PDF version Abstract In our changing educational environment, understanding the way students experience community-engaged writing pedagogy has become more important than ever. Following a semester-long qualitative study examining the reflective writing of students and conducting interviews with those students about their experiences, three students were invited to elaborate on their experiences with a critical community-engaged… Continue reading A Window Into Community-Engaged Writing: Three Student CEW Reflections

Since its inception in 2000, Reflections has functioned as a site of synthesis for community-based writing pedagogy, service-learning, public rhetoric, and community-engaged research. Such a diverse range of influences leads to the formation of a journal that is ever shifting in its identity, scope, and mission. Link to PDF

This essay describes a series of assignments that I have used in Writing and Social Issues, a first-year writing course that features service-learning. These assignments should prove useful to those interested in the relationship between community-based writing instruction and first-year courses that focus on the student’s transition from high school to college. Link to Full… Continue reading Community-Based Writing Instruction and the First-Year Experience by Mary Vermillion

We discuss how studying and creating zines in our composition classes allows our students to negotiate and explore the complexities of writing without the compulsions of many of the politically problematic commonplaces of composition pedagogy. We use zines to examine the unique ways in which their rhetorical devices address conflicts around questions of audience and… Continue reading The Politics of Persuasion versus the Construction of Alternative Communities: Zines in the Writing Classroom by Aneil Rallin and Ian Barnard

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

This article presents interviews with six composition and rhetoric teachers who teach writing in prison. Mina Shaughnessy’s 1976 article “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” is used as a heuristic with which to look at this material. As little work is available on the experience of teaching writing in prison, these interviews are a… Continue reading Diving in to Prison Teaching: Mina Shaughnessy, Teacher Development, and the Realities of Prison Teaching by Laura Rogers

This paper uses interviews with five publicly engaged, university-employed sociologists or folklorists in Houston to illuminate ways that rhetoric and composition scholars studying composition history can connect our research projects to nonacademic communities near our campuses. Drawing from covenantal ethics, it argues that we stand to re-see our work’s significance if, starting with general education… Continue reading “They Want to Tell Their Story”: What Folklorists and Sociologists Can Teach Compositionists about Linking Scholarly Research to Nonacademic Communities by Nathan Shepley