This article presents an interdisciplinary advanced honors course: Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Marginalized Communities. Through this ' course and its service-learning applications, students discovered that discourses of gender, sexuality, and race are not simply theoretical—ultimately, they impact people's lives. I include an explanation of the curriculum and the service-learning applications in my design and facilitation of the course, as well as samples of student work and a partial "showcase" of the student's final community event. In addition to describing one course in particular, this article aims to explore service-learning in activist, educative, and research formats and the implications for our students, our own research and knowledge, and our communities.

This article addresses the "problem of speaking for others" in a joint community-based research project between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Reading, Pennsylvania branch and Penn State Berks to uncover, document, and disseminate to the public African American history in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Integrating community partners' and students' voices with her own, Grobman suggests that the Berks County African American History project approached a model of CBR in which whites and African Americans spoke (and wrote) with one another. She argues that this productive, but highly complex collaboration between community partners, students, and faculty reminds us that theoretical understandings of such concepts as hybridity, border-crossing, and blurring of group-based differences and identities do not necessarily occur in practice; rather, the Black-white binary, sometimes for very good reasons, is not dissolved. Grobman recommends strategies that will aid others involved CBR to create venues that approach equal authority rather than paternalistic service.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 9, No. 1, Fall 2009.

In a 2002 article, Patricia Roberts-Miller asked if rhetorical theory has a place for what she then called "principled dissent and sincere outrage." This article addresses that challenge, as the author follows a year of living in and writing for a community in Atlanta that works with the homeless in that city. In it, she argues that, if there is a place for dissenting rhetoric, it is taking place in marginalized movements and publications like the one published by Atlanta's Open Door Community. Hers is a follow-up of two previous discussions (both written with Paula Mathieu of Boston College) on what these authors are calling "a rhetoric of dissent."

This paper reports on recent research investigating the effects of service-learning on linguistically and culturally diverse college students enrolled in a first-year composition course. Two separate studies, a pilot and main study involving native (NS) and non-native (NNS) English speaking college students, explore how students from diverse sociolinguistic backgrounds respond to and gain from service-learning. The results were mixed, with the initial study indicating NNS students often experience more difficulty finding and successfully completing work in the community while the main study found a similar group of NNS students to expect and gain more from service-learning activities than a comparative group of NS students. Implications for introducing diverse student populations to service-learning activities are discussed in light of these findings.

Review of Composition and Cornel West: Notes Toward a Deep Democracy by Keith Gilyard. So. Illinois Press. 2008.

This essay examines Katrina's impact on service-learning pedagogy, in particular how the instability of the storm's aftermath has generated alternate approaches to service project planning and implementation. Tulane's mandatory service-learning requirement following Katrina led the authors to develop a joint project at New Orleans City Park, which combined five sections of writing students who worked clearing storm debris. The weekly movement from an idealized campus space through devastated areas of the city and park served as the basis for two complementary pedagogical approaches, one treating Katrina's disruption of space; the other treating the storm's disruption of time.

Review of Eyes on the Ought to Be: What we Teach About When we Teach About Literacy by Kirk Branch. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007. 216 pages

This article describes how to set up a course in which students create publications for social justice organizations and non-profits. Careful planning is required, but the news articles, media releases, flyers and newsletters are often crucial to the success of these organizations, and therefore, student rewards are great.

Should we teach our student's how to form street protests, wave placards, and be confrontational? In our quest to teach students how to reshape civic spaces, that is, must our student learn to go beyond civility?

This essay establishes a context for discussing how community literacy pedagogy can benefit from critical engagement with the rhetorical actions of a grassroots social movement. Drawing from ongoing community literacy work in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, I detail the prospects of speaking truth to power in relation to composition studies’ ongoing skepticism of rhetorics of social protest. I end by arguing that there are central aspects associated with oppositional rhetorics that can be encountered in community literacy initiatives and used to support forms of social change often excluded from conciliatory rhetorics.

Bonnie Neumeier is a long-time resident and community activist in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. Cofounder of several grassroots organizations addressing issues of poverty and oppression, she works incessantly to develop resources that support healthy activism and leadership capacity in justice work. As an active participant in the Over-the-Rhine People’s Movement since its founding in 1970, she has worked to make affordable housing a top priority and a basic human right for all. In the following interview, Neumeier reflects on her activism, along with her experiences as a community educator working with college students.

Rhetoric and composition now has a history of teaching, research, and engagement with communities. We also have a number of terms for describing this work, each with its own history: community literacy and service learning are but the two most common. The historical roots that led to community literacy have also yielded shoots of growth in the areas of public rhetoric, cultural rhetoric, ethnography, research, and professional and technical communication. Central to all these areas is the fundamental understanding that writing matters; it can make a difference for peoples, organizations, and institutions. Depending on the purposes and exigencies for writing in these contexts, community-based writing can mobilize people, inform policy, seed new initiatives, draw audiences to events and forums, allow for greater participation in decision making, and make decision making transparent. For the last decade and half, scholars in rhetoric and composition have worked hard to define our roles in facilitating writing in the public interest, though we have not often done so in ways that create a synergy around shared research interests or theoretical projects.

Review of Service-Learning in Technical and Professional Communication by Melody Bowdon and J. Blare Scott. New York: Longman, 2003.

This paper draws on two sources to theorize gender literacy. First, it examines several influential theories of social change embedded in community literacy scholarship. Next, it uses two of these theories to analyze qualitative data from an after-school program. In this program, university students mentored Latina middle-school students to promote both gender literacy and academic literacy. Based on this analysis, it argues that (1) only a collaborative, negotiated approach can promote effective social change, (2) that such efforts must include reflexive work by researchers to produce viable negotiations, and (3) that this approach highlights the intersection between pragmatic and ethical concerns that underlies effective social change.

This article presents interviews with six composition and rhetoric teachers who teach writing in prison. Mina Shaughnessy’s 1976 article “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” is used as a heuristic with which to look at this material. As little work is available on the experience of teaching writing in prison, these interviews are a preliminary step in describing and understanding this transformative experience. The differences between the prison writing teachers and the teachers Shaughnessy describes illuminates how much the field of composition has grown in the last forty years. The interviews with these six teachers speak to the experiences of teachers in community outreach teaching situations and may be a step in understanding and articulating these experiences.

Review of Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement by Linda Flower. Southern Illinois University Press, 2008.

Most discussions of service-learning focus on the potential pitfalls of working with students who inhabit relatively privileged positions. While this crucial concern deserves attention, it has limited our focus by encouraging students to cross borders, to encounter people different from themselves rather than to encounter something different within themselves or within their own communities. This approach may be particularly problematic for students of color whose education for social justice, citizenship, and historical consciousness might best be furthered by a writing, or might I say a “re-writing,” pedagogy that emphasizes recursive spatial movement through place over time—a “writing as the community” service-learning paradigm.

This essay explores student-authored ethnographies written by undergraduates in four sections of a service-learning course taught at Wayne State University in Detroit. I argue that the introductory sections of students’ ethnographic narratives provide particular insights into the relationship between the service experience, ethnographic inscription, and student subjectivities. Following a discourse analysis of student writing, I offer some thoughts about how instructors might improve the pedagogical pairing of ethnographic writing with service-learning experiences.

Service-learning pedagogies attempt to bridge the often-distant realms of work in the academy with that of the surrounding community. However, in practice, a true partnership among stakeholders can be challenging to achieve. For this project, I invited three former students and the director of a local non-profit to partner with me in an important aspect of academic work: course redesign. Through the lens of standpoint theory, we see that students and community partners hold unique standpoints, yet all too often their voices are marginalized. I assert that their standpoints offer essential contributions to the course re-design process.

The goal of this article is to disrupt and challenge the negative discourses often associated with Mexican immigrants by introducing Mexicano concepts of success, including buena gente, buen trabajador, and bien educado. These concepts emerged within a Mexicano immigrant community in California that I have been a part of for more than ten years. In collecting data for this project, I conducted a qualitative study, using ethnographic methods, over a two-year period. This article focuses on two individuals: Luis and Armando.

Beneath the hysteria being generated around immigration, intertwined in the neighborhoods creating draconian anti-immigration laws, reside millions of individuals of Mexican descent who are working hard, supporting families, and supporting community growth. The stories of these individuals, however, are seldom represented. Rather, images of conservative talk show host Sean Hannity on horseback, chasing "wetbacks," seem to dominate the airways.

Moving Out/Moving In: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of the Immigrant Experience is a service-learning course created and taught by Mirta Tocci in the Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College in Boston, MA. Tocci describes the five-year history of her collaboration with community partner, lnquilinos Boricuas en Acción, focusing on how Emerson students' study of the psychosocial effects of the immigrant experience inspires art projects created by Emerson students and Latino children aged 5-12 enrolled in IBA's Cacique after-school program.

This article examines what it means when a university makes a multifaceted commitment to migration, taking note of both what can be accomplished through such a commitment and what tensions remain. At Fairfield University, engagement with migration is expressed in the curriculum, service-learning projects, faculty research, and in efforts to influence the national debate on immigration through the University's Center for Faith and Public Life. The philosophical context for this work on migration reflects, in part, the Jesuit Catholic tradition of the University. Service-learning courses across the curriculum involve work with immigrants. In a course on literacy, students assist children of immigrants at an adult literacy center.

Victor Villanueva studies the intersections of rhetoric and racism. He is the recipient of the 2009 CCCC Exemplar Award, which honors scholars whose work represents the best our field has to offer. Villanueva also won NCTE's David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English and CEE's Richard Meade Award for Research in English Education for his book, Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, an autobiographical tale that exposes the problems with literacy education in America based on his own experiences as a Puerto Rican growing up in New York. Though Villanueva does not often write specifically about immigration, his work illuminates the connection between rhetoric, racism and xenophobia, and encourages all of us in the field to consider how our conceptions of literacy oppress those not of the dominant culture.

It is time for Latino immigrants in the United States to take back their stories-stories that have been rewritten by people in a campaign to drive them out of the United States. The revised stories read in the press and heard on the streets, promulgated by mayors and legislators and citizens who have a vision of America the Way It Used to Be, go something like this: our towns are being taken over by brown-skinned immigrants who drive our crime rate up and overwhelm the criminal justice system; these immigrants drain our economy, sucking our resources for schools, healthcare and welfare programs; they take away jobs from Americans and drive our wages down; they don't really want to be American-they stick to themselves, won't learn English, and are only here to take advantage of our way of life while refusing to contribute to it; and now, post 9/11, they are a terrorist threat. Citizens, we are being invaded; take back your communities before it's too late.

Since 2006, Open Borders Project/ Proyecto Sin Fronteras has used digital storytelling in our work with teens and adult learners in summer workshops, computer courses and ESL classes. Participants write stories or interview others about their immigrant experience, record, edit and mix their stories on an open-source program, and create short audio stories. Their stories are published on our website, used to stimulate discussions, shared in public forums, and played on the radio. The process of creating stories and sharing them has been profound. Listening to each other's stories and reflecting on our common experience is an act of honoring our lives and affirming our sacrifices and dreams. Through our stories, we build a collective identity as immigrants. Telling our stories allows us to take risks, to talk about missing our families, our isolation, our frustrations as we try to feel at home in our new world. Our stories create openings for conversations with our friends and family, to say things unsaid. Our biggest challenge: how to use our stories as instruments for change, to give us a voice, to be heard, to organize, to become actors responding to issues that affect our lives. This article is accompanied by a CD of several of the stories produced at Open Borders Project and referred to in the text.

This collaboratively written essay explores and advocates for the rich potential of community -university educational-activist partnerships for praxis-oriented learning that enrich the lives of all by unleashing the collective power of students, teachers, and community members. Offering four perspectives from such a collaboration in Minnesota, a place that has been a magnet for national and regional anti-immigrant activity, we reflect on the false notion of a town-gown divide, the emotional, political, and deeply personal investments we have in making these collaborations successful, and the critically important and imperative nature of community-based work for shaping a more humane and just future.

This paper reports the process and outcomes of a multidisciplinary service-learning project in a major metropolitan area in southwestern Indiana that focuses on determining, then meeting, the needs of our growing Latino/a population. We discuss three service-learning courses involved with this project - one completed, one in progress, and one being planned. Deploying a theoretical apparatus emerging from sociology and intercultural rhetorical theory, we discuss our students' interaction with this rhetorical borderland and the processes of becoming and hybrid thinking that occurred in the process.

Research on early Latino/a immigration in the deep South is minimal largely because of the Black and White racial dichotomy that pervades the South. New Orleans has a rich Latino/a and Spanish presence, yet little research covers Latino/a immigration from the 1700s to the mid- 1900s. This paper will trace the early history of Latino/a immigration in New Orleans to help foster deep Southern Latino/a "roots" for this growing immigrant population. The paper will also focus on the largest New Orleans Latino/a community, Hondurans, tracing their early history and current immigrant experiences after Hurricane Katrina.

Playwright Glenn Hutchinson discusses his play Limbo, which is based on interviews with Marie Gonzalez, an undocumented college student. Like many other young people in limbo, Marie has made the United States her home; however, because she is undocumented, she is at risk of being deported back to a country she has not known since she was 5 years old. Marie has become an activist for the Dream Act, legislation that would help people in her situation. Following an introduction, Hutchinson has included some excerpts from his play that was performed in Charlotte, NC last year.

It all started with my doodling habit. Sitting at meetings - department meetings, committee meetings, doctoral defenses, meetings with the Chancellor, meetings with the insurance guy, you name it I doodle. Faces, mainly. Big long aquiline noses, thick as weeds eyebrows, creases galore, just for the fun of it. Sometimes muscled, Michelangelo arms and backs, rippling with little muscular bumps for which I have no anatomical backing.

Reader response between between Jessica Restaino and Elenore Long.

I argue that literacy studies needs to define the role of peace in our efforts to pursue social justice. Drawing on the work of Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, I show that promoting peace is the means, as well as the end, of working toward social justice. Further, I demonstrate that the process of transforming alienation into connection is a crucial step in fostering peace. Using this framework, I analyze ethnographic data on one highly successful writing instructor's classroom literate practices to illustrate a pedagogical approach that helped shift both students and teacher from alienation to connection.

Writing assignments carry political ramifications even when they attempt neutrality; students should learn that all writing occurs within larger contexts of power. To accomplish this goal, I advocate instruction derived from practices of critical rhetoric, critical revision, and critical discourse analysis. Rhetoric education, based on Donald Lazere's Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy, trains students not only for academic writing, but for citizenry. Students write what David Bartholomae calls "practical criticism," critically revising their own texts. Also, students may practice the methodology of critical discourse analysis, as prescribed by Thomas Huckin, in a course that integrates civic literacy with introductory CDA assignments.

How do you teach peace during a war on terror? The short answer is constantly.

"Educating Future Public Workers: Can We Make Inquiry Professional?" begins with an observation: students in CIT 300: Communicating in the Helping Professions are preparing for the very human service careers that caused community residents in Ellen Cushman's The Struggle and the Tools such grief. Exploring options from community literacy research for addressing this contradiction, the paper commends a problem-based pedagogy focused on collaborative inquiry and knowledge building designed to represent the agency and expertise of others. The paper dramatizes this model of rhetorical education through the work of a pre-professional named Hillary who interned at a shelter for women and children seeking sanctuary from domestic abuse. The paper follows Hillary conducting a series of "rival readings" on the shelter's no dating policy with theorists, professionals, and, most importantly, those most directly affected by the rule: the shelter's residents. "Educating Future Public Workers" argues that community-based rhetorical research can offer faculty and students outside of English both a theoretical frame and a practical guide to community partnerships.

This article focuses on America's Army Game, the first-person-shooter video game now being peddled by the U.S. Army for classroom use. In my community-based literacy class, where students partner with children and teens at a local youth center, this "game" helps us to grasp and problematize literacy sponsorship and recruitment-the idea that literacy education involves not just learning a new set of practices but also trying out a social identity. Through this class, I argue for a pedagogy of multiliteracies that's committed to counter-recruitment: to enlarging ideological space so that critical questions can be formed and alternatives entertained.

This article explores the collaborative experience of a university professor and the coordinator of a local hate crimes project as we developed and taught a service-learning course on public dialogue. We begin by describing dialogic communication and suggest that it can be integrated into other forms of public discourse, such as deliberation and advocacy, in order to enrich them. We then describe our course and analyze data we gathered during the semester to assess how the course affected our students. Our analysis suggests that although we missed some opportunities to optimize our students' learning, the course successfully prepared them to plan and facilitate public dialogues on diversity issues, and motivated most of them to become more engaged with their community as democratic citizens and promoters of social justice. We end with lessons learned and ideas for future research and practice.

My experiences teaching a service-learning composition class entitled Writing Women Safe that dealt with sexual violence against women point to a missing link between course content and community-based activism. Students in my all-female class wrote about and discussed the reality of rape, sometimes in the context of their own lives. However, for all the real talk about a real crime, our well-intentioned service component, the design of informational pamphlets for a rape crisis center, did not draw on students' personal resources, nor evoke a believable sense of "change agency." Greater engagement with avenues for action through writing, perhaps via the community partner's work in the local justice system, as well as deeper reflection on students' strengths and positioning, are central concerns as I revise my approach to the course. Faced with the prospect of one day implementing Writing Women Safe at my new institution, I argue that, as educators and scholars committed to community-based learning, we must develop partnerships that push all involved more deeply into honest assessment of needs, resources, and perspective.

Note: This article was originally published in Reflections Special Issue, Bridging the Gap: Emerging Scholars, Emerging Forms ofScholarship. "The Life of A Poem" is a poetic and critical reflection on the relationship between the University and institutionalized economic, physical and sexual violence by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a PhD candidate at Duke University, and a founding member of UBUNTU, an artistic and organizing community that emerged in Durham, NC during the Duke Lacrosse Scandal. In this article, Audre Lorde's "Litany for Survival" becomes a text of healing and a means through which to critically reframe community building and engaged scholarship.

This paper profiles the creation of the Nyerere Centre for Peace Research in Arusha, Tanzania and the evolution of a unique approach to applied peace and conflict resolution in Arcadia University's Master's degree program in International Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR). The focus is on a curriculum that bridges theory and practice in the conflict resolution field through the implementation of project-based learning initiatives, an approach particularly well-suited to the subject matter because it joins students, faculty and stakeholders together to solve problems and impact positive social change. The paper chronicles the development of this approach from within the IPCR program, including the partnership with the East African Community and the founding of the Nyerere Centre for Peace Research in Arusha, Tanzania.

In honor of the International Day of Peace (September 21, 2008), established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1981 to be "devoted to commemorating and  strengthening the ideals of peace both within and among , all nations and peoples," the United Nations organized a global peace messaging campaign inviting citizens from every country to urge world leaders to work harder for peace. With international conflicts and crises around the world in mind, the UN wished to provide ordinary people with the opportunity to have their voices heard by those who influence policy. In total, 150,000 text and online messages in many different languages were sent from 140 countries.

This conversation among five activists in Brooklyn, New York, explores the intersections between local anti-war organizing efforts and recent response to issues of gentrification, development, and displacement. Four of the five participants are university professors and members of a neighborhood peace group formed after 9/11; the other participant is an organizer for Families United for Racial and Economic Equality. All five live in the same diverse neighborhood. The central contradiction that emerges in the conversation is between the potential for building a more diverse movement around issues of gentrification and the equally great potential for gentrification to reproduce and deepen the very social divisions that have historically hampered organizing multi-racial movements across class lines.

Review of Girls, Feminism, and Grassroots Literacies: Activism in the GirlZone by Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2008.

This article examines Montana's effort to implement legislation "Indian Education for All," which is intended to help all Montanans learn about the historical and contemporary contributions and achievements of Montana's Native people, in light of peace-building. It describes three community projects developed by the Montana Writing Project to contribute to implementation efforts and peace activism in these matters. Examined are relevant theories of peace education: "Indian Education for All" legislation, the Montana Writing Project as a site of the National Writing : Project involved in Project Outreach efforts, and difficulties encountered in engaging this work. Participant writing : and photographs are included as illustrations of work accomplished.

Review of Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing by Louise Dunlap. Oakland, CA: New Village Press, 2007.

Since the U.S. invaded Iraq, I see my life as usual-wanting to be on the "frontlines of non-violence," but not always knowing how to get there or what to do. In this narrative, I re-draw my local peace advocacy since 2003 to figure out the frontlines and my endeavors. Though refreshed by my core belief in the mutual dependence of non-violent means and ends, I also have identified close conflict with this idea. Especially where my county, campus, and classroom communities intersect, I live and work where non-violence is not everywhere a community value.

Review of The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers by Linda Adler-Kassner. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2008.

"Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from dense unspeakable stuff, through the shimmering power of dreaming stuff." —Joy Harjo, A Postcolonial Tale