disability studies and conclude by using these meanings to map out how interrelations on multiple levels make our intellectual work possible.

As Editor of Reflections, I am pleased to introduce this special issue focused on Disability Studies. I have had the pleasure of working with Allison Hitt and Bre Garrett, the Special Editors to this issue, these past few months. Their commitment to this special issue shows through in the dedication and hard work they’ve exhibited throughout this process. Although my area is not disability studies, as a personal essay scholar and teacher, I was particularly impressed with the narrative styles of many of the contributors and the courage they had in speaking openly. As I’ve said many times about my editorship with this journal, we must not just talk about our areas of interest, but walk it as well. These special editors and contributors do just that.

"[W]e might say that disability refers to the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of bodily, mental, or behavioral functioning aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically." — Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability "Rhetoric needs disability studies as a reminder to pay critical and careful attention to the body. Disability studies needs rhetoric to better understand and negotiate the ways that discourse represents and impacts the experience of disability." —Jay Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric

Article featuring interviews with Melanie Yergeau, Beth Ferri, and Nirmala Erevelles.

Review of Artifactual Literacies: Every Object Tells a Story by Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell. New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2010.

Review of Scalawag: A White Southerners Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism by Edward H. Peeples. Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2014.

In this article I examine the nature of reciprocity and representation when mental illness is associated with the researcher and/or participant. Reciprocity has been a central concept of activist research methodology, which explores how academic knowledge can be used in the public sphere. Ellen Cushman defines reciprocity as “an open and conscious negotiation of the power structures reproduced during the give-and-take interactions of the people involved on both sides of the relationship” (16). Reciprocity can take the form of sharing the final write-up with participants, inviting participants into the composing of the write-up itself, and writing for and with participants on community-rather than academically-focused projects. These facets of reciprocity are particularly attuned to the civic turn of rhetoric and composition, such as that seen in John Ackerman’s and David Coogan’s edited collection, The Public Work of Rhetoric. For example, in Sophists for Social Change, Coogan describes his experience partnering with teens to organize a booklet describing a city community in order to promote a teen center. The civically-oriented, activist nature of reciprocity links it to the public sphere through its concern for research participants.

Dr. Edward H. Peeples’ career as an activist and academic spans some forty years and reads like a how-to on combining scholarship and activism. Just as amazing as his career was the journey to it. Growing up in the south entrenched in Jim Crow, one might assume that Peeples would have continued down the path of the status quo; however, his memoir, Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey thorough Segregation to Human Rights Activism (University of Virginia Press, 2014) recounts his story of learning whiteness and then standing firm against them.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 13, Number 2, Spring 2014 issue.

Many community stakeholders are experiencing increased pressure to enter the digital arena in order to be heard by new audiences, but many such stakeholders lack the technical expertise to do so. To meet this demand, some service-learning teachers are turning to digital media production as a new method of service. This approach to a service-learning pedagogy brings with it inherent complications, however. We believe these complications call for a re-orientation of service-learning projects around a model of distributed knowledge work. This model asks students to view themselves as budding professionals entering into community networks that preexist them. It also requires students to deeply share their knowledge-making practices with community stakeholders.

Review of Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love, by Stephen Parks. Syracuse University Press, 2010.

"A white double consciousness would not involve the move between white and black subjectivities or black and American perspectives, as DuBois and Fanon developed the notion. Instead, for whites, double consciousness requires an ever present acknowledgment of the historical legacy of white identity constructions in the persistent structures of inequality and exploitation, as well as a newly awakened memory of the many white traitors to white privilege who have struggled to contribute to the building of an inclusive human community." —Linda Martín Alcoff, The Whiteness Question

How might current public-spheres theory underestimate the rhetorical potential of an enclave public—portraying, as such theory does, an enclave as an acutely limited resource for rhetorical empowerment (Squires 458)? This is the question this study takes up. To do so, this study analyzes the digital paper trail of residents of the Cabrini-Green public-housing complex in Chicago, Illinois, as the complex fell siege to policy decisions to demolish it. My analysis shows that these residents’ rhetoric defied limited conceptions of an enclave. Specifically, I argue that by building a network of interconnected coalitions and by using its enclave position as a point of publicity, this group’s rhetorical work complicates scholarship on how groups with little citizenship status might vie for public accountability to them as agents recognized for their rhetorical leverage.

Review of PHD to Ph.D: How Education Saved My Life by Elaine Richardson. Parlor Press, 2013.