Front matter for Reflections Volume 12, Number 1, Fall 2012 issue.

Public writing is a constant battle to make one view seem inevitable in hopes that the audience will set aside the other possibilities. —Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics Attention is being directed toward reality-driven representations from an ever-wider array of sources: journalistic, literary, anthropological. —Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary Watch the movie. Show it to others. Inform yourself. Get active on the issue. —from the “Dreams Deferred” DVD sleeve

Regular Reflections readers will notice, among other things, a change in the journal’s subtitle. We are now “A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning,” having shifted from “A Journal of Writing, Service Learning and Community Literacy.” Title changes—even subtitle changes—are no small things, so we begin with a note on what led us to make that decision.

In a 2002 article, Patricia Roberts-Miller asked if rhetorical theory has a place for what she then called "principled dissent and sincere outrage." This article addresses that challenge, as the author follows a year of living in and writing for a community in Atlanta that works with the homeless in that city. In it, she argues that, if there is a place for dissenting rhetoric, it is taking place in marginalized movements and publications like the one published by Atlanta's Open Door Community. Hers is a follow-up of two previous discussions (both written with Paula Mathieu of Boston College) on what these authors are calling "a rhetoric of dissent."

This article argues that the teaching of public writing should not neglect issues of circulation and local need. In a series of case studies involving small press papers and homeless advocacy, the authors seek to extend recent work begun by Susan Wells, John Trimbur, and Nancy Welch, which raises crucial questions about public rhetoric in the writing classroom.

Like other seemingly ordinary materials (cookbooks, street art, scrapbooks, etc.) the subject of our investigation “holy cards or (in Italian) immaginette” often function as rich repositories of personal and cultural memory as well as indicators of popular literacy practices. But to relegate them to the category of ephemera, as is customary with materials of this sort, diverts attention from their significant cultural and pedagogical value.

Examining a range of visual images of executions, both legal (the executions of convicted murderers) and extralegal (the lynchings of innocent African Americans), in still photographs and in Hollywood films, the authors suggest that while such images may flatten and neutralize the popular debates and politics surrounding the issues, this is not inevitable, and that if we work at sustaining careful attention to its operations the image is neither self-evident nor doomed to obscure the political.

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In an attempt to bring composition studies into a more thoroughgoing discussion of the place of visual literacy in the writing classroom, I argue that throughout the history of writing instruction in this country the terms of debate typical in discussions of visual literacy and the teaching of writing have limited the kinds of assignments we might imagine for composition.

In what can be called a "culture of disconnect," students and teachers alike often want to engage in public discourse but do not know where to begin. The newsletters and newspapers produced to support the work of small, alternative hospitality houses and prison ministries reveal the role communication plays in the lives of active participants in democracy and show how communities of people who choose to write and publish learn from each other s examples. These extraordinary words of ordinary men and women, writing for local, often little known causes, offer ways of understanding what may motivate writers to begin to assume a meaningful public voice.

Review of the book Kitchen Cooks, Plate Twirlers, and Troubadours: Writing Program Administrators Tell Their Stories (edited by Diana George).

Diana George, John Trimbur, The "Communication Battle," or Whatever Happened to the 4th C?, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 50, No. 4, A Usable Past: CCC at 50: Part 2 (Jun., 1999), pp. 682-698

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