This article analyzes the importance of conversation employed by students working with community stakeholders in a civic writing seminar. Acknowledging Lloyd Bitzer’s seminal work on the rhetorical situation and Burke’s concept of identification provides a strong background of the students’ understanding of the civic sphere; however, medieval rhetorician Madeleine de Scudéry’s (1683) provocative treatise, “On Conversation,” reminds us to expand the arena of civic discourse. Scholar Jane Donawerth’s recovery of Scudéry’s treatise suggests the power of private discourse as more useful than public rhetoric. This article concludes that theorizing the rhetorical situation alone proves inadequate to energize young rhetors’ discourse needed to engage public civic agencies and actors to action.

Review of Democracies to Come: Rhetorical Action, Neoliberalism, and Communities of Resistance, by Rachel Riedner and Kevin Mahoney. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008. 142 pp.

Cristina and Isabel’s invitation to be interviewed for this edition of the journal is an honor. I apologize to all readers in advance for a contribution that could have been much better with more time, but I’m grateful to have the chance to comment on a topic that has been the motivating factor in my personal life and my life as an educator and linguist. I will respond to a few questions that have been posed to me by Cristina and Isabel, frame the ethnic studies problem in a larger context, highlight NCTE and CCCC’s work in this area, recounting the work of the Task Force on Racism and Bias in the important work of assisting teachers to recognize and implement a curriculum that authentically represents historic work, and comment briefly on Cruz Medina’s insightful essay on the ethnic studies issue in Arizona.

En un mundo dividido Por un río Lleno de lagrimas Y risas...

Today tutored two fourth graders in tandem, Lili and Maria, our trio reading poems.

Review of Conquistadora by Esmeralda Santiago. Vintage, 2011.

Review of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González and Angela P. Harris. Utah State UP, 2012.

“You should know that the education of the heart is very important. This will distinguish you from others. Educating oneself is easy, but educating ourselves to help other human beings to help the community is much more difficult.” —Cesar Chávez

This article draws on an archival case study of the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN). Building on my experience as an activist and working in communities and institutions, I argue that it is valuable to examine and translate the histories and practices of organizations like the CFMN to learn the rhetorical abilities we need to operate and make collective change as both part of and outside of publics and institutions. To make this argument, I analyze how Chicanas of the CFMN incited change by writing, theorizing, and making an identity through what might be considered mundane and programmatic writing.

She used to say… Never forget the acento It is part of your identity Y como todos los Mexicanos You need to keep your dignity...

When I draw, I focus on how people interact with one another in some small yet meaningful way. I emphasize the negative or white/empty space around the characters I draw and their environment. I do this not only to make the characters “stick out,” but also to help create a separate personality for the environment, such as the sky, trees, the sun, clouds, houses, and buildings. I use geometric shapes to emphasize how the characters in their environments are “perfect” in their own way. For instance, I use the circle to portray the idea of a generational connection and bond between the individuals within a family and circles of friends. I show not only spatial depth in my drawings but also emotional depth, such as by portraying the characters’ feelings for one another, the rituals they engage in and their attitudes. The shading techniques that I use help to compliment, add texture, and “color” the characters and their environment.

“(Chican@ Studies) will help in creating and giving impetus to that historical consciousness which Chicanos must possess in order successfully to struggle as a people toward a new vision of Aztlan.” —El Plan de Santa Barbara (1969) “When your education is under attack, what do you do?! Fight Back!!...” —UNIDOS chant at April 26, 2011 Tucson School Board Take-Over

Francisco and Miguel’s research agenda is centered in educational leadership and community development. Their work is interdisciplinary and is situated within the intersectionalities of identity formation, race, class, gender, plática and story. In operationalizing this work, Guajardo and Guajardo employ an epistemological construct congruent with their research partners that challenges higher education to engage in research that privileges the lives of youth, elders, and the organic leaders from the community.

This case study describes the Nuestra Casa (Our House) Initiative, an advocacy, communication, and social mobilization strategy to increase tuberculosis (TB) awareness through a public art exhibition hosted at the University of Texas at El Paso. This work describes this multi-disciplinary initiative that cut across academic boundaries to engage faculty, students, and community members in service-learning and community engagement efforts. Nuestra Casa reached diverse audiences, including school children, farm workers, promotoras (health promoters), university students, educators, persons affected by TB, and public health officials in Mexico and in the United States through education, critical reflection, and a call to action.

Colonial narratives often characterize Latin@ culture and students as deficient with regard to education. These narratives persist through legislation like Arizona’s House Bill 2281, which outlawed the culturally relevant curriculum of Tucson High School’s Mexican American Studies program. This article argues that culturally relevant student writing that responds to a prompt about dichos or proverbial sayings in Spanish, illustrate rhetorical strategies of subversive complicity when analyzed through a decolonial framework. Written by students at multiple Tucson High schools during the controversy surrounding HB 2281, the student publication, Nuestros Refranes, serves as the site of analysis that demonstrates how students navigate institutions governed by subjugating policy.

This study follows Mike, a police officer in training, as he runs a Criminal Justice Club at an after-school center in a working-class Mexican@ neighborhood. Employing James Paul Gee’s theories of discourse and identity, the study shows how this club enables the teens to shed the identity of at-risk youths and inhabit the identity of future-cops, a transformation that secures their future within the linked institutions of law enforcement and the public schools. However, because the police and schools help to subordinate community residents, the teens’ new identity sets them against their neighbors. The study describes how Mike and his fellow teacher instruct the teens in how to negotiate this irresolvable structural contradiction through double-consciousness. Drawing on interviews and observations, the author presents the perspectives of Mike and the teens he teaches regarding race, empowerment and justice in literacy education.

Review of Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community by Joe Lambert. 4th edition, Routledge, 2012.

It is well known that in the United States White European American (WEA) cultural practices are the norm. These ideologies appear ubiquitously, but are especially prevalent in spaces like universities, where WEA cultural practices have a long history of normalcy. For example, although not often stated, university classes are heavily guided by WEA ideologies. This manuscript examines how these practices appear within writing classrooms, and how the curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher biases (re)produce these racist practices that often marginalize people of color.

Introduction to Reflections Spring 2013 issue.

This essay explores the pedagogical lessons of student-inmate peer reviews conducted during a prison outreach project in a first-year composition class. Collaborative writing between inmates and students reveals the positive outcomes that can result from strong mutuality in community-based learning relationships. Through a qualitative analysis of student reflection papers and prisoner oral reflections, this essay shows how an emphasis on the personal during this project did not preclude systemic considerations, but rather produced productive, political outcomes. This essay concludes with a response from my community partner—a prisoner in a medium security facility and participant in the peer reviews. We hope to demonstrate how a reciprocal, relationship-based orientation can facilitate not only productive community-based learning outcomes for students and communities, but also a new type of scholarship—one more thoroughly enriched by community voices.

Drawing upon concepts from service-learning theorists Sarah Ash and Patti Clayton’s DEAL Model for Critical Reflection (2009), this article suggests an innovative approach to critical reflection. Rather than create separate reflection assignments, which can be problematic for a number of reasons described in this article, the author offers composition teachers strategies for embedding critical reflection concepts into composition assignments to create a “reflective course.” The author provides models of types of reflective assignments from a first-year service-learning writing course, including a research paper, a proposal letter to a member of the community, and an oral presentation. These models are adaptable to many levels of rhetoric and composition courses, to many genres, and to students working with a wide range of community partners.

Review of Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics by Phyllis Mentzell Ryder. Lexington Books, 2011.

This article includes excerpts and information about Mother Tongue/Idioma materno, a published anthology created in collaboration with authors and Program Gemini Ink, a San Antonio-based literary arts organization and independent literary center in South Texas.

Service-learning courses have typically encouraged students to write for or about communities. Such courses rarely involve students writing with the communities they serve, despite the growing number of opportunities for collaboration afforded by digital media. Scholarship on collaborative writing with communities in service-learning courses is scarce; research on collaboration using digital, multimodal texts is more so. Arguing that digital technologies have the potential to make service-learning more reciprocal and effective for all participants, this article 1) suggests that digital spaces are an underutilized technology in community-university partnerships; 2) discusses common barriers to using digital mediums collaboratively; and 3) recommends a set of best practices for introducing collaborative digital writing into service-learning courses.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 12, Number 2, Spring 2013 issue.

Review of Exit Through the Gift Shop, directed by Banksy. Paranoid Pictures 2010.

During a December 2011 interview with the Jewish Channel, then Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said, “I think we have an invented Palestinian people who are, in fact, Arabs and historically part of the Arab community, and they had the chance to go many places.” Gingrich then defended this statement during the December 10 Republican debate, arguing, “Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists.” While Gingrich’s comments were met with audience applause during the debate and later praised by some in right-wing circles, they also drew plenty of negative criticism—and not just from Palestinians. The outcry came from both conservative and liberal Americans, while many in the international community, including Jews and Arabs, also took umbrage at Gingrich’s statements.

Documentary film has the power to carry the stories and ideas of an individual or group of people to others who are separated by space, economics, national boundaries, cultural differences, life circumstances and/or time. Such a power—to speak and be heard by others—is often exactly what is missing for people living in poverty, with little or no access to the technologies or networks necessary to circulate stories beyond their local communities. But bound up in that power is also a terrible responsibility and danger: how does the documentarian avoid becoming the story (or determining the story) instead of acting as the vehicle to share the story? How does she avoid becoming a self-appointed spokesperson for the poor or marginalized? Or how does he not leverage the story of others’ suffering for one’s own gain or acknowledgment? These questions become even thornier when intersected with issues of race, cultural capital, and national identity.

Review of Stick ‘Em Up, written by Tony Reyes, directed by Alex Luster. Shoot, Edit, Sleep and Stone Kanyon Productions, 2011. http://stickemupmovie.com

Front matter for Reflections Volume 12, Number 1, Fall 2012 issue.

Our mission is to provide opportunities for local communities to represent themselves by telling their stories in their own words. We document stories of local communities because we believe their voices matter in addressing issues of national and global significance. We value these stories as a way for communities to reflect upon and analyze their own experience through literacy and oral performance. We are committed to working with communities, writers, editors and translators to develop strategies that assure these stories will be heard in the larger world. —New City Community Press, circa 2000

In 2009, Jennifer Hitchcock and her husband, Vernon Hall, traveled to Israel and the West Bank with a $600 Canon camera to find and capture the voices of Israeli and Palestinian nonviolence advocates and activists. Their objective was to challenge the dominant narratives of violence, terrorism, and oppression perpetuated by the mainstream U.S. media, and Dreams Deferred: The Struggle for Peace and Justice in Israel and Palestine documents voices of nonviolence activism as an alternative to such narratives. In the following article, Jennifer takes us behind the camera to explain what compelled her and Vernon to make their documentary, why they made the choices they did, and how they went about making their first feature-length documentary. Theirs is a story that illustrates the rhetorical power of do-it-yourself activism in response to a deeply felt call to action. —Kathleen Kerr, Virginia Tech

Back matter for Reflections Volume 12, Number 1, Fall 2012 issue.

Public writing is a constant battle to make one view seem inevitable in hopes that the audience will set aside the other possibilities. —Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics Attention is being directed toward reality-driven representations from an ever-wider array of sources: journalistic, literary, anthropological. —Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary Watch the movie. Show it to others. Inform yourself. Get active on the issue. —from the “Dreams Deferred” DVD sleeve

The authors have provided, here, a brief introduction to their digital article.

On a cold night in December 2010, the experimental documentary Rothstein’s First Assignment was screened at Virginia Tech. After the film, the audience asked questions of the panelists, who included Dr. Scott Whiddon, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Transylvania University and composer of the original music in the film; the film’s director, Richard Knox Robinson, an award winning photojournalist; and me, the film’s assistant producer.1 That night was the culmination of years of archival research, interviews, long phone conversations, planning missteps, rewrites, emotion, and gratification. The film has since been accepted to the Seattle International Film Festival, the Appalachian Film Festival, the Virginia Film Festival, and several other smaller screenings.

Though born in Ohio, Eli Goldblatt would soon be able to call several more cities home as his father moved the family to Army posts in the United States and Germany. It was this transience that pushed Eli to develop significant relationships quickly and to cherish them long after the family had moved again. This focus on relationships and a sense of movement through the world is something that continues to inform Eli’s career as a professor of writing and a community partner in literacy education. Just as a hitchhiker and a driver build their brief relationship through narratives, we also harness the power of narratives to build our relationships with others, with our communities, and with our world.

Enlightened Self-Interest is a game about non-profit boards. When you play the game with people involved in university/community partnerships, at least one member of the board should be a university representative, but the game can certainly be played with any mix of member characters.

Contemporary nonprofit and governmental organizations actively mediate relationships through and compose representations of literacy initiatives and their participants’ literate abilities for multiple national and transnational audiences. Connecting Deborah Brandt’s theory of literacy sponsorship and New Literacy Studies scholars’ conceptions of literacy mediation to Bourdieu’s idea of the cultural intermediary, this article identifies critical processes of literacy intermediation during a 2008 “Voices of Women” national quilt project collaboration between nonprofit organization Create Africa South, the South African Parliamentary Millennium Programme, and women project participants. Intermediating relationships and processes intensify at postcolonial and multilingual sites of literacy initiatives, in particular through acts of framing and translating that literacy intermediaries engage. Identifying literacy intermediaries affords literacy studies scholars a critical tool to connect local sites of literacy to transnational organizational processes and policies.

Regular Reflections readers will notice, among other things, a change in the journal’s subtitle. We are now “A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning,” having shifted from “A Journal of Writing, Service Learning and Community Literacy.” Title changes—even subtitle changes—are no small things, so we begin with a note on what led us to make that decision.

This article nods to a writing project in a Detroit Metro area writing class where students were challenged to take a metaphorical walk inside the walls of inner-city Detroit. Modeling the intersection of theory and practice embedded in this method of seeing the city, it introduces terms from compositionists and other scholars who write about place theory. It suggests that the development of vocabulary for seeing and re-seeing a place can help writers, who are also citizens, interpret the material world around them better and, in the best case, invest or reinvest in their communities. Readers are also asked to consider what Detroit “streetwork” can teach them about consuming and producing text twenty-first century style.

In recent years, numerous scholars have become disillusioned with first-wave critical pedagogy, particularly the idea that transformative intellectuals can emancipate students and advance progressive politics despite working for reactionary educational institutions. Portraying social justice-oriented teachers as dogmatic, naïve, and self-contradictory, these post-first-wave scholars hope instead to cultivate students’ critical literacies within the default and privatized ethos of the American Dream. A handful of other scholars look to literacy education’s progressive extracurriculum for ideological refuge from institutional hegemony. This essay, while agreeing that significant obstacles constrain progressive teaching in ways that first-wave critical pedagogues have not sufficiently acknowledged, nevertheless rejects the idea that progressive teachers are trapped by unavoidable paradox. It argues further that, rather than accentuating a dichotomy between institutional and extracurricular, socially conscientious teachers can more productively negotiate the challenges of progressive education by breaking down walls between these locations.

In “A Narrative of Teaching, Community, and Activism,” youth minister, Tim Lee, narrates his journey towards establishing a literacy program dedicated to the personal and spiritual development of young black men. In addition to spiritual advisement and critical dialogue, his program exposes young men to prominent black thinkers such as Langston Hughes, Etheridge Knight, Malcolm X, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. This community-based initiative is dedicated to the development of a community literacy specific and, as Lee sees it, necessary, for the successful development of the black male youth in Chicago and beyond.

Mrs. Wilma Stephenson has taught in the Philadelphia public school system for over forty years. She currently serves as a culinary arts teacher, a cheerleading coach, and the director of the yearbook committee at Philadelphia’s Frankford High School. Despite the fact that very few conversations about education incorporate a broad understanding of literacy and education that includes practical arts such as cooking, we believe such practices model spaces where institutional knowledge can meet community knowledge in valuable ways. Wilma Stephenson and her students are the subject of Pressure Cooker, a documentary about a group of Philadelphia high school students learning the ins and outs of the culinary arts.

Using the work of Keith Gilyard (Voices of The Self) and Victor Villanueva (Bootstraps) as models for interrogating his own development as a writer of color, Cagnolatti explores the way Hip Hop influenced his rhetorical education in the urban and militant environment of a Los Angeles magnet high school. Through his detailed analysis of the E.M.E.R.G.E. (Elevated Minds Embracing Righteousness and Gaining Equality) collective he joined in high school, he provides an in-depth and passionate model for how teachers should use Hip Hop forms such as battling, freestyling, and ciphering to shape their approach to college composition instruction and community engagement.

In this article, Williams-Christopher calls for greater awareness of the educational import of non-traditional texts, specifically black women’s memoir, for college composition and rhetoric courses. Williams-Christopher contends that including texts that illustrate the various ways black women have transcended forms of oppression, abuse, and disenfranchisement helps to validate the experiences of black women inside and outside of academe. In doing so, the university becomes a space where the transaction of knowledge is multi-directional rather than merely from teacher to student. The goal of holding both community literacy and academic literary in equal regard is to create a space where students can start to break down sharp divides between academic spaces and local communities.

Review of Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age by Adam J. Banks. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011.

As a follow-up to his own article in this collection Damon Cagnolatti decided to interview Thomas Lee about his experiences with EMERGE, a student group designed to build critical thinking through discussions on hip-hop, the local community, and youth culture. Thomas Lee is currently the director for the Pasadena, CA based transitional housing organization known as “Hillsides Youth Moving On.” At Hillsides Thomas assists emancipated foster youth (ages 17-21) in achieving financial and social independence.

African American community literacy (AACL) originates with the belief that collective social interactions frequently provide the best chance for individuals to develop—through dialogue, personal interactions, and storytelling—into critical citizens. Community, although often taken for granted, figures into the learning of all students as a primary influence on their language and reading habits, as a space for deliberating with others. In response to this understanding, the editors and authors of this collection ask how we might use the long tradition of African American community literacy to teach students to write and respond to traditional academic concerns and the broader social world. Our interests in AACL extends from an understanding that “if writing instructors are to open their typically controlled, teacher-centered classrooms to the press of local community life, they should be aware of how literacy is figured differently across various contexts" (Deans, Roswell, and Burr 5). In this case, we focus on the way black Americans have used specific social practices to organize and educate one another.

This article considers the value of young adult literature in the literacy development of adolescents. Her account of an out-of-school reading group for adolescent African American girls illustrates the capacity such spaces have to provide young African American women with opportunities for self-reflection, critical inquiry, and personal development, opportunities that may not exist within the traditional classroom setting. Melvin-Davis contends that reading groups, such as these, function as “homeplaces,” spaces where diverse, relevant, and realistic African American experiences are shared, validated, and explored for the insights they might reveal for negotiating the world.