PDF version Abstract This study examines strategies for emphasizing collaborative writing in a community engagement project. Doing so can enrich students’ experiences with ethical community engagement. Successful collaborative writing provides students with competencies—rhetorical knowledge, confidence, understanding of transfer, and appreciation for diverse perspectives—that are key building blocks in supporting students as they deepen their engagement… Continue reading The Group Project’s Potential: Emphasizing Collaborative Writing with Community Engagement

PDF version Abstract COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Latinx/a/o communities as people face interlocking global pandemics: “COVID-19, economic recession, global warming, and structural racism” (Solorzano, 2021, xvi). While popular discussions have focused on how these systemic inequities have resulted in learning loss, we have found the focus on school-based learning loss also obscures experiential knowledge students… Continue reading Beyond Learning Loss: Testimonios of a Pandemic Education/Más Allá de la Pérdida: Testimonios de Una Educación Pandémica

PDF version Abstract This article builds on the authors’ 2021 ATTW keynote, “The Power of Language in Building Confianza with Communities.” It emphasizes the importance of maintaining confianza (trust/confidence) over time and encourages researchers to share results in accessible and usable ways for community members who participated in their projects. Drawing from their work with… Continue reading Rethinking Access to Data and Tools for Community Partners in Research

Introduction The COVID-19 outbreak impacted regional Australia in ways yet to be measured; for many of the country’s regions, the pandemic immediately followed natural disasters including droughts and bushfires. In such affected regional communities, activities such as writing offer opportunities for pleasure, engagement, and connectedness. Yet the restrictions developed in response to COVID-19, such as… Continue reading Writing Historical Fiction Online: Community Digital Literacies in Regional Australia

This analysis uses a critical race framework from African American literary studies (Morrison 1993, McBride 2001) to locate discourses of whiteness circulating between the texts of prison-based scholar-practitioners and their imprisoned counterparts, considering how those rhetorical economies risk marginalizing prisoners in an already vexed space. Recognizing the role of affect and bodily ritual in shaping… Continue reading Bodily Instruments: Somatic Metaphor in Prison-based Research by Libby Catchings

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

This paper describes methods to study the impact of service-learning on the writing performance of students in first-year college composition. Linguistic and rhetorical features commonly identified as affecting judgments of writing quality are compared to holistic essay ratings to assess the impact of different teaching and learning contexts on writing performance. Link to PDF

Frankie Condon implores her audience to imagine new ways of performing anti-racist activism and pedagogies throughout her book: I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric. For Condon, building an antiracist epistemology involves an individual’s ability to weave together the affective and spiritual dimensions of knowing alongside of multiple stories, which highlight… Continue reading Review: I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric by Kelly A. Concannon

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… Continue reading The Affective Dimensions of Service Learning by William DeGenaro