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Front matter for Reflections Volume 20, Issue 2, Fall/Winter 2020 issue.

More often than not, coming to the end of things is bittersweet. As we look back on our three years co-editing Reflections, we are proud of the issues we published, the authors we came to know, the amazing editorial and production team we assembled, and the effort we put into developing a set of tangible guidelines to pass along to our successor(s).

Front matter for Reflections Volume 20, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2020 issue.

We are thrilled to introduce this 20th anniversary issue of Reflections. Our tenure as coeditors has taught us a great deal about the journal, the growing subfield of community-engaged writing, and the pleasures and pitfalls of editing a biannual publication. As we embarked on editing this issue, we assumed we would learn a lot about the journal’s history, but we could not fully appreciate what that meant until we began to review submissions. The first round we got were in response to a call for articles directed mainly to those with a close association with the journal—former editors, contributors, board members, reviewers—or whose own career paths were influenced by reading it. These articles and several interviews, shorter pieces, and a dialogue provide valuable perspectives on the journal.

We write this introduction for our fourth, coedited issue of Reflections at a historic moment between the passage of two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump in the House and his possible (theoretical) removal in the Senate. This conjuncture comes just two months after the third Conference on Community Writing took place in Philadelphia in October. As coeditors of one of two affiliate journals of the Coalition on Community Writing, we had eagerly anticipated the conference and commissioned an article to review the conference as a way to take the pulse of community writing on the cusp of the 2020s (see Hubrig et al. in this issue).

Front matter for Reflections Volume 19, Issue 2, Fall/Winter 2019 to 2020 issue.

Reflections call for submissions for Volume 21, Issue 2, Spring 2021.

Back matter for Reflections Volume 18, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2018-2019 issue.

As we prepare to publish our second issue as coeditors of Reflections, we find ourselves pondering the semantics of names, the power of design, and the importance of circulatory reach. We began our term as editors with several questions: whether the title of the journal accurately expressed its evolving mission, whether the website was agile and modern enough to reach a wider public, and whether it was feasible to become an open-access journal. It is with a greater appreciation for the modalities and complexities of the world of publishing that we are delighted to announce the renaming of the journal to Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric, the redesign of the website (many thanks to our new website editor Heather Lang), and the movement with this issue to open access (print subscriptions will be honored through 2019).

Front matter for Reflections Volume 18, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2018-2019 issue.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 18, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2018 issue.

As our first volume as co-editors of Reflections goes to press, we look back at the journal’s achievements and forward to shepherding it through an exciting period of growth in the subfield of community-engaged writing. We are at once committed to upholding its history of quality, cutting-edge scholarship—which has contributed significantly to new ways of viewing, practicing, and theorizing community-based writing—and eager to break new ground. Not least, we are keenly aware that we follow a Reflections editorial tradition of excellence and innovation in advancing knowledge in community-engaged writing.

This article argues for a purposeful, racial justice–focused framework for community-engaged projects in rhetoric and composition so that faculty, students, and community partners work together to understand and overcome the myriad ways racist and racial discourses perpetuate injustice. The author explores critical race inquiry in community-engaged projects by presenting analyses of successes and missed opportunities of an ongoing multi-year partnership with a small, local, all-volunteer, collector-based museum and the local branch of the NAACP. These projects reveal insights about pedagogy and disciplinary knowledge and suggest possible forward paths that may lead to more egalitarian partnerships, multi-perspectival knowledge, and impactful antiracist writing instruction in our classes and communities.

Co-authored by a professor and two undergraduates and drawing on interviews with community partners, this essay analyzes a community writing project to document the Civil Rights Movement in a northern city. In collaboration with a local African American history museum, students interviewed 22 African Americans ranging in age from 62-90 years old who lived in Reading, Pennsylvania during the 1960s and 1970s Civil Rights Movement. Beyond the 22 oral histories recorded, transcribed, and housed at the museum, students, community members, and the professor researched, wrote, preserved, and shared a history of the Civil Rights Movement as experienced by African American members of the local community. Aligned with the “political turn” in community-writing partnerships advocated by Shannon Carter and Deborah Mutnick (7), the coauthors argue that collaboratively producing and studying local civil rights history is a form of anti-racist writing pedagogy. The rhetorical, historical project under study illuminates the rhetorical and powerful nature of current narratives of race and racism. As we and all our collaborators documented Civil Rights era history together, we began to circulate layers of counternarratives that both expose and challenge racial realities in productive ways.

This article analyzes a public memory pedagogical partnership that disturbed the public memory of a community organization as an egalitarian space. How students, community partners, and I negotiated privately and represented publicly this legacy of the United States’ worst shame required us—and me—to figure out what partnership and collaboration mean in this context, whose interests come first and why, and the ethical implications of my and our choices.

The policy brief assignment in my capstone course in professional writing was designed as a community-engaged project in partnership with a nonprofit organization whose mission is to grow Reading, Pennsylvania's economy. The assignment was intended to do real work in the world: the nonprofit's director, a city council member, and an outreach manager for the city of Reading plan to use the policy briefs to convince Reading's City Council to adopt the recommended policies to enhance citizen participation and representation in local governance and to address deficiencies identified through the STAR Community Rating System(r) (STAR), the nation's leading sustainability framework and certification program (STAR 2016). I welcomed the collaboration and designed the assignment with the goal that students would experience what writing faculty always tell them: fundamental concepts in composition and rhetoric/writing studies are operational in the workplace, and understanding writing and communication rhetorically opens up possibilities for them to enter diverse and unfamiliar writing contexts. Students successfully researched, synthesized, organized, and clearly communicated information in a content area and genre new to them. They presented their policy briefs in written and electronic form to the community partners and explained their work in oral presentations. It was an exciting, nerve-wracking, and challenging endeavor, and, as I will describe, the periods of dissonance led to the best learning experiences--for students and for me.

This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard, the founder and former director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum (CPAAM), was deceased. Because oral history is narrator-driven, Gilyard’s death required us to remain especially attentive to the epistemic value of his voice.

This article describes a series of community-based research projects, (Re)Writing Local Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Histories, done in partnership with the local African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Jewish communities. The author argues that these projects are one substantive response to the ongoing, growing demand that English studies teacher-scholars and students participate in purposeful, impactful public work. These projects position students as rhetorical citizen historians who produce original historical and rhetorical knowledge and promote democracy through conscious, deliberate rhetorical historical work. But these partnerships also raise complex issues of unequal, fluid, and shifting discourses among community partners, students, and faculty and, consequently, inform ways to enact publicly shared meaning in community literacy partnerships.

This article examines founder Frank L. Gilyard’s role in the establishment of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, through the dual lenses of African American rhetoric and performance studies. It concludes with an analysis of how these insights informed a community-based research course in honors first-year composition.

This article provides a pedagogical model for students in introductory literature classes to participate in the undergraduate research international curricular movement.

This article addresses the "problem of speaking for others" in a joint community-based research project between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Reading, Pennsylvania branch and Penn State Berks to uncover, document, and disseminate to the public African American history in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Integrating community partners' and students' voices with her own, Grobman suggests that the Berks County African American History project approached a model of CBR in which whites and African Americans spoke (and wrote) with one another. She argues that this productive, but highly complex collaboration between community partners, students, and faculty reminds us that theoretical understandings of such concepts as hybridity, border-crossing, and blurring of group-based differences and identities do not necessarily occur in practice; rather, the Black-white binary, sometimes for very good reasons, is not dissolved. Grobman recommends strategies that will aid others involved CBR to create venues that approach equal authority rather than paternalistic service.

This article initiates scholarly discussions of undergraduate research, an educational movement and comprehensive curricular innovation, in composition and rhetoric. I argue that by viewing undergraduate research production and authorship along a continuum of scholarly authority, student scholars obtain authorship and authority through participation in undergraduate research. I then address several implications of this continuum for the discipline.

Author Sue Monk Kidd, who is white, employs stereotypes of African Americans and problematically appropriates features of black writing in her novel “The Secret Life of Bees”. Nevertheless, this book is worth teaching, not only because it has acquired much cultural capital but also because it offers students a way to examine relationships between whites and blacks in American literature and culture.

This article examines the authors’ arduous struggle to develop a professional communication program that would not only meet their students’ professional and intellectual needs but also achieve an identity consistent with their goals as scholars and teachers of composition. Ultimately, the authors argue that a professional communication program that combines in its teaching the ethos of a liberal arts tradition along with the practical skills needed by writers in the workplace is both desirable and possible but that it must be flexible enough to allow for ongoing curricular and philosophical negotiations to meet changing contextual demands.

Tutoring class, thanking them for the Barnes

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

Research Article| April 01 2003 Postpositivist Realism in the Multicultural Writing Classroom: Beyond the Paralysis of Cultural Relativism Laurie Grobman Laurie Grobman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2003) 3 (2): 205–226. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-2-205 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Laurie Grobman; Postpositivist Realism in the Multicultural Writing Classroom: Beyond the Paralysis of Cultural Relativism. Pedagogy 1 April 2003; 3 (2): 205–226. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-2-205 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: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

To bridge the gap between composition and professional communication studies, we should add multiculturalism to the widely accepted international perspective in professional communication instruction, thus transforming the classroom into a contact zone (Pratt). The practical necessity of intercultural communication in a global marketplace necessitates internationalization. The international perspective, accounting for the heterogeneity of the technical communication audience, focuses on audience analysis and leads us to encourage students to learn about the multiple, cultural layers of audience. A multicultural perspective, however, can teach students of professional communication about the complex relationship between language and ideology and the underlying forces that shape and reflect the ways we use language. Multiculturalism's critical component provides insights into the structures and ideologies of domination/subordination and provides students with the linguistic, intellectual, and moral tools for resisting fear and prejudices. Likewise, the international perspective in professional communication can inform issues of audience analysis in composition.