PDF version Our lives are moving images and sounds. Shapes and textures. Rhythm and truths.I’ve always wondered what it would’ve been like to have an HBCU experience.Here, I can document my imaginings with photographs and pop cultural bounce.Y’all can tell me if I caught a bit of the spirit. – k(R)

PDF version Abstract Students are often clamoring for assignments that connect to real-life situations. This paper will highlight various projects assigned in my classes, including the midterm and minor writing submissions, which cover both modern and historical cases, student responses, and student feedback regarding the assignments, along with how and why I continue to incorporate… Continue reading Researching and Resisting: Incorporating Social Justice and Resistance in First-Year Writing Courses

PDF version Abstract This article interrogates the political contexts leading up to the University of Arizona’s designation as a land grant and Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). As a white settler teacher, I reflect on how researching this history helped me confront how increasing access to the university was met by exclusionary gatekeeping mechanisms that function… Continue reading Past and Present Contradictions in Land-Grant and Hispanic Serving Institutions: A Historical Case Study of the University of Arizona

PDF Version Abstract This article discusses the program and goals that were instituted at our new community-based medical school to increase the representation of underrepresented minorities (URM) as faculty. We rely heavily on mentorship of the students for their research, and also employ community physicians for teaching and to serve as role models for the… Continue reading Removing Barriers to Academic Medicine for Underrepresented Minorities

PDF version Knight, Aimée. Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2022; 125 pp.: 9781646423149, $19.95 (pbk) Universities have increasingly demonstrated a desire to develop collaborative relationships with members of their local community. The question becomes how to ethically develop these community partnerships in a way that is mutually beneficial… Continue reading Review: Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative ChangeReview:

This article describes a case study of an inclusive Summer Lunch Program, focused on nutrition, community engagement, and literacy programming. The Summer Food Service Program is a federally-funded, state-administered program designed to meet the needs of children from lowincome families who qualify for free and reduced lunches during the school year. Link to PDF

Megan Faver Hartline: I am the director of community learning at Trinity College, a small liberal arts college in Hartford, Connecticut, where I work to create and strengthen institutional structures for community engagement by designing opportunities for students, faculty, and community partners to build relationships and work together. This work builds on my research examining… Continue reading Early Career Scholars’ Encounters, Transitions, and Futures: A Conversation on Community Engagement by Jessica Pauszek, Charles Lesh, Megan Faver Hartline, & Vani Kannan

With increased interest in communityengaged course design, instructors across the United States are looking for ways to encourage their students to become more connected with their local contexts and the larger communities surrounding their university’s walls. Moving beyond a “feel good” approach to making college courses more meaningful, I think it is crucial that educators… Continue reading Community-Based Writing with Latinx Rhetorics in Milwaukee by Rachel Bloom-Pojar, Julia Anderson, & Storm Pilloff

As we prepare to publish our second issue as coeditors of Reflections, we find ourselves pondering the semantics of names, the power of design, and the importance of circulatory reach. We began our term as editors with several questions: whether the title of the journal accurately expressed its evolving mission, whether the website was agile… Continue reading Editors’ Introduction by Laurie Grobman & Deborah Mutnick

As we prepare to publish our second issue as coeditors of Reflections, we find ourselves pondering the semantics of names, the power of design, and the importance of circulatory reach. We began our term as editors with several questions: whether the title of the journal accurately expressed its evolving mission, whether the website was agile… Continue reading Introducing Reflections 18.2

This article shares first-hand experiences and reflections of individuals who participated in a community writing project between university students and women incarcerated and participating in a therapeutic community (TC) in Washington state. Together, the students and women explored the causes, impacts, and treatment of addiction and designed an online platform to share their writing, artwork,… Continue reading Breaking Free While Locked Up: Rewriting Narratives of Authority, Addiction, and Recovery via University-Community Partnership by Taryn Collis, Felice Davis, & Jennifer Smith

Mass incarceration in the United States is deeply entrenched into the political and economic makeup of modern America. In a time of political upheaval and radical change, prison and criminal justice reform activists are turning the public’s attention towards the problem of America’s prisons and shining a light on the forgotten voices of the incarcerated.… Continue reading Review: The Named and the Nameless: 2018 PEN Prison Writing Awards Anthology by Jenny Albright, Kalyn Bonn, Matt Getty, Zach Marburger, Brooks Mitchell, Jake Quinter, & Shivon Pontious

This profile examines “Writing for Advocacy,” a pair of Spring 2018 courses designed around community engagement and project-based learning. Supported by a grant from Conexión Américas and the Tennessee Educational Equity Coalition (TEEC), Christian Brothers University (CBU), a regional leader for educating undocumented students, provided a fertile space for a course that leveraged student voices… Continue reading Writing for Advocacy: DREAMers, Agency, and Meaningful Community Engaged Writing (Course Profile) by Jeffrey Gross & Alison A. Lukowski

Higher education research has demonstrated the positive effects of service-learning on students, with particular attention to the increased attainment of institutional outcomes such as retention and graduation. However, traditional assessment models, focused on measuring outcomes, offer few strategies for developing a holistic understanding of service learning environments. In response, this article outlines the process of… Continue reading Heuristic Tracing and Habits for Learning: Developing Generative Strategies for Understanding Service Learning by Laurie A. Pinkert & Kendall Leon

“Tapping the Potential of Service-Learning: Guiding Principles for Redesigning Our Composition Courses” | Cheryl Hofstetter Duffy“In the Eye of the Beholder: Contrasting Views of Community Service Writing” | Teresa M. Redd “Service-Learning Outcomes in English Composition Courses: An Application of the Campus Compact Assessment Protocol” | J. Richard Kendrick, Jr. & John Suarez “Keep it… Continue reading Volume 3, Number 1, Winter 2003

The critical lenses provided by the author’s framing of the domains of charity, civic engagement and social action highlight the assumptions and implications of different service-learning models. Classroom practices and writing assignments are interrogated for their affinity with each of the domains and their inherent power to shape students’ reading of the world. Link to… Continue reading Reading and Writing the World: Charity, Civic Engagement and Social Action in Service-Learning by Betty Smith Franklin

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 14-20. 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… Continue reading Rhythm of the Machine: Theater, Prison Community, and Social Change by Martin Mitchell

In 1983 my associations with prisons began. Since then, I have seen many role models go in and out of the system. My earliest memories are of my real father, James W. Gray. He was incarcerated in the Montana State Prison system. It was at that institution that I had the first birthday I can… Continue reading Prison: A Way of Life by Derek E. Gray

Who will watch the watchmen? Plato posed the question, but it is just as important today as it was 2,400 years ago. Power has to be kept in check, as the founders of our country knew when they designed a system of checks and balances in the United States Constitution. An agency that has the… Continue reading Who Will Watch the Watchmen? A Response to the Patriot Act by Robert Brown

This article discusses a service-learning project for an English Composition class, focusing on the theme of incarcerated women. Through class projects, which included a book drive and research for the group Prison Watch, the students and teacher learned to negotiate the tricky demands of audience and worked to develop a new model of successful service… Continue reading First Year Composition and Women in Prison: Service-based Writing and Community Action by Lisa Mastrangelo

This article traces the development of a sophomore composition service-learning course, using data gathered from a formal qualitative study as well as subsequent teacher reflection. Course redesign has been guided by the need to balance the initial emphasis on and measurement of academic outcomes with exploration of the ethics of service. The author shares her… Continue reading Ethics and Expectations: Developing a Workable Balance Between Academic Goals and Ethical Behavior by Catherine Gabor

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.… Continue reading Genre Analysis and the Community Writing Course by Thomas Deans

The Measure of Service Learning offers a compilation of psychometric scales that, while not all designed specifically for service-learning, should provide useful ways to measure different aspects of students’ experience with and attitudes toward community-engaged learning. The authors group these scales under six headings: motives and values, moral development, self and self-concept, student development, attitudes,… Continue reading Review of The Measure of Service Learning Research Scales to Assess Student Experience, eds. Robert G. Bringle, Mindy A. Phillips, and Michael Hudson reviewed by Billie Hara and Matthew Levy

Insights from activity theory—specifically, David Russell’s synthesis of activity theory with genre theory—suggest ways to understand and ease problems of clashing expectations encountered in professional writing classes that use a client-based assignment model for service-learning. Link to PDF

In the last ten years, projects designated as “service-learning” experiences have become enormously popular. Unfortunately, that popularity has also led to a certain amount of confusion about what service-learning is. Service-learning is different from “community service.” At its core, it involves linking the subject of a class with work in a nonprofit community organization and… Continue reading Service-Learning at a Glance by Linda Adler-Kassner

In the past few years, many English departments have welcomed the burgeoning area of service-learning into their curriculums, a development which Adler-Kassner, Cooks and Watters consider a “microrevolution” in the area of college-level composition (1). While compositionists have become increasingly thoughtful about different models for community-based writing – in Tom Deans’ schema, writing for, about… Continue reading Broadening the Community: Service-Learning Connections to the Writing Classroom by Risa P. Gorelick,

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… Continue reading CITYbuild Consortium of Schools: From Disaster Response to a Collaborative Model for Community Design and Planning by Sarah Gamble and Dan Etheridge

Carol Weinberg, who passed away this summer after a courageous battle with cancer, played a crucial role in preparing the soil for Reflections to grow and flourish. She was the first professor to hold the France-Merrick Chair of Service-Learning at Goucher College and was nationally recognized for the interdisciplinary service-learning senior capstone course she designed.… Continue reading Remembering Carol Weinberg by Megan Cooperman

Examination of the Compass Learning Community shows that service-learning, when integrated into first-year learning communities, expands each student s ability to determine a college major in an informed manner. The combination of a first-year writing course linked with an academic course in career discovery provided students with a variety of opportunities for experiential learning about… Continue reading Helping Undeclared Majors Chart a Course Integrating Learning Community Models and Service-Learning by Gerry McNenny

This article underscores the importance of examining community-based writing in practice. It traces the evolution of an “International Connections” service-learning project from a well-intentioned add-on to a thoughtful and critical component of a writing course. Distilling best practices from recent service-learning literature, the article concludes with a call for 1) integration of the service-learning project… Continue reading Tapping the Potential of Service-Learning Guiding: Principles for Redesigning Our Composition Courses by Cheryl Hofstetter Duffy

“Tapping the Potential of Service-Learning: Guiding Principles for Redesigning Our Composition Courses” | Cheryl Hofstetter Duffy “In the Eye of the Beholder: Contrasting Views of Community Service Writing” | Teresa M. Redd “Service-Learning Outcomes in English Composition Courses: An Application of the Campus Compact Assessment Protocol” | J. Richard Kendrick, Jr. & John Suarez “Keep… Continue reading Issue 3, Vol 1, Winter 2003

This article nods to a writing project in a Detroit Metro area writing class where students were challenged to take a metaphorical walk inside the walls of inner-city Detroit. Modeling the intersection of theory and practice embedded in this method of seeing the city, it introduces terms from compositionists and other scholars who write about… Continue reading Writing of and on the City by Liz Rohan

While many colleges and universities have earned a “military friendly” designation, too few offer opportunities for faculty to learn about military culture and the specific issues facing student veterans as they transition from active duty to student status. This article chronicles the authors’ experiences with and approaches to a workshop series, “Working with Post-9/11 Student-Veterans:… Continue reading Faculty Development Workshops with Student-Vet Participants: Seizing the Induction Possibilities by Sue Doe & Lisa Langstraat

This essay considers the implications of using David Russell’s activity theory to re-conceptualize models of community service writing (CSW) that stem from discourse community theory. Here I argue that the notion of discourse community is of limited use to practitioners committed to CSW, because it leads students to adopt unrealistic expectations about their roles in… Continue reading From Discourse Communities to Activity Systems: Activity Theory as Approach to Community Service Writing by Michael-John DePalma

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… Continue reading This Video Game We Call War’: Multimodal Recruitment in America’s Army Game by Nancy Welch

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 ID named Hillary who interned at a shelter for women… Continue reading Educating Future Public Workers: can We Make Inquiry Professional by Elenore Long

Compositionists have long been calling for scholarship aimed at productively reshaping various institutional and public discourses of writing instruction. Jeanne Gunner, for instance, has called for more scholarship that can help Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) to formulate “critical questions” about their “historical practices and modes of self-representation” (275) in order to address how “writing program… Continue reading Review of The Activist WPA by Linda Adler-Kassner by Steve Lamos

Beneath the hysteria being generated around immigration, intertwined in the neighborhoods creating draconian antiimmigration 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… Continue reading Editor’s Introduction by Steve Parks

This article describes how I incorporated an AR-based community media project into a recent undergraduate course on environmental rhetoric, which featured a partnership with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS). With the support of DMNS staff in Creative Technology and Exhibits, students in the course researched and wrote curated materials designed for the… Continue reading Augmenting the Wildlife Exhibits: A Community Media Project with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science by John Tinnell

In Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse, editors Richard D. Besel and Bernard K. Duffy attempt to address the oversight that most modern rhetorical scholarship focuses on the written works of environmentalists rather than their spoken words. To redress this paucity, the editors collect a series of analyses focused only… Continue reading Review: Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse by Garrett Stack

While service learning can be compatible with feminist objectives, if the service does not contribute to structural change or help students understand their role in facilitating change, it can replicate patriarchal goals and run counter to feminism (Ludlow). In this article, we show the way we utilized a feminist lens when designing and implementing a… Continue reading Service Learning as Social Justice Activism: Students Help a Campus Shift to Bystander Awareness by Irene Lietz & Erin Tunney

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… Continue reading Advancing Campus-Community Partnerships: Standpoint Theory and Course Re-Design by Ashley J. Holmes

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… Continue reading Designing the Future: Assessing Long-Term Impact of Service-Learning on Graduate Instructors by Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Megan Marie Bolinder; Nadya Pittendrigh, Candice Rai

Nearly two decades ago, the New London Group (NLG) theorized the concepts of multiliteracies and multimodality in their groundbreaking work, “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Challenging literacy education which overprivileged “formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed forms of language” (61), the NLG argued that conceptions of literacy—and its attendant pedagogies—must be sensitive to the… Continue reading Review: Working with Multimodality: Rethinking Literacy in a Digital Age by Timothy R. Amidon

From 2007-2009, I designed and led an oral history project focused on gathering the stories of recent immigrants to Collin County, Texas. Students in my first year writing courses learned interviewing techniques before gathering stories from local volunteers. We built an archive of interviews that the students then used to connect the act of preserving… Continue reading Review: Conquistadora by Lisa Roy-Davis

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… Continue reading Composing With Communities: Digital Collaboration in Community Engagements by Stacy Nall & Kathryn Trauth Taylor

Drawing upon concepts from service-learning theorists Sarah Ash and Patti Clayton’s DEAL Model for Critical Reflection (2009), this article suggests an innovative approach to critical reflection. Rather than create separate reflection assignments, which can be problematic for a number of reasons described in this article, the author offers composition teachers strategies for embedding critical reflection… Continue reading The Reflective Course Model: Changing the Rules for Reflection in Service-Learning Composition Courses by Veronica House

A lone elephant, awash in red paint and stenciled with gold fleur-de-lis, lumbers through the loading deck of a warehouse on Skid Row in L.A. She matches the wallpaper background of a freestanding living room, designed to be the centerpiece of an art exhibition by newly-minted street artist Mr. Brainwash (MBW). The impressive, gentle animal… Continue reading Review: Exit Through the Gift Shop by Lauren Goldstein

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… Continue reading Serving the Public: Gender, Sexuality, and Race at the Margins by Jill McCracken

For many people, the word “NHI” means nothing more than an acronym. It does not illustrate or symbolize victimization, injustice, marginalization, or a complete disregard of humanity in life and death. “NHI” or No Humans Involved is a designation that was used by police, politicians, and judges when dealing with prostitutes and other marginalized communities.… Continue reading ‘NHI’ Condones Violence Against Prostitutes by Diana Cabili