This article examines an African American urban debate league in order to understand the types of literacy training youth in these leagues undergo. As the author notes, debate leagues are important sites of community literacy that are often overshadowed by the popular views of these leagues as highly competitive, predominantly white, and for the socially affluent. However, Cridland-Hughes shows that facilitators and organizers in urban debate settings often shape these leagues as sites of communal and cultural education and support. Her discussion of City Debate, one such organization enacting community literacy, illustrates the relationships built through these sites of rhetorical training and their connection to the development of black youth as critical thinkers, speakers, and citizens of tomorrow.

This article examines Alexander’s experiences teaching literacy and African American Literature to prison inmates at the Orange County Correctional facility in Hillsborough, North Carolina. For Alexander the conversations and insights provided by these inmates about their experiences and the experiences of the writers they read were indeed emancipatory. As Alexander explains, the process of reading and discussing the works of African American writers can provide a critical lens for understanding one’s own subjugation, and participates in a long tradition of African American community literacy by helping to transform the lives and minds of a population disproportionately comprised of people of color.

Roosevelt Wilson is the former owner and editor of Capital Outlook newspaper and a former Professor of Journalism at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU). This interview with Van Wilson investigates Roosevelt Wilson’s commitment to FAMU and the African American Community. The Capital Outlook newspaper bridges FAMU and the black community as a service-learning site, and links the black community to the university as an African American Community literacy partner. As such, Mr. Wilson is an “agent of social change” in the African American community.

This essay argues that African American church founder Richard Allen (1760-1831) developed a rhetorical pedagogy that prefigures the community literacy partnerships of later Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). While Allen did not enjoy the material opportunities of institutionalized higher learning, we can interpret passages from his autobiography as a rhetorical pedagogy that affirms the ways of knowing in language of his community, suggests a relationship between language and the truth, and points toward a community pedagogy rooted in language. Allen also figures as a rhetor whose own higher literacy is sponsored by his community, and who returns his rhetorical power to the community for its own betterment. These same dimensions can be witnessed in the pedagogies of later nineteenth-century African American educators, particularly that of Fanny Jackson Coppin of the Institute for Colored Youth, and Daniel A. Payne of Wilberforce University. Moreover, Allen’s very lack of formalized schooling affords us a way of reframing contemporary efforts in university and community partnerships, and offers compelling precedent for Linda Flower’s model of inquiry. For African American higher learning, community literacy partnerships are not merely an additive element of a traditional curriculum; instead, they are the lifeblood of the school itself.

Review of Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six by Jordan Flaherty. Haymarket Books, 2010.

This article discusses Shaw University’s mission and service to African American Communities. The author asserts a definition of community literacy that exemplifies the “communal” relationships of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and African American community literacy partnerships. By analyzing historical and contemporary literacy partnerships and agents of change at Shaw University, the author highlights an insider view of community literacy, as lived experiences that reflect the university’s mission. This insider view draws attention to the shared experience of a people as well as the uplift and education of African Americans. The author believes that this focus speaks to Shaw University’s motto of service to Christ and humanity.

“Upholding the Tradition” explores the national program The Big Read and Claflin University’s attempt to form community partnerships in order to increase literacy in the primarily black, rural, and poor city of Orangeburg, SC, where the university is located. The essay includes interviews with the program director and with a key community member, Reverend Larry McCutheon, who was instrumental in recruiting more than 40 people to take part in the reading project. The interviews demonstrate how multiple levels of planning and engagement were implemented and also how many HBCUs, like Claflin, approach service-learning. More importantly, this essay attempts to theorize ways in which HBCUs can do a better job of servicing the neighborhoods that house them. Ultimately, The Big Read project, featuring Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying, was successful in reaching lapsed readers because it highlighted programs that brought the reader to the book and allowed him or her to become engaged with issues raised therein.

This article investigates service-learning practices and pedagogy at Jackson State University (JSU), a Historically Black University, founded in 1877 to educate underserved and underrepresented African Americans in Mississippi. As a reflection of the university’s motto, “Challenging Minds and Changing Lives,” this research highlights JSU’s concerted efforts to foster students’ participation in school-community literacy partnerships. Since 2009, the university has facilitated academic instruction in first-year English Composition and Literature courses and in second-year Humanities courses. Not only have these efforts enabled JSU students to partner with Elementary schools and African American women’s help initiatives in the Metro-Jackson area, but JSU students have also completed service-learning projects in Limon, Costa Rica. To further illustrate JSU’s commitment to African American literacy partnerships, the authors present a selection of course materials to demonstrate course designs dedicated to service-learning and African American community literacy partnerships.

For one hundred years, North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a Historically Black College and University, has promoted the concept of service as a means of building a stronger academic and social community. At NCCU, service manifests in many forms; however, during the fall 2009 semester, a group of college students collaborated with high school students on a handwritten letter-writing project. The cross-aged teaching initiative employed different theoretical practices that helped NCCU students become rhetors who immersed themselves in rhetorical situations that promoted change. This article focuses on the impact of this literacy-based service-learning experience on NCCU students’ perception of themselves as change agents and problem solvers and on their rhetorical and analytical thinking skills. It also focuses on high school students’ readiness to form a partnership with NCCU students and reveal the problems that negatively affect their lives. Since university students engaged in a rhetoric of change, this partnership is an example of how NCCU continues its founder’s legacy.

Review of Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom by Kristie S. Fleckenstein. Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.

For several decades now, the scholarship of rhetoric and composition studies has shown an increased interest in community literacy and community-based pedagogy. Many point to the emergence of the Ethnography of Literacy (see studies by Heath, Barton, Cushman) and New Literacy Studies (Gee, Street, among others) as an origin for this initial focus on community literacy practices. These areas of scholarship turn our gazes to community literacy practices as rich sites of inquiry that emphasize the social nature of literacy and writing. Linda Flower explains that this turn is, due in part, because “rhetoric and composition studies has long held itself accountable to the public and social significance of writing,” while recognizing its “potentially contradictory goal of developing personally empowered writers” (Community Literacy 76).

This article discusses found literacy partnerships—collaborations around literacy practices that emerge unexpectedly when Spelman College students enact the spirit of service and activism that has defined the historically black liberal arts college for women since its inception. Through an examination of institutional rhetoric, a required general education course and three student cases, the article considers the relationship between doing and becoming as students’ literacies align with the interests of community agencies. Literacy partnerships are not always planned; they can emerge from a spirit of service and commitment to activism that encourages students not just to do service, but to become, through their doing, civic-minded women who use their literacies to promote positive social change.

Despite the significant role digital technology has played in social movements, including the political protests in Iran last year, many still doubt the ability of these technologies to foster civic engagement and social change. In “Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted,” Malcolm Gladwell claims the enthusiasm for social media is “outsized,” and that 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement we’ve (“we” meaning Americans writ large) “seem to have forgotten what activism is.” Gladwell’s analysis highlights many short comings of social networking technologies, and moreover, makes (very) clear his distinction between social networks performing one-off acts of kindness and hierarchical organizations making “real” social change.

As more nonprofit organizations take advantage of the ease of creating an online presence, they need to understand the fundamental nature of Web 2.0: its interactivity between writers and readers. The “(un)civil discourse” that often comes from such interactivity results in an inherent lack of control for writers and their organizations. However, the nonprofits that most successfully use Web 2.0 technologies to enhance their missions are those that accept and even embrace this lack of control, finding ways to use it productively to improve their advocacy and empower their supporters and clients.

What does it mean to teach civic engagement in the 21st Century writing classroom? In our digital and networked and globalized world, college composition instructors need to redefine literacy in ways that reflect the actual communication practices we and our students engage in. To this end, many compositionists are now integrating multimodal projects (that is, “texts” composed with digital/new media technologies so as to include images, video, audio, and alphabetical writing) into their classroom designs. These multimodal projects provide new opportunities for students to communicate with and for a public audience outside the classroom, and to foster community connections and engagement. In Spring 2010, I taught my first multimodal civic engagement class, an upper division writing and rhetoric course that included a community-based experiential learning project in partnership with a campus organization. I hoped that a project using a variety of media, technologies and modalities with a purpose and audience beyond the classroom would foster in students a sense of connection to their campus and teach them that they can use composition, rhetoric, and design skills to participate in public conversations around issues that matter to them and their community.

This article argues that community publishing initiatives might extend the scope and impact of their work by critically examining the ways in which technology influences the production and circulation of their [counter]public discourse. Building upon the work of Paula Mathieu, the author analyzes the material and discursive complexities of the “street paper” movement as a site of community-based publishing, finding both limitations and potential in the survival-driven, print-based, and hyperlocal character of street paper media. Discussing an emerging digital platform for participatory blogging among homeless and low-income street paper vendors, the author suggests how a model of Web-based, multimodal, and interactive communication might work to extend the community literacy practices of the street paper movement.

Review of Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement with editors Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser. Utah State Press, 2010.

Review of Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action by Jeffrey T. Grabill. Hampton Press, 2007.

The emergence of blogs and social networking sites open new areas of study in composition and rhetoric, adding literate spaces and foregrounding multimodal communication. While assessments of these technologies range from celebratory to ominous, their ubiquity and their integration into our rhetorical situation is undeniable. I suggest that labor activists in higher education have new opportunities to organize, communicate, and campaign utilizing these new rhetorical networks. I argue for a notion of “viral advocacy” for organizing in new digital spaces. Based on an on-going project using social media in my faculty union’s advocacy work, I demonstrate some possibilities for using social media for rhetorical advocacy.

This article investigates the parameters of civic engagement through digital writing. Specifically, it examines the differences between slacktivism and activism against changing citizenship styles and definitions of civic action. With the goal of rethinking the relationship between civics, digital technology, and slacktivism, it outlines a digital writing project that uses social networking technologies to enact social change by increasing students’ awareness in terms of what counts as civic action in digital spaces. In particular, it draws upon student reflections from a digital writing class to illustrate how engaging Stuart Selber’s three components of computer literacy—the functional, critical, and rhetorical—can afford young citizens an aware and ultimately agentive role in terms of their online civic participation, as well as an opportunity to increase their social capital as digital citizens.

Much of the scholarship that explores the democratizing potential of the Internet begins with an assumption that ideal public discourse will appear as on-line deliberation; it seeks out discussion forums on issues-based and community-oriented websites to examine whether strangers come together in these spaces to deliberate about public concerns. This article questions the focus on deliberation by looking at the social networking practices of a local non-profit. Miriam’s Kitchen, which serves meals to homeless individuals in Washington DC, actively engages many followers and fans through their Twitter and Facebook feeds, but their social networking does not set out to encourage deliberation among homeless and housed people. Nevertheless, the essay argues, their on-line rhetorical work should be understood as the work of public-formation. The essay analyzes the local contexts and participants—including, in this case, the constantly public lives of chronically homeless individuals—and considers how social networking offers people a new tool in public formation: the power of circulation.

As promoters of social justice movements adopt digital technologies in order to communicate with their members, it is necessary to interrogate the rhetorical and ethical effects of these new technologies. If connection to a justice movement is as easy as typing and reading a few key phrases, can that connection be expected to prompt the kind of action required for social change to occur? Using student produced writing and responses to websites promoting social justice causes, this essay discusses emerging digital and cultural literacies that demand a re-imagining of rhetorical appeals for both membership in and action by social justice organizations. Although at first glance the electronic environment seems antagonistic to the goals of uniting people toward a cause, once one begins to closely examine what the new platforms for electronic communications are and how they are being used to form interpersonal connections, one finds that they are ideal for the kind of community building past voices of social justice deemed necessary for successful social transformation. Despite any perceived fragility of virtual awareness, digital technology is an extremely beneficial tool for civic engagement, capable of fostering conversation and writing about justice issues in a meaningful and rhetorically sophisticated manner, and individuals can learn to use their voices to shape the kind of inclusive communities they desire socially into those that also seek justice.

Paula Mathieu is an associate professor of English at Boston College, where she directs the First-Year Writing Program and the Writing Fellows Program. For more than a decade she has also worked with the international movement of street newspapers, local publications that provide income and a public voice for people who are homeless or living in poverty. With David Downing and Claude Mark Hurlbert she co-edited Beyond English Inc: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy (Boynton/Cook, 2001). In 2005, Mathieu published her seminal text (in my humble opinion), Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition. In 2007 she received the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s (CCCC) Rachel Corrie Courage in the Teaching of Writing Award. She has published articles in College Composition and Communication (CCC) and in The Public Work of Rhetoric with Diana George. Mathieu is a CCCCs executive committee member and has been a member of the Reflections Civic Scholarship Outstanding Book Award committee for the past two years; she graciously agreed to conduct this interview at my request.

This article deals primarily with the issue(s) of student engagement and technology by examining two YouTube videos, both posted by professor of cultural anthropology Michael Wesch. A critical examination of such texts is both academically revealing and pedagogically useful. By foregrounding the complex interplay of cultural attitudes towards technology, progress, and the purpose(s) of education, scholars and teachers may fruitfully engage students in both the critical study and composition of multi-modal texts. As a gesture in that direction, I view the larger issue of public discourse through the lens of Patricia Roberts-Miller’s taxonomy of models of the public sphere, and Jacques Ranciere’s notion of the distribution of the sensible.

This is the story of my first attempt to write myself into labor activism in higher education. As an untenured teacher protesting retrenchment and increases in class sizes at a public university, I explore the risks inherent not only in directly addressing critique to management, but also in publicly posting that critique via blog and Facebook. I note the potential protections of public writing at a unionized school, and discuss the surprising benefits of even small actions for a culture of labor consciousness.

Service learning presents students and teachers alike with emotionally fraught moments. Before these moments shape ideologies and worldviews, they give us sensations. Understanding these sensations is part of what theorists label the affective domain. Affect is a notion garnering much critical attention from compositionists writ large but little attention in the service learning literature. The field has much to gain from acknowledging that students and teachers both experience civic engagement rationally as well as affectively. One of the potential benefits is a more sensitive understanding of how various modes of civic engagement (e.g., volunteerism and activism) are socially, ideologically, and emotionally constructed.

This paper describes how a book group setting fostered the construction of meaning by 12 urban adolescent Latina girls as they responded to literature. Differing from the interactions seen in more traditional educational settings, this study examines the ways that this book group context encouraged the participants to discuss and write about issues related to their lives in order contemplate social and personal complexities, celebrate triumphs, and cope with tragedies. Furthermore, this paper explores the development of the literate meaning-making behaviors that helped the girls interpret textual messages and connect with each other as members of a literate community.

This essay argues that by expanding our conception of a “literacy act” to include the denial of literacy, it is possible to gain a greater understanding into how the politics of literacy are enacted both historically and in the current moment.

In the midst of Tea Party protests, party politics, and political programming which marked the recent mid-term elections, one question kept returning to me: What would it look like if dialogue, a sense of mutual listening and response, was the norm and not the exception? What would it mean to engage in political issues, but to do with a sense of collaboration, cooperation?

Review of The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning by Editors Randy Stoecker and Elizabeth Tryon, with Amy Hilgendorf. Temple University Press, 2009.

This article presents The Kamp Katrina Project, a community literacy partnership with Kamp Katrina residents in New Orleans. Kamp Katrina is a colony for displaced artists, musicians, and low-wage earners. In this article, Kamp Katrina residents relate their stories about life in post-Katrina New Orleans after the levee failures devastated the city (now exacerbated by the recent BP oil disaster). As part of this article, we enclose the documentary short Kamp Katrina: A Love Letter to New Orleans, one of several community texts including a book of photography and a website (http://public.csusm.edu/kampkatrina/) where visitors can access video biographies and performances and learn how to support Kamp Katrina.

In 2009, Reflections sponsored a panel titled “De-centering Dewey,” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. The following statements reflect the comments of the program participants, Ellen Cushman, Juan Guerra, and Steve Parks. A question and answer period followed these remarks, which is also reproduced below. Speaker comments have been edited for clarity.

The following email conversation, much of it done in a coffee shop in Amherst, Massachusetts across a table from each other, contains two strands that quickly merge into one. We’ve reproduced the beginning of each strand. We each sent an initial email (before either of us had read the other’s posting) and responded to them. Strand one starts with Lauren’s first posting and Kirk’s response to it, strand two with Kirk’s first posting and Lauren’s response. Following that, somewhat chaotically, we’ve included postings, which take up various themes. Readers will see where they merge, and where threads get picked up (or dropped).

Review of Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric of Social Movements, edited by Sharon McKenzie Stevens and Patricia Malesh. SUNY Press, 2009. 250 pages.

This project investigates how a group of adult learners who are acquiring new literacies articulate their relationships to dominant ideologies of literacy. My goal is to look beyond typically expressed motivations for becoming more literate to understand how people see the roles of writing and reading in their lives. I argue that adult learners can teach scholars and teachers something about dominant ideologies from their unique point of critique. Another goal is to examine how learners use alternative literacy narratives to define a place of agency. By examining interview transcripts and written texts, I investigate the ways that one adult learner uses alternative narratives as a means to alter his subject position and disrupt dominant literacy narratives.

Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. In 1998 she founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. Her activism and scholarship engages with Feminism, Marxism, and African American studies. Benjamin D. Kuebrich met with Professor Davis at Syracuse University to ask her about issues of pedagogy, rhetoric, and community literacy.

For many people, the word "NHI" means nothing more than an acronym. It does not illustrate or symbolize victimization, injustice, marginalization, or a complete disregard of humanity in life and death. "NHI" or No Humans Involved is a designation that was used by police, politicians, and judges when dealing with prostitutes and other marginalized communities. This paper will mainly look at the effects of NHI in regards to women sex workers. NHI is an example of the institutional oppression that Tracey E. Ore's Maintaining Inequalities: Systems of Oppression and Privilege addresses. By designating crimes against sex workers as "NHI," police, politicians, and judges are accepting the continued violence against sex workers, and the belief that sex workers are unworthy of human rights. The main problem of society is the clashing of ideologies, defined as a system of beliefs. It is important that for oppression and thus, the oppression of sex workers, to end, ideologies of individuals must be dynamic to ideologies of other individuals. In other words, we need to be able to have our ideology, but still be willing to learn, change, or adapt to those ideologies of others.

At the start of my junior year this semester, Professor McCracken asked our class whether or not we identified as feminists. I hesitated before raising my hand. I knew that I wanted to be a feminist but I was afraid that if I was questioned further about what it means to be a feminist, I would not have a worthy answer. Having minimal background in the history and contemporary struggle for women's rights, I quickly glanced around the classroom to gather a reason why my hand should remain raised. I noticed some hands raised confidently and others at half-mast. Then I noticed the white board displaying the title of our class: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Marginalized Communities. I really care about these issues, I asserted in my mind, and my classmates must too, if they chose to take this course.

Here are the major writing assignments, sequenced from English 101103, that Jonathan developed for his service-learning course on HIV and AIDS.

This paper recounts the experiences of co-teaching a community engaged seminar focused on study of sexuality and space in the city of Syracuse. This geographical focus grounded engagement and provides here a platform from which to address the difficulties of identifying communities organized around diverse, socially constructed identities. The study of sexuality and space prompts a rethinking of how and whether sexuality operates in the city as a situated series of locations or, rather, a series of identities shaping all spaces. The paper explores a semester-long, student-driven discussion concerning queer as a category in relation to the study of sexuality and community. Through discussion of this scholarship, we engaged students in the ongoing process of figuring out what it meant to locate queer communities and to queer the broader community.

What is the origin of oppression? Why do we hear so much about it from some circles, and yet can rarely identify it when it confronts us in our everyday lives? Charlie Manter and I, April Maltz, set out to answer this question within the context of our Honors Seminar, Gender, Sex, Race, and Marginalized Communities. We focused on rhetorically analyzing oppression as it occurs in American society using Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory, which states that our reality is represented through the use of symbols and that it is created by the terministic screens through which we view these symbols and by drawing on Tracy Ore and Marilyn Frye's theories of oppression. Tracy Ore claims that oppression is institutionalized, and that there are five types of institutional oppression: family, media, education, state and public policy, and economy.

Since its founding, the Hetrick-Martin Institute has grown from a small, volunteer-led grass-roots advocacy organization into a leading professional provider of social support and programming for at-risk lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning (LGBTQ) youth. Hetrick-Martin youth members, ranging in age from 12 to 21, come from 174 zip codes throughout all of New York City and the surrounding metropolitan area. They are of all colors and sizes, come from all kinds of backgrounds, and their enthusiasm and creativity is boundless.

An (Em)bodied Workshop: When Service Learning Gets Bawdy explores the ways a student's perception about which bodies are and are not sexualized creates problems for that student when she attempts to run a writing group for senior citizens with Alzheimer's disease. This essay suggests that students engaging in service learning may import constructions of a mind/body split common in school settings to service learning sites as a way to authorize their presence in these sites. Students engaged in service learning need to be pushed to examine the ways their constructions of their work may erase the body.

Review of Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World by Nancy Welch.

This article discusses the practices of sexual literacy by two members of Legato (the collegiate Lesbian and Gay Association) in Istanbul, Turkey, through the perspectives of gateways, sponsors, and the accumulation of literacies. The discussion reveals that sexual literacy is community-based. Therefore, the complex and conflicting notions of community, as inflected by the politics of place and use, are essential for theorizing present and future configurations of sexual literacy in different ways. The conclusion provides suggestions for further research and some thoughts about ways of incorporating pedagogical understandings of how literacies are (self) initiated and acquired, in community-based literacy education.

This essay shares stories and valorizes concepts related to sexualized identities, highlighting details and reflections about exotic dancing, and Bernadette Barton's Stripped. Further, the essay contends that potentially powerful and profound pedagogy exists in exploring these, identities, and that explorations leading to developed awareness of sexually stigmatized individuals and groups may encourage student writers to become more engaged in supporting community engagement.

It is difficult to imagine one's place within oppression, and even more difficult to picture one's participation in it. Yet the fact remains that we live in a hierarchical society that creates a steep slope for marginalized communities to climb. Marginalization occurs when an individual or group is considered "outside" the bounds of mainstream society based on differential association from the "norm", i.e. white, male, rich, and heterosexual.

Review of Teaching/Writing in Thirdspaces: The Studio Approach by Rhonda C. Grego and Nancy S. Thompson.

In Queer Rhetorics, an upper-division service-learning writing course taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005, students used queer theory to frame their engagement with local LGBTQ non-profit organizations in Boulder. In their journals, students moved from responding personally to the course material and their volunteer work to generating their own critical inquiries into queer discourse, as well as community-based service projects. This essay argues that self-reflecting on their own sexual citizenship in the context of community engagement fosters students' critical understanding of the public rhetoric of sexuality and gender and the social norms that delimit our sexual worlds.

We know the drill: service learning is good. It's good for you, it's good for your students, and it's good for the community partners and the communities they serve. We know the drill but we still want to hear it, and we want to hear why.