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.

This piece explores a recent change in pedagogy for a professional communication program at a U.S. university. The Covid-19 pandemic prompted a reevaluation of the program’s service-learning curricula. Students’ pre-pandemic challenges are described and compared to their exacerbated struggles post-Covid, especially the impact of misinformation and artificial intelligence upon critical thinking skills. Service- learning clients’ struggles too are analyzed. Intersecting service-learning pedagogy with thought from public pedagogy scholarship can address these challenges by enhancing reciprocity in service-learning relationships. A nuanced understanding of reciprocity in service-learning roles can address power dynamics and break free from restrictive academic conventions, fostering a more equitable learning environment. The piece includes an example of how a revised service-learning curriculum in grant writing affected students’ critical thinking skills and enabled client partners to advocate for their organizations’ constituents.

GitHub provides a project hosting platform and Git-based version control system for individuals and teams looking to develop and manage software and documentation online. Technical writers have long played an important role in this process, contributing the documentation infrastructure that organizes and sustains project development. As GitHub continues to grow in popularity, the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) educators will need to devote more effort to researching GitHub while developing both critical pedagogies and industry best practices committed to design justice. This paper provides a primer for this discussion as well as tools and scaffolding designed to assist GitHub implementation in the TPC classroom.

In this collaboratively composed article, we both theorize and dramatize the act of paying attention to scalar dynamics. In particular, we draw on the concept of transacting scales in order to complicate how “ethics” materialize in technical and professional communication (TPC). Because ethics materialize in relation to particular contexts and events, in the second half of this article, we show affordances of our approach for TPC through case studies animated by personal stories. We hope this will encourage readers to stay attuned to the particularities of embodied experiences as we theorize with unwieldy complex systems. Our cases speak to international student enrollment, matriculation, and retention in TPC programs and also general education TPC pedagogy.

Compositionists are committed to social justice in classrooms, in academia, and in our communities, but we must also respond creatively and strategically to the structural consequences of precarity capitalism, even more urgently so in the wake of Covid-19. Precarity has shaped both composition studies’ and community literacy’s histories, and compositionists have often had little choice but to develop entrepreneurial responses to austere conditions. In this article, we advocate owning up to this history so that we can more intentionally direct entrepreneurial practices toward social justice, noting that people across numerous communities have worked along these lines for some time. Justice-oriented entrepreneurship is especially relevant for community literacy practitioners. To contextualize this argument, we examine how scholars in community literacy and technical and professional communication have conceptualized entrepreneurship as an analytically useful frame and/or employed entrepreneurial practices themselves. We then unpack the work and values of justice entrepreneurship, highlighting traditions of communalist Black entrepreneurs who have fought for economic and political self-determination. Next, we offer a model of justice entrepreneurship practiced by Youth Enrichment Services, a Pittsburgh-based non-profit that has demonstrated community-responsive, entrepreneurial flexibility in confronting Covid. We conclude by considering the future of justice entrepreneurship in a society simultaneously trending toward further crises of precarity and, contradictorily, new opportunities for progressive experimentation.

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.

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.

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.

Review of Service-Learning in Technical and Professional Communication by Melody Bowdon and J. Blare Scott. New York: Longman, 2003.

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”).

Being situated on an international bordar allows higher-education institution to explore diverse cultural and linguistic venues for teaching and learning. Such is the case for workplace writing courses at the University of Texas at El Paso. Workplace writing, intercultural communication, service-learning, and bilingualism became the tools for exploring diversity, strengthening student identities, and bridging disciplinary, geographical. cultural, and linguistic borders. This article includes the voices of service-learning students, agency mentors, and faculty involved in an English-Spanish workplace writing course and shows how service-learning empowers students to explore and strengthen their diverse identities.

This article describes how the technical and professional writing pro gram at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi defines, identifies and values the diverse literacies that exist In our community. It demonstrates how our students use these literacies to build agency and enhance their identities as well as the identity of the community.

Drawing on the work of experiential learning experts such as John Dewey to show that one of the foundational objectives of service-learning is to encourage civic engagement, this article argues that students who undertake work in a business environment can develop a strong sense of their roles as citizens. It offers a case study of a workplace communication course to argue that experiential learning in for-profit companies has the potential to allow students to both participate in and critique corporate cultures, learning to act ethically, responsibly and democratically as agents of change.

Over the last several years, service-learning has become a burgeoning area in technical and professional communication studies. In addition to offering pedagogical strategies and theoretical approaches, the scholarship in this area to date points to several concerns for the continuing growth of high-quality service-learning in our field: 1) building reciprocal, sustained community partnerships, 2) developing robust approaches to reflection, and 3) assessing how well models of service-learning achieve their objectives.

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.

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.

This article describes a service-learning-based capstone course for MA students in Professional Writing and Editing at the University of Cincinnati and illuminates the potential advantages of service-learning on an advanced level. Of particular benefit are the rhetorical and ethical challenges that partnerships with nonprofits can raise, requiring students to draw not only on their writing and design skills but also on their informed judgment. Our experience suggests, however, that, for students preparing for writing careers, the goals of “doing good” or “becoming good citizens,” often cited as desirable outcomes for service-learning, should be secondary to the goal of developing a strong professional ethic.

In a recent study of Harvard University students, Richard Light documents that for the over 400 students he interviewed the “most important and memorable academic learning [occurs] . . . outside of classes.” His findings are not surprising. Evidence is mounting that courses and activities that link service and learning in some kind of reciprocal relationship with a community partner, allowing students to use their knowledge in service of others, are among the most effective and meaningful learning experiences. These experiences allow students to develop substantive field knowledge, hone their abilities in problem solving, and deepen their sense of social responsibility (Checkoway; Ehrlich; Giles and Eyler; Marcus, Howard, and King; Youniss and Yates). In this volume we invite readers to explore a number of models for such activities through a diverse and exciting conversation about service-learning in professional communication.

This article examines the implications of service-learning educators’ commitments to community literacy for professional development in higher education. It places stories of professional development in composition studies within the context of community literacy needs and of broader debates about tenure and promotion practices. The article proposes a set of questions that challenge compositionists to draw on community-based work to redefine professional development in rhetoric and composition studies.