In this article, we provide a reflection on a community storytelling project that took place at Kūtha Primary School, located in Kitui, Kenya in August of 2023. The project brought together faculty members at two Florida institutions in the U.S. with students and teachers at Kūtha Primary to develop and publish stories written by youth in grades sixth through eighth. By working together to develop the project objectives, mentor youth to write, edit, and illustrate their stories, and collaborate with a visual designer to publish the stories into a book that was shared with the community, our team learned about the value of collaboration and sustainability in developing transnational community-engaged projects. The article also emphasizes the need to embrace a multi-epistemological framework when developing and implementing community-engagement literacy projects.

Articles in the Spring 2024 issue of Reflections engage with the concepts of positionality and collaboration. The authors in this issue recognize their own positionalities as researchers, and they also interrogate the interactions between their own positionalities and those of their respective institutions and communities. As community-engaged researchers, we should consistently recognize how our identities, and our positionality (how we embody and interact with the world), influence how we will be able to conduct research in community. I hope these articles help teachers, researchers, and practitioners to ask important questions about how power structures shape how academics collaborate, or should collaborate, with community partners across contexts.

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 with social issues. Current research demonstrates how collaborative writing and community engagement experiences provide overlapping benefits. Pairing them has the potential to amplify students’ learning, including their understanding of their ability and responsibility to use writing as a tool to affect meaningful change.

Since joining Reflections as Editor in December of 2022, I’ve been learning first-hand how much work and collaboration goes into producing an academic journal. As a community-engaged researcher and practitioner, I approach editorial work as a community-sustained endeavor. Every piece of writing you engage with in this issue was made possible by a team of people: 1) The authors, their community partners, their institutions, their families and support networks; and 2) Our team—the reviewers and editorial board, as well as Associate Editor Heather Lang, Assistant Editor Alexander Slotkin, Design Editor Heather Noel Turner, Book Review Editor Romeo García, and Copy Editor Victoria Scholz. All of these people contributed their expertise, time, resources, and labor to bring you this issue, and to maintaining and expanding the legacy of Reflections as a community-driven journal. I’m so grateful to be a part of this team, and I invite you to join us by contributing your expertise by sending us submissions, serving as a reviewer, and/or writing to us to share an idea for a special issue. We are here and are very excited to keep pushing Reflections’ innovative work forward.

An Annotated Bibliography on Rhetorics of Reproductive Justice is a project motivated by several overlapping exigencies. When we began our collaborative research and writing for this project in the fall of 2019, we were unaware that in the months to follow we would face a global health pandemic, accompanied by the reignition of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Since its inception in 2000, Reflections has functioned as a site of synthesis for community-based writing pedagogy, service-learning, public rhetoric, and community-engaged research. Such a diverse range of influences leads to the formation of a journal that is ever shifting in its identity, scope, and mission. This complexity is what ultimately defines Reflections: a publication that constantly pushes the boundaries of knowledge creation and strives to remain receptive to topics and voices that are often excluded from other academic sources. The following collaborative article offers a content analysis of all publications in Reflections’ twenty-year history (2000-2020). Though not exhaustive, this analysis highlights unique aspects of the journal’s history, methods, non-traditional genres, pedagogical and disciplinary impact, and evolving interactions with power and privilege that have made it the public conscience for Writing Studies.

This article is an experimental collaboration that blends qualitative data, archival research, and rhetorical theory with autoethnographic writing. Utilizing Jenny Edbauer’s (2005) conceptualization of rhetorical ecologies, we engage strategic contemplation and critical imagination (Royster and Kirsch 2012) to explore Reflections’ past, present, and future rhetorical landscapes. We designed, distributed, coded, and analyzed a fifteen-item questionnaire to discover the journal’s readership demographics, its archival contents, and its reverberating effects/affects on issues of public rhetoric, civic writing, service learning, and community literacy. We identified four themes—inclusivity, advocacy, pedagogy, and discovery—as the most salient features of Reflections’ twenty-year legacy. Amplifying our participants’ voices, we discuss the ways in which these four themes work to cultivate an affirming space of theoretical inquiry and ethical intervention—a networked community of mutual reciprocity that continues to transform the field of rhetorical studies today. Altogether, this article offers unique insight into Reflections’ rhetorical ecology, including its professional legacy and the ways in which the journal has innovated the genre of writing scholarship.

I became Editor of Reflections in 2008, soon joined by Brian Bailie as a graduate intern in 2008 and, then, as an Associate Editor beginning in 2009. Just prior to this moment, Reflections had been transformed from a saddled-stapled publication for engaged dialogue to more formal academic journal binding with more extended articles. The move from an “informal” to a “formal” academic structure also echoed the emerging status of community partnership scholarship in the field. Increasingly, academic and community-based scholars were finding that interest in such work was expanding beyond the capability of traditional journals and series to publish. Reflections’ expansion was designed to meet that need and to provide it a formal “disciplinary” space. Indeed, this moment also marked the emergence of Community Literacy Journal. And it speaks to the ethos of community partnership work that, since that time, the two journals have fostered a collaborative ethos, both finding a home in the Coalition for Community Writing.

This article analyzes the capacity for public art to build a “métis” infrastructure (Grabill 2007) capable of supporting local experiential and performative knowledge about the environment. The article describes the work of UPPArts, a small, nonprofit arts organization focused on promoting environmental awareness. Their long-term cultivation of partnerships with state agencies, NGOs, and community residents resulted in a robust collaborative arts program that engaged the public in making “nonexpert” (Simmons and Grabill 2008) knowledge based on the embodied experience of living within a contaminated urban watershed. Using field research conducted over the course of the author’s work with the organization, the article presents a thick description and rhetorical analysis of UPPArts’ annual culminating event, a parade known as the Urban Pond Procession. The article argues that the representation and performance of community knowledge in the form of community-made arts projects like the Urban Pond Procession helped mobilize a community into a public that could advocate for its right to environmental remediation and protection. The lesson of UPPArts is that the material dimensions of artistic method matter. The close attention that art-making forces us to pay to how we use materials to make things with each other can reconfigure social relations around the idea of a watershed as a rhetorical common-place (Druschke 2013).

In this essay, the authors describe a collaborative, community-engaged graduate seminar in which students and incarcerated writers worked together to write promotional brochures for WordsUncaged, a prison writing program. Drawing on reflective writing from graduate students and incarcerated writers, the authors apply a hospitality framework to articulate participants’ learning and growth. The public nature of the writing task grounded the experience in tangible results, and the circulation of the brochures beyond the classroom led to specific rhetorical growth as participants worked towards a common purpose. The collaborative nature of this learning process also led to different interpretations of voice and language representing individual and collective experiences. This collaboration resulted in a reciprocal humanization for students and incarcerated writers, as students’ rhetorical decisions emphasized their incarcerated partner’s humanity and, simultaneously, the incarcerated writers felt recognized as human beings. While acknowledging the constraints and limitations of this sort of community engagement, the authors argue that the collaborative and public facets of this experience were central to creating meaningful growth for all participants; indeed, the different ways in which graduate students and incarcerated writers experienced this growth reflect the complex realities of the partnership itself.

In this article, we tell stories from our own research experiences to demonstrate the need for a set of methodological tools within Rhet/Comp that is more fully responsive to the ethical challenges of working with traumatized communities. Drawing on feminist and indigenous approaches, we propose a methodological toolkit for trauma-related research to reduce participant risk. In so doing, we situate shared ownership within a research as care framework and suggest five pillars for conducting trauma-related rhetorical research: (1) mediating academic use, (2) responsivity to re-living trauma, (3) recognizing participant motivations, (4) collaborative meaning-making, and (5) accounting for identity evolution. In sharing our stories about our research and the complications involved in negotiating researcher-participant dynamics in traumatized communities, we hope to help other researchers more effectively navigate similar territory in their own work.

Review of Collaborative Imagination by Paul Feigenbaum.

Co-authored by a professor and two undergraduates and drawing on interviews with community partners, this essay analyzes a community writing project to document the Civil Rights Movement in a northern city. In collaboration with a local African American history museum, students interviewed 22 African Americans ranging in age from 62-90 years old who lived in Reading, Pennsylvania during the 1960s and 1970s Civil Rights Movement. Beyond the 22 oral histories recorded, transcribed, and housed at the museum, students, community members, and the professor researched, wrote, preserved, and shared a history of the Civil Rights Movement as experienced by African American members of the local community. Aligned with the “political turn” in community-writing partnerships advocated by Shannon Carter and Deborah Mutnick (7), the coauthors argue that collaboratively producing and studying local civil rights history is a form of anti-racist writing pedagogy. The rhetorical, historical project under study illuminates the rhetorical and powerful nature of current narratives of race and racism. As we and all our collaborators documented Civil Rights era history together, we began to circulate layers of counternarratives that both expose and challenge racial realities in productive ways.

This article describes the value of cross-campus collaborations for community-based learning. We argue that community-based learning both provides unique opportunities for breaking academic silos and invites campus partnerships to make ambitious projects possible. To illustrate, we describe a course “Writing for Social Justice” that involved created videos for our local YWCA’s Racial Justice Program. We begin by discussing the shared value of collaboration across writing studies and librarianship (our disciplinary orientations). We identify four forms of cross-campus collaboration, which engaged us in working with each other, with our community partner, and with other partners across campus. From there, we visualize a timeline, turning from the why of cross-campus collaborations to the how. Finally, we underscore the need to name and claim—to value and cultivate—cross-campus collaborations for community-based learning.

This article offers both a theoretical underpinning and a case study of practice as exhibits of a more democratic community engagement praxis for rhetoric and composition educators. The case study featured in the article suggests re-positioning the importance of collaborative and democratic engagement as the cornerstone of successful community engagement work. While the case is situated in technical and professional communication, it affords an interdisciplinary representation of community engagement.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

"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 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.

Community is a tricky word: although it often connotes an inclusive and harmonious collaborative space, too often it signifies a site of struggle and negotiation, an attempt to find a common framework for conflicting and seemingly contradictory impulses. One of the marks of those active in "community literacy studies," "service-learning" and '"engaged scholarship" is the desire to place themselves in the struggle to build a common framework for collaboration and, within that architecture, to move forward towards building a shared notion of educational, social, and/or political rights.

In spring 2007, I began working with a fellow graduate student in Purdue’s Rhet/Comp program on a community engagement project that would become the basis for both our dissertations. Allen and I agreed to work together because of our mutual interests in community engagement and public rhetorics, as well as our complementary interests in professional writing and usability (what we would call “his things”), and writing program administration and adult basic education (“my things”).

This essay examines the origins and initial objectives of the Comedy Club—an after school comic theatre program that develops an original sketch comedy show annually at Colonel E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Wheaton, Maryland—along with the value of university-middle school collaborations. Throughout, I document administrative issues, some associated with university collaborations and others endemic to the public school system and the impact this collaboration had on my own research and teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park. Employing a feminist ethnography as my method, this discussion draws from interviews, participant-observation methods, and first-hand involvement to examine how this program is efficacious for students, the school district, the university and community at large.

The CITYbuild Consortium of Schools is a consortium of design and planning schools based at the Tulane City Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. This group came together after Katrina through common interests in grass roots neighborhood recovery support. The article looks at the context in which such a consortium came to be, some of the results of the first two years of collaborative practice and some critical reflection on the goals and realities of this model of collaborative community design in a post disaster context.

This essay examines the impact of difference in the service-learning classroom and offers an overview of three approaches to creating community while engaging students in dialogues on difference. The authors reflect on the local pedagogies they create in response to the anger, tensions, and challenges that arise In the classroom and at the service learning site. By composing this essay together, the authors hope to embody the collaborative nature of service learning courses.

This article describes the development of a community writing and publishing program, the DiverseCity Writing Series, from 1998 to 2005. Starting as a one-time workshop between a community college English service-learning course and a local women’s advocacy organization, the DiverseCity Writing Series has grown into a year-round partnership between the SLCC Community Writing Center and multiple organizations throughout the Salt Lake City metropolitan area. This mutually beneficial collaboration for the college and the community has been achieved through critical inquiry regarding issues of ownership and discourse as well as the dedication of community members and organizational partners.

This article chronicles changes in the author’s service-learning pedagogy, concentrating on his recent attention to genre and its consequences for course design. The cumulative influences of rhetoric, discourse community theory, collaborative assignments, and genre theory are traced. The core claim, however, is that instructors should help students grasp the concept of genre as social action. Included are descriptions of assignments for first-year and advanced courses, plus student samples of genre analysis memos.

In response to recent calls for internationalization and greater social relevance in professional communication teaching and research, this article links service-learning pedagogy with participatory action research (PAR) methods. A multi-year collaborative project in Kenya illustrates both the challenges and the positive outcomes of international partnerships, which include increased intercultural communication skills, significant contributions to the literature, invigoration of teaching and curriculum, and the development of global civic awareness among all participants. In their recommendations for faculty interested in developing similar partnerships, the authors highlight the importance of understanding the theoretical foundations of service-learning pedagogy and PAR methods, and advocate for the incorporation of exploratory site visits, pre-departure preparation for both students and faculty, critical reflection, efforts to ensure reciprocal benefits, and ongoing outcomes assessment.

This article reflects upon four years of exploring Augusto Boal’s Image and Forum Theatre techniques in prisons for youth in upstate New York with young men aged 1420. These practices work for prisoners by respecting the “literacy” of survival inside prison and by putting prisoners in control of making meaning with their bodies. Examples show the “embodied knowledge” of prisoners as the basis for collaborative, critical deliberations by prisoner communities who use it to re-envision conflict. The “well-contested” site of the body and the definition of “respect” by prisoners are keynotes to this work.

This article explores a unique approach to becoming literate about prisons ––through a dialogical exchange between individuals on both sides of the wall. The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program offers a semester-long course through which college students and incarcerated men or women attend class together weekly inside a local correctional facility. Pivotal to this pedagogy is the power and reciprocity of the exchange between the “inside” and “outside” students. The depth of discussion involved, the collaborative nature of the engagement, and the consideration of the issues (literally from the inside, out)––together encompass an approach to learning that changes lives.