Service-learning projects and traditional internships both prepare the student of technical communication for the workforce in many ways. What is lacking in the scholarship is a discussion of how to successfully link these two ideas. To help teachers implement courses that bridge the gap between service-learning projects and internships, I discuss how to design a course in technical communication that actively prepares students for subsequent internships with nonprofit agencies. In specific, I outline social development and social learning theories, service-learning pedagogies, and lesson plans and assignments that integrate these theories into practice. This project serves as a model that insists that the teacher first instructs students regarding not only rhetorical aspects of document design, including audience awareness and style, but also in placing the students in internships and designing assignments to be fulfilled in internship roles. The combination of classroom practices with an internship supports the idea that students learn the value of the process of writing, including the social embeddedness that can often influence their writing.

Prompted by Cushman’s and Grabill’s call to “ask and answer the difficult questions” about service learning (Reflections 2009), this article addresses the difficult question of “what happens when service learning goes wrong.” Authors engaged in family history writing and service learning with a local historical group. When the project was unable to be sustained, authors theorized a three-part methodological continuum of expectation, reality, and rectification to articulate the merits of failed attempts at service learning.

“At Jesuit universities, the task is not just to form better citizens but also to form persons who use the principles of Ignatian spirituality to ‘perceive, think, judge, choose and act for the rights of others…'”

This article describes a service-learning program for undergraduate Shakespeare courses and the project's learning outcomes. The project enables significant ownership of Shakespeare, demonstration and engagement of students' multiple intelligences, and a re-valuation of the useful role of literature in everyday life.

“In committee meetings, academic and student affairs retreats, or simply in chance encounters with colleagues, a periodic response to the mention the course is polite confusion, misinformation, or even outright dismissal…”

Four service-learning projects were conducted in technical communication courses using wikis. Results confirm previous findings that wikis improve collaboration, help develop student expertise, and enact a “writing with the community” service-learning paradigm. However, wikis did not decenter the writing classroom as predicted by previous work. Instructors using wikis to scaffold client projects should calibrate standards for evaluation with students and client, and they may need to encourage clients to stay active on the wiki.

The pharmaceutical industry’s corporate responsibility reports illustrate how the liberal rhetoric of civic engagement can be reappropriated to serve the market-driven aims of risk management and public relations. Tracing the ideologic linkage of corporate responsibility and service-learning versions of civic engagement, and contextualizing postsecondary service-learning along a larger neoliberal trajectory, should prompt us to reconsider basic questions about the means and ends of our institutional and pedagogical work.

This article argues for approaching pedagogical outcomes as ends-in-view that guide, but do not determine or limit, pedagogical possibilities. Reflecting on moments from a service-learning literacy course, the writers argue that experiences of chaos in the classroom, while often uncomfortable, can open opportunities for reflection and inquiry.

Pedagogical and scholarly discussions of the process of usability tend to focus more on methods than on practices, or specific, tactical performances of and adjustments to these methods. Yet such practices shape students' learning and determine the success of their usability efforts. A teacher research study tracking students' understanding and enactment of usability and user-centered design over the course of a service-learning project illustrates the importance of practice-level struggles—and the thoughtful preparation for and facilitation of these struggles—to the development of students' flexible intelligence (metis) and rhetorical translation skills. © 2008 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Heather Lettner-Rust has written a commentary on David Coogan’s article “Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhetoric,” which appeared in the June 2006 issue of CCC. David Coogan responds to Heather Lettner-Rust’s commentary. The full text of the original article is available at http://inventio.us/ccc.

This essay argues that a pedagogy of “dialogue across differences” should be infused into the core curriculum and function as the link joining multicultural education to service learning. Close examination of student reflections and journal writings reveals how such dialogue can enhance learning, strengthen community partnerships, and enrich antiracist pedagogy.

Much of the research on literacy sponsorship positions students as “sponsored” rather than “sponsor,” which promotes a view of sponsorship as a one-way, fixed endeavor. In this essay, I consider how, in the context of service-learning, students might sponsor literacy and how this literacy sponsorship has the potential to be reciprocal. I highlight a semester-long course project that aimed to develop a variety of literacies in students. Results show that students supported, enabled, and sponsored the literacies of the clients with whom they worked. Findings also reveal that this literacy sponsorship was reciprocated by the clients, which indicates that, at least in service-learning settings, literacy sponsorship functions as a dynamic, reciprocal process where both parties learn and grow through their relationship with each other. This research is significant because it brings students into the discussion on literacy sponsorship and shows how individuals can seize the literacy resources offered to meet their own goals, motivations, and needs.

The authors call for tying service learning to feminist agendas. In particular, they emphasize civic activism involving true collaboration with communities. They report on a graduate seminar at their own university that worked toward this goal by having students self-reflectively participate in local organizations.

This essay traces two teachers’ experiences crossing spaces in a combined literature and history seminar where students explore American culture and diversity and engage in service learning. The model has evolved from paired classes with collaborative activities to a student-centered environment promoting active learning. This article offers practical advice for establishing cross-curricular pairings and suggests course content that promotes learning across curricula.

A materialist rhetoric in service learning is needed to teach students how to discover the arguments that already exist in the communities they wish to serve; analyze the effectiveness of those arguments; collaboratively produce viable alternatives with community partners; and assess the impact of their interventions. Through a discussion of a project that attempted but failed to increase parent involvement in Chicago’s public schools, this article shows why rhetorical production needs to be supported by the kind of rhetorical analysis that reveals how institutions exercise power. Materialist rhetoric challenges students, teachers, and community partners to write for social change and define change concretely, in terms of institutional practices or policies that they wish to influence.

Personal narrative embeds the expertise of subordinated groups in stories that seldom translate into public debate. The authors describe a community writing project in which welfare recipients used personal narratives to enter into the public record their tacit and frequently discounted knowledge. The research illustrates the difficulties and possibilities “rhetorical, emotional, and material” of constructing narratives that “cross publics.”

Research Article| October 01 2005 Living the Rhetoric: Service Learning and Increased Value of Social Responsibility Mary Hutchinson Mary Hutchinson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2005) 5 (3): 427–444. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-3-427 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mary Hutchinson; Living the Rhetoric: Service Learning and Increased Value of Social Responsibility. Pedagogy 1 October 2005; 5 (3): 427–444. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-3-427 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2005 Duke University Press2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Describing a service-learning project in Chicago public housing, the author argues for a reconception of counterpublics that takes the individual (and individual development) as the primary unit of analysis. The real question for service-learning educators, he suggests, is not whether the private and the public can inform each other, but whether we are prepared to discern the ways in which they already do inform each other in the communities we wish to serve. The students in the project developed a much broader conception of themselves as members of the human family, with the consequence that, although social problems in public housing were not changed, public discourse and private convictions about race in those communities were altered, suggesting that cultural difference may be less of a problem and more of a resource in service learning courses.

The author suggests that Saul Alinsky’s concept of community organization, a theory of action devised for neighborhoods rather than for higher education, might offer a new model of service-learning, and describes the Community Educators’ Collaborative at Temple University as one example of how such a model might work.

Although service-learning has the potential to infuse technical communication pedagogy with civic goals, it can easily be co-opted by a hyperpragmatism that limits ethical critique and civic engagement. Service-learning's component of reflection, in particular, can become an uncritical, narrow invention or project management tool. Integrating cultural studies and service-learning can help position students as critical citizens who produce effective and ethical discourse and who create more inclusive forms of power. Rather than being tacked on, cultural studies approaches should be incorporated into core service-learning assignments.

Combining service-learning with multicultural literature study in a general education first-year course can encourage students to theorize difference from multiple perspectives.

While most service-learning courses at the college level establish a hierarchical connection between mentor and student, the service-learning program at Los Angeles City College encourages a reciprocal relationship in which mentor and mentee benefit from each other. First-year composition students are paired with intermediate ESL composition students in a semester-long program.

This essay turns to feminist ethnography and postcolonial theory to address how the figure of “the stranger” haunts the project of community service learning. By explicating the immediate and broader relations of power that structure these “strange(r) encounters,” we are more likely to produce the kind of agitated pedagogy that creates opportunities for progressive practices and effects.

Community service learning in college-level composition has been widely proclaimed as a microrevolution in higher education. Advocates enthusiastically assert that both faculty and student participants report radical transformations of their experiences and understanding of education and its relation to communities outside the campus (Adler-Kassner et al. 1). This pedagogy, they argue, addresses writing as a situated, social act and points us toward a curriculum of textual studies based on [rhetorical] inquiry into variation in discourse (Bacon 53). Students write about the community in journals and rhetorical analyses of mission statements, or with the community in an urban

By addressing race and class through the stories we tell about service-learning in the classroom and in our scholarship, I argue that we can more effectively negotiate the divide between the university and the community and work toward social change.

This article offers a retrospective case study of a service learning project in a technical writing class. For this project, students were asked to develop a communication tool with information about consent rates in organ donation to use in an academic medical center. In contrast to the service learning literature, which notes that students often resist the professionalizing move that service learning offers, this study shows that students in this project actually overprofessionalized, constituting themselves as one more party vying for control over the communication of organ donation. This embrace of professionalism via service learning raises as many issues as the resistance to professionalism that is more commonly documented.

In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subject-object, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses.

In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subjectobject, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses. I begin with a scene written by a student in my service learning course, U.S. Literacy Politics. The scene, taken from her final paper for the course, recounts her first night at a downtown community center, where students likeJanis serve as literacy partners and mentors. Shifting back and forth between present and past tense, Janis writes:

Argues that the conflicts and contradictions of community outreach (such as service learning) call for an intercultural inquiry that not only seeks more diverse rival readings, but constructs multivoiced negotiated meanings in practice. Presents a case study in which students use the practice of intercultural inquiry to go beyond a contact zone into confronting contradictions, inviting rivals, and constructing and negotiating meaning through the eyes of difference.

This article presents an argument for and offers illustrations of service learning in technical communication courses and curricula. Alongside traditional internships that prepare students as future employees, service learning provides students with an education in engaged citizenship. This article reviews service-learning literature, discussing specifically the advantages of projects to students, faculty, and the community. The authors also describe three projects in which instructors and students integrated service learning and technical communication in innovative ways.

The role of the professor in community service writing courses factors into the teaching, research, and overall institutional viability of these initiatives, yet too little has been written about the role of the professor in service learning. Through an analysis of recent publications on service learning and data gathered during an outreach initiative at University of California, Berkeley, this article reveals a few of the obstacles that hinder the sustainability of community literacy programs. I find that professors in service learning courses can better sustain these initiatives when they view the community site as a place where their research, teaching, and service contribute to a community’s self-defined needs and students’ learning.

Argues that Vida Dutton Scudder’s pedagogy predicted a college–community connection increasingly popular one hundred years later: service learning. Outlines Scudder’s teaching, settlement work, and the ideologies underlying both; critiques her work with the benefit of 21st–century hindsight; and concludes by reaffirming that in the context of her times she was a remarkable figure.

Research Article| April 01 2002 Activism and Service-Learning: Reframing Volunteerism As Acts of Dissent Donna M. Bickford; Donna M. Bickford Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nedra Reynolds Nedra Reynolds Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2002) 2 (2): 229–252. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-2-229 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Donna M. Bickford, Nedra Reynolds; Activism and Service-Learning: Reframing Volunteerism As Acts of Dissent. Pedagogy 1 April 2002; 2 (2): 229–252. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-2-229 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2002 Duke University Press2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

As service learning becomes a popular pedagogical approach to technical and professional writing courses, instructors need to examine critically the causes of practical problems that arise when classroom work involves nonprofit agencies. Nonprofit management theory provides a possible solution in its discussion of some basic characteristics of organizations in the nonprofit sector. By understanding these characteristics, instructors and students might anticipate and solve problems they encounter.

Teachers at all levels of college instruction use service learning, a popular pedagogical tool since the mid-eighties, to teach students both social consciousness and pragmatic, real-world writing skills. This article explores the concept of service learning as rhetorical action in the field of technical communication in general, and the question of whether service learning is appropriate in beginning level technical writing courses. Using my experience through two years of service learning instruction in community college classes, I respond to the charge that students in lower-division courses may lack the maturity to successfully enact service learning assignments. I also analyze the appropriateness of the community college as a catalyst for community-based writing projects.

Describes a “distant service learning” unit in a first-year composition course in which students wrote for a nonprofit organization in the classroom. Discusses program activities in relation to the first-year composition curriculum, program activities and the nonprofit organization, classroom implementation and assessment (including scoring guide criteria), and assessing student impact and impact on the nonprofit organization.

Our ethnographic study of a service‐learning class revealed some students benefited in developing civic values, improving academic learning, and accepting responsibility for their own education. Other students struggled to see the connection between technical communication and service learning, felt frustrated with nonacademic writing, and experienced team conflict. We must redefine both technical communication and service learning, help students make the transition to the workplace, and educate community organizations about the role of technical communicators.

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Challenges the recently proposed definition of the public intellectual. States that true public intellectuals (1) combine their research, teaching, and service efforts in order to address certain social issues important to community members in underserviced neighborhoods; and (2) believe in protecting scholarly autonomy through popularizing intellectual work.

Service learning, an expanding pedagogical movement, educates students to volunteer their expertise for the benefit of society. Teachers of business and technical writing can apply this pedagogy by assigning students to write for nonprofits. Such assignments prepare students for both workplace writing and responsible citizenship. To help our profession consider the appropriateness of this pedagogy, this article describes the origins of the movement and proposes a rationale for it in our field. This article then explains sequential projects and teaching methods intended to reduce problems related to collaborative writing for nonprofits. Last, resources are identified to help prepare grant proposals, perhaps the most beneficial kind of document for nonprofits.

Uses the example of service learning to examine connections between and definitions of public and private as they are deployed in writing, literacy studies, and the field of English. Argues that, done effectively, service learning fits well into an English Studies that is reconsidering its own boundaries and internal relationships.

Contends that service learning--community service linked to academic courses--adds a valuable experiential dimension to composition classes. Describes service learning at Raritan Valley Community College where in composition it fits as an optional alternative for the research paper assignment that is the culminating course project. Discusses how projects are developed and implemented.

Many technical writing programs across the country have their students go out into the community and do writing projects for local businesses, campus organizations, government agencies, or nonprofit organizations. Few, however, take advantage of the increasingly popular pedagogy known as service learning. This article describes how to set up such service-learning courses and how to anticipate certain types of problems. Also discussed are some of the many benefits, both pedagogical and civic/humanitarian, that this truly real-world approach brings to the teaching of technical writing and, potentially, to the teaching of other forms of professional writing.