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:

When service-learning educators of future generations look back at the development of the field, they may well point to three events at the turn of the century as watershed moments in service-learning research. In 1999, Janet Eyler and Dwight Giles published Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning?, drawing upon their own ambitious nationwide studies and dozens… Continue reading Setting the Course for Service-Learning Research by Nora Bacon

The authors argue that writing-intensive service-learning courses extend the lessons of first-year composition courses by teaching students how to understand and negotiate differences between the discourses of the academy and those of community-based organizations. While first-year writing courses lead students through successive approximations of a generalized academic discourse in the relative safety of the composition… Continue reading Confronting Clashing Discourses: Writing the Space Between Classroom and Community in Service-Learning Courses by Caryn Chaden, Roger Graves, David A. Jolliffe, Peter Vandenberg

In his introduction to Life Stories, a collection of New Yorker Profiles, David Remnick confesses that “the Profile is a terribly hard form to get right.” Conceived as a form to describe Manhattan celebrities, the genre now travels widely and along all emotional and occupational registers. One quality runs through many of the best Profiles,… Continue reading “The Book Man” by Courtney Hollender

This article examines what it means when a university makes a multifaceted commitment to migration, taking note of both what can be accomplished through such a commitment and what tensions remain. At Fairfield University, engagement with migration is expressed in the curriculum, service-learning projects, faculty research, and in efforts to influence the national debate on… Continue reading I Was a Stranger’: Creating a Campus-Wide Commitment to Migration by Betsy A. Bowen

In the process of creating portraits that document the lives and knowledge of community leaders who are engaged in food access work and urban farming in Chester, PA, students in a first year writing course at Widener University are introduced to a rhetoric of social change and the multivocality and creativity that characterizes food justice… Continue reading The Food Justice Portrait Project: First-Year Writing Curriculum to Support Community Agency and Social Justice by Ruth Cary

At the time of this interview Dr. Grabill had just returned from West Virginia where he was working with junior high and high school students. Grabill’s work in West Virginia was as a member of the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center (WIDE), which came out of a grant designed to develop young leaders in… Continue reading Change is Really Hard Work: An Interview with Jeffrey Grabill by Paula Mathieu

In this paper, the authors introduce the voluntary education center (VEC), which is a multi-school campus located on military bases in the United States and worldwide that offers accredited undergraduate and graduate degrees to service members and their families. The VEC combines military and higher education elements, offering a productive site of study for the… Continue reading Writing Faculty on the Marine Corps Base: Building Strong Classroom Communities through Engagement and Advocacy by Bree McGregor & Lourdes Fernandez

Ehrlich and Fu’s main goal in co-authoring Civic Work Civic Lessons is to encourage young people to become more civically engaged, particularly in politics and public policy (in terms of genre, the book is a type of ‘how-to’ or ‘lessons-learned’ text, intended for a general, mainstream audience. It would be most useful to assign to… Continue reading Review:Thomas Ehrlich and Ernestine Fu. Civic Work Civic Lessons: Two Generations Reflect on Public Service, reviewed by Kathryn Yankura Swacha

Coeditors Laurie Grobman and Deborah Mutnick seek submissions for the Fall 2018 volume of Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning. Continuing a nearly 20-year history of leading writing and rhetoric’s scholarly and theoretical study of service learning, public rhetoric, community writing, civic writing, and community literacy, the journal publishes wide-ranging… Continue reading Call for Submissions Fall 2018 (Closed)