College Composition and Communication Dec 2002

"And Now That I Know Them": Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course

Nancy Welch

Abstract

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:

Journal
College Composition and Communication
Published
2002-12-01
DOI
10.2307/1512148
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Open Access
Closed
Topics
service learning literacy studies gender and writing community literacy
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (2)

  1. White (2021)
    “When It’s Outside of You”
    Pedagogy
  2. Jagla (2015)
    Conceptualizing Generative Ethos in Service Learning
    Rhetoric Review

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