PDF version Abstract 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… Continue reading What Brought Us Here, What Keeps Us Here: Multiple Perspectives on Building and Sustaining a Community-Engaged Youth Research Partnership

PDF version Abstract 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… Continue reading An Unglamorous Queercrip Account of Failure in the Writing Lincoln Initiative

PDF version Abstract 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… Continue reading What’s in a Tweet? A Graduate Student Rumination of the 2021 ATTW Virtual Conference

Introduction 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… Continue reading Embedding La Cultura: Digital Engagement by a Latinx Nonprofit Organization

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… Continue reading Our Amalgamated Voices Speak: Graduate Students and Incarcerated Writers Collaborate for a Common Purpose by Katheryn Perry & Bidhan Roy

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 classbased community writing projects, capstones, and onsite workshops engaging graduate and undergraduate students.… Continue reading Building an Infrastructure for a Jail Writing Community Partnership through Student Internships and Community Writing Projects by Lara Smith-Sitton & Brody Smithwick

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… Continue reading The Challenge of Community: From Culture to Learning in New Orleans by Amy Koritz

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… Continue reading Service Education as (Auto?)-Ethnographic Encounter by Jim Henry

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… Continue reading Courage, Commitment and a Little Humility: The Path to Civic Engagement by Jennifer J. Kidd

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… Continue reading Does the Academy Need an ‘Extreme Makeover’? by Allison Gross

“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?” Link to PDF

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… Continue reading Interview with Steve Parks by Willma Harvey, Cristina Kirklighter, & Jessica Pauszek

Organized into ten chapters and an epilogue, the book focuses on recurrent themes that the research uncovered: organizations’ motivations for taking part in service learning partnerships, issues of timing, fit, management, communication and diversity. Chapters One, Ten, and the Epilogue are written by the editors, while the individual chapters are authored by the graduate students… Continue reading Review of The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning by Randy Stoecker and Elizabeth A. Tryon reviewed by Paula Mathieu

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… Continue reading Listening to Ferguson Voices, Finding the Courage to Resist by Joel R. Pruce