This paper highlights the reflective experiences of five graduate students who emerged as practitioner-scholars in the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) through their participation in the Spring 2025 graduate course, Writing Grants and Proposals, at Sam Houston State University. The semi-simulated, Better Sam Program assignment, grounded in a community-engaged and social justice framework, required students to develop unsolicited full proposals addressing local issues or opportunities within SHSU or the Huntsville community. This assignment challenged students to align their proposals with community needs while engaging in ethical, research-driven practices. Drawing on extensive community engagement, students developed proposals that were not only realistic and contextually grounded but also reflective of broader social justice concerns. The reflective process, guided by structured questions, encouraged students to critically analyze their proposal development experiences and consider the broader implications of their work for community advocacy and social responsibility. This paper presents these reflections, offering insights into how grant writing can be a transformative educational experience that fosters critical thinking, ethical engagement, and social impact.

The Youth Research Council (YRC) is a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project in which high school students, undergraduate and graduate students, and university-affiliated professors and administrators collaborate on consequential, justice- oriented research projects in their community. In this article, twelve members of the YRC reflect on our reasons for joining and remaining active participants in this community-engaged research project. Our discussion and analysis of “what brought us here” and “what keeps us here” offers a window into strategies and struggles for cultivating transformational reciprocity and sustainability within research partnerships.

Drawing on their embodied experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing a student-founded, student-led community literacy program, this article foregrounds queercrip embodied experiences to reinterpret normative notions of failure in community literacy programs. Using our own experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing the community literacy program, queer and disability theory, and community literacy studies scholarship, the authors unpack their own stories of failure and argue, through queercrip readings of that failure, that failure should be seen as generative, as relational, and as bound by institutional perspective.

This article weaves narrative, tweets, relevant literature, and conference session summaries from the 2021 ATTW Virtual Conference. Topics include discussion of power, language, and a short guide for graduate students (predominantly first-generation) to assist with navigating virtual conferences. The article includes questions and ideas that scholars in technical communication may be interested in further exploring, and urges such scholars/instructors in positions of privilege to support graduate students. The reflections center a graduate student’s position as a white cisgender woman and first-generation college student exploring the uncertainties involved with attending and navigating power relations at a virtual conference. This positionality informs a reflection of sessions from panels such as the DBLAC Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, Responsive Technical Communication Pedagogies and Institutional Practices, Critical Technical Communication Practices and Pedagogies, User-Generated Content and its Effects on the Technical Communication Profession, Technologies and Pedagogies, and more.

Located in Austin, TX, Latinitas describes itself as one of the only bilingual tech organizations in the U.S. and prides itself for creating the first digital magazine made for and by Latina youth. In 2002, Latinitas was developed as a project by a group of undergraduate students in a Latinos in Media course at the University of Texas at Austin.  Founders of Latinitas saw a need for more representation and stories by Latinas. Prior to the organization receiving its non-profit status, the organization ran as a student-led group. Since 2003, the organization has grown and adapted to the needs of the community and has provided an assortment of writing, leadership, tech, STEM, and college preparation workshops for Latina youth in middle school and high school. Through these workshops and the online magazine, “Latinas discover their voice and develop media skills while building a solid foundation for their future” (Donelly 2017). In addition to serving 3,000 girls annually through a variety of workshops, their online magazine continues to be a key tool for sharing multimedia content that represent the evolving digital landscape and what it means to be a Latina[1]. The work by the magazine’s editors and writers support and circulate the organizational identity[2] of Latinitas. In this article, we focus on how Latinitas, as a Latinx[3] organization, challenges the deficit perspective of Latina youth while trying to keep up with a changing digital landscape.

This article celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Reflections Journal, as a premier publication in service learning, public writing, rhetoric, community literacy, and activism. The author applauds Reflections as a space that nurtures emerging voices and professional development, even prior to the printing of individual volumes and issues. In general, the author showcases four professional collaborations between doctoral students, early-career professionals, and/or more seasoned scholars that are demonstrated through and within select special issues in Reflections. More specifically, the author recalls successes and challenges of editorship when taking on the duties as a coeditor for an African American literacy special issue. The author highlights visible and mostly invisible editorial processes, reflects on the labor of editing submissions, and discusses high and low stakes editorial choices that impacted the final production of the special issue. The author makes the case that editing and editorial decisions may illuminate scholarly voices, show community engagement, and reify pre- and early-career professional development, which has been a twenty-year hallmark of Reflections.

Reflections offers a plethora of stories, strategies, and applicable content for community-based writing projects as well as considerations for our pedagogy within institutional walls. In this piece, I, a first-time contributor, reflect on a few of my own endeavors in community-engaged work over the last decade alongside a reading of this journal and its continued impact on my pedagogy and research. Specifically, I discuss the value of community engagement efforts for graduate students developing as teachers and scholars in the discipline. Through this writing, I contribute to and build upon the ongoing knowledge-making practices at the heart of this journal.

Co-authored by a nonprofit administrator and an English Department faculty member, this contribution discusses the creation of a community partnership for jail-based education and writing projects. By starting small through student internships directly with the nonprofit, manageable, programmatic development followed that included class-based community writing projects, capstones, and onsite workshops engaging graduate and undergraduate students. Seeking to provide insights for new program developers as well as experienced leaders, this article reflects on the value of taking what Paula Mathieu describes as a tactical approach to partnership growth that begins with small-scale projects to maximize reciprocity and impact in order to first construct of a strong, sustainable foundation. Through descriptions of the evolution of this partnership, best practices for communication, addressing challenges, and expanding projects are outlined. Insights about this partnership reveal possible student-engaged activities and assignments, as well as the complexities of jail and prison writing. Reflections by students and community partners affirm a range of opportunities and the value and impact of internships, service learning, and community-writing when working directly with nonprofits, rather than with jails or prison administrators.

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.

Grounded in the authors’ dissatisfaction with academic leadership after the 2016 presidential election, this article complicates the idea of the WPA-as-manager by introducing the framework of feminist, transformational, and intersectional writing program leadership. As writing program administrators, the authors identify the problems with calls for civility and neutrality post-election, particularly as these calls came down to the many nontenure-track faculty and graduate students teaching first-year writing. The authors introduce two methods of moving beyond writing program management to include greater attention to community engagement and leadership post-Trump: through revising curricula and course materials and by diversifying professional development opportunities. WPAs may find themselves in a rare moment where the pedagogical approaches for which we have long advocated—attention to marginalized voices, representation of complex arguments grounded in material realities, validation of the rhetorical import of nonacademic texts—are immediately practicable as a condition of civic engagement. Curricula and course materials may convey these commitments beyond the classroom. Further, the authors address the need for greater attention to professional development for faculty, particularly focusing on addressing the needs of vulnerable populations. They discuss two professional development resources beyond individual campus resources: the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) and the University of Michigan’s Program on Intergroup Relations (IGR). By grounding this renovated image of the writing program administrator as a writing program leader, situated theoretically in leadership studies, the authors extend the work of scholars who see the WPA as a site of radical advocacy.

A team from the University of Dayton, consisting of undergraduate students, a faculty facilitator, and practitioner partners, conducted an innovative oral history project documenting the experiences of ordinary people who lived through the unrest following Michael Brown’s death in 2014. The Moral Courage Project, as it was called, sought to investigate the spectrum of stories from Ferguson that failed to fit into the extreme and polarized narratives emerging from mainstream media coverage and were, therefore, overlooked. With the testimonies collected, the team produced a multimedia exhibit featuring portraits and audio materials. In the process of preparing, traveling, and working, we learned not only about the events surrounding Ferguson, but also profound lessons about building community and practicing courage. As the exhibit begins to travel and reach diverse audiences, the team bears responsibility for sharing these stories and positioning the content in a society where everyday resistance is a reality.

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.

Welcome to another issue of Reflections. We are particularly pleased to begin the issue interviewing Steve Parks, someone who the editors have worked with for a number of years. Given we have a couple of articles focused on graduate student experiences with community projects and service-learning, we thought asking Steve Parks to reflect on this particular area would add continuity to this issue. For many years, Steve has mentored many graduate students, including Jessica Pauszek, our Assistant Editor. He is also the previous Editor of Reflections and someone I’ve known for years.

We focus on the long-term impacts of service-learning pedagogy on an oft-overlooked assessment group: graduate instructors. We describe the civic engagement program we participated in as graduate student teachers, the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program, and we illustrate how our early experiences with community-based pedagogies led to formative and long-term impacts on our approaches to research, teaching, and service and on our professional and personal work and identities. Based on our experiences, we offer a set of best practices that can serve as a foundation for the intentional design and assessment—both formative and summative—of forward-thinking graduate instructor objectives and outcomes.

If service education is to avoid the many cultural pitfalls that have been signaled to date in the literature, it seems crucial that town-gown articulations be nurtured as organic, reciprocating, knowledge-producing endeavors that position the ethnographic encounter at their epistemological center. For these articulations to be organic, they must grow from encounters between graduate students and community organizations that begin very early in students' scholarly careers—perhaps even as undergraduates in the same locale. This organic relationship should be grounded in writing with the organization or for the organization. My decades of embedding service learning in an undergraduate course in technical communication and in many internships I have directed have shown me that writing with and/or for the organization is a key step in the ethnographic encounter that community-based education involves. Students come to know the local culture first as one of its discursive agents, the better to discern if they want to pursue this agency in further scholarship.

“What does public scholarship look like at the graduate level?” “What do publicly engaged graduate students want? What are their pressing concerns?” “How do graduate students get into publicly active work?” “What are publicly active graduate students doing?”

In the spring of 2007 I helped organize a research cluster with three other graduate students at the University of Washington that focused on the question of public scholarship for academics. We formed the group Students Writing in Public (SWIP), and, taking it as given that public scholarship is of value because it extends the readership of our work beyond the academy and therefore the impact that it might have, committed ourselves to pursuing (via weekly writing meetings/workshops and quarterly guest speakers) how to go about doing this thing called “public writing.” At the time, we conceived of public writing as a translation of our academic work into non-jargon-laden prose, largely as articles and editorials for popular magazines and newspapers. We saw SWIP as an opportunity to try out different kinds of writing so as to engage with an audience less familiar with the “conversations” in which we regularly take part.

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”).

A few years ago I served as a graduate assistant in an experimental course for freshmen at Old Dominion University (ODU) in Norfolk, Virginia. New Portals to Appreciating our Global Environment (NewPAGE) united faculty and graduate students across disciplines to tackle instruction on pressing global issues such as climate change, health, sustainable development, and environmental resources. The issues were timely: Hurricane Katrina struck in the first few months of the course, and the content, including a five-hour community service component, had potential to spark social and civic responsibility among the 1800 students enrolled. There was just one problem: students hated it.

The goals of community-centered courses in universities are often in tension with ensuring that a community acquires tools and knowledge useful to its own development and preservation. In Community Cultural Development, an undergraduate seminar taught at Tulane University, the attempt was made to harmonize these goals through creating profiles of elders and tradition bearers of the Treme Community in New Orleans. Included are responses of students to the class and their work in the community, along with examples of the community profiles they created. This work is framed by an overview of the course and its project that places it in the context of emerging tensions in Treme and the civic engagement movement in higher education.

As I am a New Orleans native and doctoral candidate in the field of rhetoric and composition, Hurricane Katrina has forever impacted both my personal and academic lives. Relying upon the work of Sandra Gilbert and other trauma theorists, this essay presents a microcosm of my dissertation. It offers examples from New Orleans bloggers who chronicle their post-Katrina rebuilding efforts, and analyzes how writing in generative, on line spaces calls worldwide attention to a city still suffering. It also reflects upon my attempts to make Hurricane Katrina a teachable moment, and discusses the lessons I have learned when students react without empathy to assigned readings.

Editors’ Note: This photo essay, created by an undergraduate student at Howard University enrolled in a service learning class taught by Arvilla Payne-Johnson, preserves and documents the graffiti at the now closed Washington D.C. area Lorton Prison. The essay highlights a genre of hidden literacies claimed by inmates even in spaces of vast power differentials and exaggerated social control. We suggest that readers inspired by this project to pursue similar work also consult Jeff Ferrell’s Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality (NY: Garland, 1993), Ralph Cintron’s Angels’ Town : Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of Everyday, and Pete Vandenberg et al.’s “Confronting Clashing Discourses: Writing the Space between Classroom and Community” in Reflections 2.2 (Spring 2002): 19-39.