This article compares ten English composition courses - six taught with traditional methodologies and four incorporating service-learning. Four instructors, each of whom taught both the traditional and service-learning versions of the composition courses, and one hundred twenty-eight students were involved in the study. The authors demonstrate that service-learning improves students’ attitudes toward civic engagement and social responsibility, sense of personal efficacy, and understanding of the complexity of social issues while enabling students to meet traditional standards for proficiency in the composition course.

Is service-learning of value for community college students who have very limited time and who do not need to “be exposed” to the neighborhoods in which they live? Yes. Service-learning can be a vital bridge connecting community and college for students who frequently are the first of their family or friends to go to college, who have more confidence in their street skills than in their academic skills, and who see real needs in their communities. However, service learning will only benefit these students if it evolves from and responds to the realities of their lives.

This article adopts the perspective of rhetorical theory to examine student, teacher, and client assessments of community service writing projects created by students in a technical writing course. The study compares both students’ and clients’ assessments of the benefits of the service-learning experience and the teacher’s and clients’ evaluations of the documents. It highlights significant discrepancies in the teacher and client assessments stemming from different views of the rhetorical situation. Analysis of these differences leads to recommendations concerning best practices for organizing, evaluating, and conducting classroom research on community service writing in a technical writing context.

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 within the goals and activities of the writing course, 2) critical pedagogy and academic rigor, 3) mutuality/ reciprocity, and 4) diverse discourses (personal, civic, and academic) that invite students to write for, about, and with community partners for a variety of purposes.

Professor of Political Science and former Director of the Feinstein Institute for Public Service at Providence College, Rick Battistoni is a distinguished author in the field of political theory with a principal interest in the role of education in a democratic society. As Campus Compact's Engaged Scholar for Civic Engagement, Battistoni has published a recent volume, Civic Engagement Across the Curriculum, and has been involved with the development of their Engaged Department institutes and toolkit. Battistoni currently directs Project 540, an ambitious new program that gives over 100,000 high school students nationwide the opportunity to talk about issues that matter to them and to turn these conversations into real school and community change (www.project540.org).

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, though, notes Remnick: a sense of obsession. The Book Man is one student's foray into the genre of the Profile. It was written in an Introduction to Creative Nonfiction course and is based on her service-learning experiences for which she earned an optional fourth credit.

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.

Review Article| January 01 2003 A Lexis for Literacies and Service Hannah M. Ashley Hannah M. Ashley Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2003) 3 (1): 123–126. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-1-123 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Hannah M. Ashley; A Lexis for Literacies and Service. Pedagogy 1 January 2003; 3 (1): 123–126. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-1-123 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. © 2003 Duke University Press2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Roundtable: : Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning in Composition You do not currently have access to this content.

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:

ommunity outreach brings idealism and social consciousness into the academy. It brings a human face and complex lives into the discussion of issues and ideas. But it can also plunge teachers and students into contradictory and sometimes profoundly conflicted social and literate practices. Guerrilla service (as Joe Mertz calls those short forays into soup kitchens, nursing homes, and Lisa's neighborhood) reinforces the distance between the giver and receiver, especially if the contact is superficial and the junket uncomplicated by preparation or reflection. Many current approaches to service-learning avoid this dilemma by embedding personal and social consciousness in academic work-in professional performance for a nonprofit client and/or broad critical analysis (Adler-Kassner, Crooks, and Watters; Waterman). But a fundamental conflict remains, I believe, unresolved, when students (fired up with confidence in social change) confront the suddenly

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.

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 classroom, service-learning courses create conditions in which students must confront clashing discourses in action. This article present s vignettes of three different courses, one of which intentionally tapped into the discourse tensions the students faced and the other two of which encountered these tensions as impediments to successful teaching problems that could be overcome in future versions of the courses. The challenge of negotiating competing discourses will inevitably be part of any service-learning course that involves extensive writing, the authors conclude; hence this issue should be addressed explicitly in readings, class discussions, and student papers. When addressed directly, the friction between discourses can become a teachable space where teachers can help students explore options for addressing dissonance, and so provide everyone involved with an opportunity for transformation.

This paper describes methods to study the impact of service-learning on the writing performance of students in first-year college composition. Linguistic and rhetorical features commonly identified as affecting judgments of writing quality are compared to holistic essay ratings to assess the impact of different teaching and learning contexts on writing performance.

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 ways of understanding work as well as structured opportunities to reflect on their experiences. Students were enabled to think critically about their strengths, predispositions and values and to consider the implications of their self-discovery for college major and career choices. In the Compass program, service-learning provided the crucial experiential link in students critical assessment of their place in the college community and the community at large.

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.

This case-study examines the ways citizens took up, and in some ways resisted, city planners’ assumptions about their lived experience of “Portstown.” While it is necessary to acknowledge the coercive properties of institutional documents and genre-systems, community-literacy workers must not efface the epistemic potential of everyday compositions, for this quality creates opportunities for strategic interventions in the solicitation and reception of civic writing.

Review of Charting A Hero’s Journey by Linda A. ChisholmNew York: The International Partnership for Service Learning, 2000

Review of Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning in Composition by Thomas DeansUrbana, IL: NCTE, 2000

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.

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. The winner of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival award for her plays Every Suzie and Sal, Keeping the Faith, and Freedom Summer, Carol was also the author of The Transition Guide for College Juniors and Seniors: How To Prepare for the Future.

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.

Using an established university level internship program, this article discusses the issues of socialization and acculturation of interns into the workplace, motivation of student employees, and the relationships between education and training/workplace and academy. Evaluations by students and their supervisors reveal the significance of these issues for positive experiential learning.

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.

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.

At a moment when multiculturalism is inspiring new directions for studying non-fiction, new literary genres are emerging, including the oral history narrative. This essay explores the value of the oral history narrative through its recovery in a service-learning course. Interrogating questions of genre, subjectivity, ethics, and composition, this paper affirms the place of oral history recovery in the composition classroom and proposes innovative strategies to remake a basic assignment into an interdisciplinary event.

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.

This essay explores the many benefits of adding a community-based writing component to the first year composition course. It looks closely at the self-selected projects of 25 freshmen at a large suburban university to show how service-learning creates a context in which students can gain greater control over their own literacy and learn more about self and others.

This article investigates the successes and failures of an upper-level service-learning composition course on the theme of “literacies” in order to uncover the particular challenges of engaging in community-based critical teaching in a faith-based institution. It identifies a religiously grounded form of noblesse oblige revealed in students’ literacy autobiographies and proposes pedagogical interventions to engage students in considering their own and their institutions’ ideological assumptions about literacy and service.

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.

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 or with the community – the literature has yet to explore the definition of “community” integral to each of these approaches. As Joseph Harris pointed out in his article “The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing” a decade ago, the idea of community has “extraordinary rhetorical power” yet the word “community” has no negative term; in fact, the term “community” is not even found in a college-level thesaurus. What and where is the ubiquitous “community” talked about in the service-learning literature? Is one community the same as the other? Are we all talking about one generic community or does the term vary from writing to writing? By uncovering the over-reliance on this term, we may begin to see why those who write on this subject do little to define the meaning of community.

In the service-learning writing courses I teach at Wright State University, my academic goals seem simple. I want my students to improve their writing skills and to develop civic literacy. The special challenge of achieving these objectives begins to come into focus in defining civic literacy. In my courses, I define it as having the ability to critically examine the complex social situations that create and perpetuate needs in our communities and an awareness of our responsibility as literate individuals to address those needs.

Based on the belief that students produce better writing when they are personally engaged in the writing topic, the University of Arizona’s Composition program is working to integrate service-learning into a variety of the courses it offers. Research to date suggests that composition students and instructors feel a greater sense of purpose and meaning when they believe that their work will have tangible results in the lives of others.

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.

Tom Deans chairs the CCCC Service-Learning Committee established in 1999. An assistant professor of English at Kansas State University, Deans is the author of Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning in Composition (NCTE, in press).

Editors’ Note: This article originally appeared in COLLEGE CYBERBRIEF, an electronic newsletter sent to members of the Colelge Section of TEACH2000. Reprinted with permission of the National Council of Teachers of English. The list of electronic resources appeared in Adler-Kassner’s CyberBrief; we’ve updated the list a bit and added some print materials.

The title of this article means in triplicate. “True Stories from Philadelphia” is the title of the Project WRITE (Writing and Reading through Intergenerational Teaching Experiences) web site (http://www.temple.edu/CIL/WRITEhome.htm). “True story” also smacks a bit of gossip, the confession of some difficulty. And the phrase “true stories,” itself perhaps an oxymoron, also describes the type of epistemologically self-conscious writing I hope students generate in my service-learning composition classroom.

The State of Maryland requires students to complete 75 hours of service-learning in order to graduate from high school. The mandate also requires that preparation, action and reflection be part of that service. I am a ninth grade English teacher at Sherwood High School in Sandy Spring, MD and the school’s volunteer coordinator. I believe so strongly in the service-learning requirement that I try to incorporate a service-learning project into each ninth grade unit of study.

In the past fifteen years, American colleges and universities have embraced service-learning with active enthusiasm. Campus Compact, the national service-learning organization of university presidents, began in 1985 with three members; today, it has almost 700 member campuses where students annually engage in an estimated 22 million hours of service activities linked to their academic studies. Hundreds of faculty members have found their teaching invigorated as they have observed the impact of service-learning projects on the community and on students’ personal and intellectual growth.

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.

Designing desktop publishing courses around a model of service familiar In the U.S.—the pro bono publico tradition of professional gratis service—would broaden students’ professional horizons in addition to meeting growing demands for service learning. Such courses would mate volunteerism with the democratic spirit of desktop publishing, a technological platform that provides a means for unrepresented voices to be heard and read. One community project is outlined.

104 RHETORICA Some key concepts would perhaps have benefited from explicit, technical explanation. For example, the use of "hegemony" in Morris's book is disconnected from Antonio Gramsci's use of the same term. Another instance is "culture", which resonates with Lionel Trilling's meanings for this term, but, at times, seems like a synonym for ideology. In addition to references to "collective memory", Morris distinguishes "cultural memory" from "public memory", by remarking, "whereas cultural memory reflects the particularized world view and ethos of the members of a particular culture, public memory is perhaps best conceived as an amalgam of the current hegemonic bloc's cultural memory and bits and pieces of cultural memory that members of other cultures are able to preserve and protect" (p. 26). Sinners, Lovers and Heroes will be useful to scholars interested in the rhetoric, public argument, public memory, American studies, and, especially, the legacy of Abraham Lincoln's public image. LESTER C. OLSON University of Pittsburgh Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde, eds., Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) xxiii + 406 pp. Like the recent Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition by Kathy Eden, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time marks another attempt at a rhetorical Anschluss, annexing rhetoric . to hermeneutics in an apparent attempt to make rhetoric look more philosophical, for instance, by pointing to Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. In fact, two of Gadamer's own essays on rhetoric appear in the Jost and Hyde collection. While the writers within the collection draw many analogies between rhetoric and hermeneutics, hardly anyone obtains any definitional precision about the pairing. Reviews 105 On the other hand, the Jost and Hyde volume seeks to be what Eden's book avoids—concerned with the present, as conveyed by the prepositional phrase in the title, "in our time", and explicitly with politics: "Our very being-in-the-world is inseparably hermeneutical and rhetorical in complex ways and...a multi-faceted speaking as well as listening constitutes our situation. Our own time is an epoch of corporate capitalism and technologism, of vulgarization and breakdown. But it is also a time of deep reflection on linguistic interpretation: on persuasion, 'conversion' across paradigms or worldviews, propaganda, and more invidious forms of deception and power, as well as on forms of the electronic word and the new multimedia. It is, accordingly, a time in which we need both to listen to and to discuss what Gadamer calls the 'deep inner convergence' between rhetoric and hermeneutics" (p. xvi). First, "our" turns out to be some amorphous, underdetermined "everyone", and despite the implicit "critique" of "corporate capitalism" in the passage above, Jost and Hyde never get near the topic again, except to get away from it. The slide happens but a page later: "The task at hand now includes identifying hermeneutics (in its modern forms) as a further counterpart to rhetoric and rhetoric to hermeneutics and seeing both as features or dimensions of all thought and language, not only as the special methods or abilities of political praxis" (p. xvii). Before dealing with any concrete issues of political praxis, they widen the aperture of their project to "all thought and language", and thus sidestep the part of the "all" that might have brought them in contact with any logical definition of "politics", or with concrete historical events in North American party politics, for instance. The rhetoric that goes on in the streets, the deception—what the Greeks called the pseudos—the advertising, the propaganda, the double-talk, the exercises of political esotericism, the kind of interpretive practice that produces The Bible Code, all the "ugly" manifestations of rhetoric that are its life blood, hold almost no interest in the context of the book under review. (For the importance, even primacy, of the "ugly", see Slavo Zizek, in Slavo Zizek / F. W. J. von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997] pp. 21-25). Jost and Hyde promote the lemony fresh side of rhetoric, the side most often seen in contemporary RHETORICA 106 accounts of what rhetoric accomplishes or can accomplish: "Rhetoric...helps promote civic engagement and...