Volume 9 • No.1· Fall 2009

'" Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy

Editor: Steve Parks, Syracuse University

Associate Editors: Brian Bailie, Syracuse University

Collette Caton, Syracuse Univerity

Book Review Editor Tom Deans, University of Connecticut

Special Projects Editorial Staff Beth Uzwiak, Temple University

Editorial Board Hannah Ashley, West Chester University

Nora Bacon, University of Nebraska-Ohmaha

Adam Banks, Syracuse University

Melody Bowdon, University of Central Florida

Jan Cohen-Cruz, Imagining America/Syracuse University

Ellen Cushman, Michigan State University

Linda Flower, Carnegie Mellon University

Eli Goldblatt, Temple University

H. Brooke Hessler, Oklahoma City University

Tobi Jacobi, Colorado State University

David Jolliffe, University of Arkansas

Linda Adler-Kassner, Eastern Michigan University

Cristina Kirklighter, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

Joyce Magnotto Neff, Old Dominion University

Kristiina Montero, Syracuse University

Patricia O'Connor, Georgetown University

Nick Pollard, Sheffield Hallam University

Luisa Connal Rodriguez, South Mountain Community College

Barbara Roswell, Goucher College

Lori Shorr, Office of the Mayor, Philadelphia

Amy Rupiper Taggart, North Dakota Statel::!nviersity

Adrian Wurr, University- of North Carolina at Greensboro

Steve Zimmer, Los Angeles Public Schools

Copyright © 2009 New City Community Press

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http://reflections.syr.edu

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Reflections

'--..

Reflections, a peer reviewed journal, provides a forum for scholarship on writ­

ing, service-learning and community literacy. Originally founded as a venue for

teachers, researchers, students and community partners to share research and

discuss the theoretical, political and ethical implications of community-based

writing and writing instruction, Reflections publishes a lively collection of es­

says, empirical studies, community writing, student work, interviews and reviews

in a format that brings together emerging scholars and leaders in the fields of

community-based writing and civic engagement.We welcome materials that:

report on research; showcase community-based and student writing and/or art­

work; investigate and represent literacy practices in diverse community settings;

discuss theoretical, political and ethical implications of community-based writing;

explore connections between service-learning, civic engagement, and current

scholarship in composition studies and related fields.

Submissions Electronic submissions are preferred. Manuscripts (10 -25

double-spaced pages) should conform to current MLA guidelines for format

and documentation and should include an abstract (about 100 words). Attach

the manuscript as a Word or WordPerfect file to an email message addressed

to Steve Parks (sjparks@syr.edu). The email message will serve as a cover

letter and should include your name(s) and contact information, the title of the

manuscript, and a brief biographical statement. Your name should not appear in

the manuscript itself or in accompanying materials such as syllabi. All submis­

sions deemed appropriate for Reflections are sent to external reviewers for blind

review. You should receive prompt acknowledgement of receipt of your piece, '--------f

followed by a report on its status within six to eight weeks.

Contributors interested in submitting a book review (about 1000 words) or recom­

mending a book for review are encouraged to contact the editors. We invite an­

nouncements and abstracts (200-500 words) describing current research projects

and Classroom Sampler submissions (1000- 2000 words) describing exemplary

course designs, assignments and activities and the theoretical perspectives that

inform them. Articles published in Reflections are indexed in ERIC and in the

MLA Bibliography.

Reflections

Table of Contents

1 Beyond Politeness: The Role of Principled DissentSteve Parks, Syracuse University

3 It’s Not About Me: Public Writing and the Place of Principled Dissent

Diana George, Virginia Tech

26 Engaging Community Literacy through the Rhetorical Work of a Social Movement Christopher Wilkey, Northern Kentucky University

61 Interview with Bonnie Neumeier

74 Toiling in ‘the land of dreamy scenes’: Time, Space, and Service-Learning Pedagogy J oe Letter and Judith Kemerait L ivingston, Tulane University

103 Desktop Publishing for Community and Social Justice Organizations Karyn Hollis, Villanova University

129 Speaking With One Another” in Community-Based Research: (Re)Writing African American History in Berks County, Pennsylvania Laurie Grobman, Penn State University- Berks

162 Composing Cultural Diversity and Civic Literacy: English Language Learners as Service Providers Adrian J. Wurr, University of Idaho

191 Review of Keith Gilyard, Composition and Cornel West: Notes Toward a Deep Democracy. So. Illinois Press. 2008 Linda Flower, Carnegie Mellon University

195 Kirk Branch. Eyes on the Ought to Be: What we Teach About When we Teach About Literacy. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007. 216 pages

David Stock, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Volume 9 • No. 1 • Fall 2009

Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy

Introduction Beyond Politeness: The Role of Principled Dissent

Should we teach our student's how to form street protests, wave placards, and be confrontational? In our quest to teach students how to reshape civic space, that is, must our student learn to go

beyond civility?

Reflections' Beyond Politeness explores the tension between civility and dissent in our work as teachers, scholars, and community partners. In Diana George's opening essay, focused on her time at Atlanta's Open Door Community, we are introduced to the limitations of "civil" discourse in arguing for social change. Using his activist work in Over-the-Rhine, Chris Wilkey's explores how asking student to engage in provocative rhetoric enmeshes them deeper in the work of social activism, a term his community partner, Bonnie Neumeier, then explores in an accompanying interview. Joe Letter and Judith Kemerait Livingstone build upon these arguments to discuss service-learning classrooms linked to efforts to save City Park in New Orleans, work that led their students to not only build a new rhetoric of "service," but to help re-build an actual park as well. Their essay reminds us of the need to actually "get our hands dirty" in work with community partners. Karyn Hollis completes our exploration of this issue by exploring how students can work with progressive organizations to produce community-based publications.

Reflections then takes a step back in time. Prior to her stepping down as Editor of Reflections, Barbara Roswell had worked with two authors, Laurie Grobman and Adrian WUIT, to develop essays that explore questions of difference. Grobman's essay explores her role in assisting

Reflections. 1

an African-American community recapturing their own history; Wurr's essay asks us to consider the difficulty of non-native speakers of English encounter when engaged in service-learning and community­based classrooms. In their essays, we see both the legacy of work Roswell was able to bring to the journal, but also how issues of race, class, and immigrant status remain issues that those invested in using their role in the academy to foster a more inclusive and open civic society must continually confront and overcome - through civil and, perhaps, sometimes not-so-civil means.

I am grateful to all the authors for allowing Reflections to share their work with our readers.

Steve Parks Editor, Reflections

Reflections. 2

It's Not About Me: Public Writing and the Place of Principled Dissent

Diana George, Virginia Tech

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, ifthere is a place

-iii 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:'

"If rhetorical theory promotes decorum, what is the place of principled dissent and sincere outrage?"

Patricia Roberts-Miller

At times like this-times when I'm trying to figure out why I've done a thing the way I've done it-my Mother pops up out of nowhere. Well, not really (she's been in her grave since

1988), but real enough. She showed up again just last week when I was worrying over how I might frame the piece you are reading right now. It was something she used to say about women whose families were struggling to get by but who always wore the newest and best dresses, shoes, coats, hats. "She's wearing her children's food on her back," is what she'd say. When I first heard that, I was too young and too literal­minded to understand it. I could never quite shake the thought of lunch

Reflections. 3

meat sitting on the lady's shoulders, maybe sandwich bread hanging from her sleeves. Let's just say I came to metaphor later than some of my peers.

When I finally did get it, I thought she was being too rough. I knew where Mom was coming from-she rarely had anything new herself and her kids were always hungry-but the comment seemed sexist, tight-fisted, and even mean-spirited, especially for someone who was none of those. Eventually, I called her out on it, saying that I thought everybody deserved a little bit ofluxury now and then. She didn't budge: "When you have mouths to feed, it isn't about you, is it?"

Exactly.

Never argue with your mother.

Writing the Life: A Year at The Open Door Community In July, 2003, my husband (Chuck Harris) and I began a year-long stay in Atlanta's Open Door Community. I was on sabbatical from Michigan Tech. Chuck was simply continuing the work he had begun five years before when he began traveling regularly from Michigan'S Upper Peninsula to Atlanta and spending stretches of time living and working in the Community. Founded over 30 years ago by Murphy Davis, Ed Loring and Rob and Carol Johnson, the Open Door Community calls itself a "Protestant Catholic Worker." The founders drew both their inspiration and direction from Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin who began the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933 in New York, setting up the first Catholic Worker House and publishing the first issue of The Catholic Worker newspaper that same year. As Catholic Worker historian Jim Forest writes,

"Beyond hospitality, Catholic Worker communities are known for activity in support of labor unions, human rights, cooperatives, and the development of a nonviolent culture. Those active in the Catholic Worker are often pacifists people seeking .to live an

Reflections. 4

unarmed, nonviolent life. During periods of military conscription, Catholic Workers have been conscientious objectors to military service. Many of those active in the Catholic Worker movement have been jailed for acts of protest against racism, unfair labor practices, social injustice and war" (Forest).

Like many intentional communities inspired by the Catholic Worker, the Open Door Community carries that tradition of serving the homeless and agitating for social justice to the streets of Atlanta. During my year there, I cooked and scrubbed and served and marched. Most of the time, though, I wrote for Hospitality, the community paper. In the past, when I have written about living at Open Door. and writing for the paper, I've tried to keep my story - at least my private moments of failure, frustration, shame, success, joy - out of those accounts. I've backed away with the excuse that, while the personal might indeed be political, sometimes it's just personal. I can't say precisely what has changed my mind now, but one thing is certain: If it's worth telling at all, this story, as my mother would say, isn't really about me - though I could be wrong on that one. The way I choose to tell the story now is through some of my writing that made it into Hospitality's pages, and though it could well seem like I am telling the story starting in the middle, I open with this piece written nearly six months into our stay:

On Being Told that the Economy is Improving: A Note on NPR and Jack London

from Hospitality, February 2004

From the slimy, spittle-drenched sidewalk, they were picking up bits of

orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and, they were eating them.

The pits of greengage plums they cracked. between their teeth for the

kernels inside. They picked up stray bits of bread the size of peas, apple

cores so black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and

these things these two men took into the4- mouths, and chewed them,

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and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven o'clock in the

evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest,

wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen.

Jack London, The People of the Abyss (78)

Over a century ago, one of Dorothy Day's favorite writers - Jack London - traveled to London, England, traded his regular clothes for rags he found in a second-hand shop, and walked the streets of that city posing as one of the homeless. He lived in shelters (work houses) to learn what it meant to be out of work, living in the streets, and ignored by "the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen."

One hundred and two years later, it is time to reread The People of the Abyss, Jack London's account of what Stephen Crane had earlier called an "experiment in misery" - an attempt to become one of the poor, to know poverty within poverty. It is especially important to read of London's life in the streets when, today, so many of our brothers, sisters, and children walk our own streets, enduring conditions not far removed from those London experienced so long ago.

The U.S. has, quite surely, taken over from Britain the dubious honor of being called "the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen," and in the midst of all that wealth and power it is increasingly difficult to see the level of demeaning poverty that is growing everyday in our streets, under our bridges, in the gullies, in abandoned warehouses, in churchyards, and against doorways.

Despite the current communications boom, most Americans cannot see this poverty and never hear of it. At the Open Door we do see it, but that is most likely because we want to.

On the first day of December,. in the first week of Advent, I sat in

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my room listening to a National Public Radio report on what they were calling an "improved economy." It was cold and rainy in Atlanta that morning and guys from the street were lined up and huddled under our eaves waiting for a bag breakfast. Normally, we can bring people in, but that day we couldn't, so the tension and frustration in the yard were high. Amazingly, people's patience goes up with the tension. For every shouting match there is somebody who wants to make peace. For every curse there is a word of thanksgiving.

The NPR report was focused solely on what this "economic upswing" might mean for the next presidential election. There were no nuances in this story and little to suggest that the reporters had any sense of what is going on in the real economy of making it day-to-day on low income, below-minimum-wage income, temporary income, or (given free trade agreements) no income at all. I wished they could sit with me and just take a look out the window.

Daily, I watch old men and women (our elders) pick through dumpsters.

Daily, I am reminded of how little I know about living in the streets in this city.

Twice this winter, I have been stopped short by my own ignorance / my own habits of mind.

The first time was with a man I've known since I got here. He usually looks pretty spaced-out, so I assumed he was doing some drug or wasted on alcohol. Listerine is a preferred beverage for a number of alcoholics in the streets, and since he never really smelled ofliquor;I thought maybe it was just a lot of Listerine dulling his eyes and slowing his responses. Now that I know him better, I realize t~e spaced-out look isn't alcohol or illegal drugs

Reflections. 7

at all but prescribed medications for everything from a bi-polar condition to high blood pressure, anxiety, headaches, sleeplessness, and allergies. I knew that he slept in the streets somewhere, but I didn't know where. He is at The Open Door most days and gets food and a change of clothes and a shower on shower days. He worries when our routine changes, so that morning in Advent he was probably anxious.

The week before, I had heard that he had finally been approved for a place, and he looked happy about that. I was happy about it because I could see him going downhill as the days got wetter and colder, and I didn't like thinking about him sleeping outside. So, when I saw him, I said, "Hey! I heard you got a place! Congratulations!" He nodded and just said it was good. He was relieved.

I mentioned his place to Barbara here in the house. She tried to set me straight: "It isn't inside. It's a doorway." I told her that he said he was approved for a place. "I'm pretty sure he's inside."

When he came through the sorting room that morning, I asked about it. "It's a church doorway," he told me, "but they gave me a letter to show the police. It says I'm allowed to sleep there."

A church doorway. That's what he meant by being approved for a place.

Later the same week, I was talking to a couple I've come to know in our yard. I don't recall what it was they were noticing, but I overheard one say to the other, "We'll have to do that at home."

Okay. Home. That sounds to me like a place to live, so I asked where their place is.

"We found an abandoned car that's all covered in kudzu. So far,

Reflections. 8

nobody's found us."

The week before Christmas, I heard that they had lost their place. Maybe the hard frost killed back the kudzu. Whatever it was, they were on the streets looking for a spot to sleep.

We see them here at The Open Door most evenings. They drink coffee and eat sandwiches in the yard. After that, I'm not sure where they go. Maybe they sleep in whatever doorway, yard, ditch, or underpass they can find. Or, maybe they "carry the banner." That's what Jack London called walking the streets all night. Just walking. Rarely stopping.

Over a century ago, The People of the Abyss described a life of harassment and exhaustion, a life in which street people kept moving to avoid arrest, and London painted a picture that could easily be Atlanta today. "And now," he wrote, "I wish to criticize the powers that be":

All night long they make the homeless ones walk up and down. They drive them out of doors and passages, and lock them out of the parks. The evident intention of all this is to deprive them of sleep. Well and good, the powers have the power to deprive them of sleep, or of anything else for that matter; but why under the sun do they open the gates ofthe parks at five o'clock in the morning and let the homeless ones go inside and sleep? If it is their intention to deprive them of sleep, why do they let them sleep after five in the morning? And, if it is not their intention to deprive them of sleep, why don't they let them sleep earlier in the night? (118-119)

London makes a plea, in People of the Abyss, for sanity and caring. After a night spent out with others "carrying the banner," London tells his readers that he did not stop and rest in the park:

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I was wet to the skin, it is true, and I had had no sleep for twenty-four hours; but, still ... I had to look about me, first for a breakfast, and next for work. (121)

It is, indeed, a good time to reread Jack London. The people he wrote of in 1902 in England are still with us today in 2004 in Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Memphis, Miami, Orlando, St. Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Duluth, Tucson, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and in Washington, D.C. They are with us in small towns and major cities; in the heat of the South and in the bitter cold of the North. They are with us whether we see them or not, whether the "powers that be," as London calls them, keep them out of our sight or not. They are with us.

"And, so, dear soft people," London writes, "should you ever visit London Town [or Atlanta, Georgia] and see these men [and women] asleep on the benches and in the grass, please do not think they are lazy creatures, preferring sleep to work. Know that the powers that be have kept them walking all the night long, and that in the day they have no where else to sleep" (119-120).

For a writer, community newspapers can be an amazing mixture of report, commentary, instruction, satire, appeal, outrage, and-for lack of a better term-personal journey. A publication modeled on Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin's Catholic Worker, as is Hospitality, is also an instrument for what Maurin called, "clarification of thought." After all, when Maurin proposed a paper to Dorothy Day, what he was hoping for was a place where he could publish his own ideas, a paper that would be unapologetic in its politics. I have been fond of quoting Maurin's reaction to the first issue of The Catholic Worker which he found to have no strong politics in its effort to reach readers across political lines: "Everyone's paper is no one's paper." That stark dismissal remains foundational for community newspapers, the radical press, street papers, even today's political blogs. It is an

Reflections. 10

assessment, moreover, that stands in contradiction to many of the most basic lessons of traditional rhetoric. To put it simply, among its many functions, a community paper provides a soapbox - a place for the "principled dissent and sincere outrage" Patricia Roberts-Miller identifies as missing in the lessons of classical rhetoric (23). In her 2002 examination of John Quincy Adams's defense of those charged in the Amistad incident, she identifies a significant contradiction in the rhetorical tradition and the supposed usefulness of decorum for

. challenging the status quo:

In the rhetorical tradition, this means that there is some confusion fundamental to the notion that good rhetoric is 'the good man speaking well'-such that decorum and virtue are implicitly causally connected. But, if decorum and virtue are connected, how does one disagree with convention without thereby identifying oneself and ill-mannered and immoral. What is the place of dissent? (16)

Papers like The Catholic Worker (or, Hospitality) rarely pull back from dissent and, indeed, "sincere outrage." I do believe that, in the first few months at Open Door, I felt that outrage more than I felt anything.

Sticks and Stones-Language that Kills from Hospitality, October 2003

Crack-heads. Dealers. Beggars. Aggressive Panhandlers. Nut Cases. Con Artists. Bums. Drunks. Thieves. Perverts. Lazy Asses. Vagrants. The Un-housed.

The Homeless.

When we were kids, our parents taught us not to call each other names, and when others called us names, we were supposed to shake it off: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." That's what my mother taught, anyway. And,

Reflections. 11

though I continue to think that she was one of the wisest people I will ever know, I am quite sure Mom was wrong on that one .

. . . For some time now, Central Atlanta Progress, Atlanta Journal­Constitution columnist Colin Campbell, The Atlanta Neighborhood Association, Mayor Shirley Franklin, and others hoping to make downtown Atlanta a pleasant place to be have been calling names. They have been talking about "cleaning up" downtown and "making sweeps" through the city parks. They have warned "righteous do-gooders" to keep quiet and let the authorities "Do Downtown." And, for some time now, Atlantans have read and listened to that language just barely aware of its power to shape our responses to the people who live in our streets.

Last Wednesday, as some of us from The Open Door walked through Woodruff Park passing out leaflets and talking to people in the park, one of our group crossed over to Sun Trust Plaza and approached a neatly dressed, attractive young woman who told him not to bother to talk to her about homeless people. "I don't care what they do with them," she said. "Get rid of them all. I don't care if they kill them all. I want them out."

"I don't care if they kill them all."

Could she really have said that? Yes. She did say that.

So, who is it she wants out of her sight-even if it means killing "them all"? What language shapes her thinking when she looks across from her concrete bench in Sun Trust Plaza to the people sitting on Woodruff Park benches waiting for a sandwich from the "righteous do-gooders" who Mayor Franklin also wants to keep out of the parks?

The language we hear from the Journal-Constitution, from Central Atlanta Progress, from the Mayor's office is language that depicts

Reflections. 12

all homeless men and women as waste. And, quite naturally, it is the city's business to "clean up" waste.

When police entered the Pine Street Shelter a few weeks ago and offered anybody who'd agree to stay away for five years a free one-way ticket out of town, that was an action prompted by the metaphors we live by. Sweep this town clean of the waste of vagrants and crack-heads and lazy bums. Get them out of our sight. Send them somewhere else and let someone else deal with it.

When Colin Campbell supports the proposal of a new multi­million dollar park to connect mid-town Atlanta to downtown Atlanta, he describes the "two acres of graffiti-covered parking lots, and the troubled shelter for the homeless at Peachtree and Pine" as "reminders that the city's core still needs help." It is here that this new stretch of green would be developed.

And, where would the shelter go? I suppose it would just be greened over.

And, where would the people in it go? Well, if they didn't take their one-way ticket out of town, I suppose they'll be walking the streets looking for help.

Where the homeless go doesn't seem to matter in all of this language because, after all, they are the vagrants, the dealers, the thieves, the drunks, the waste. Surely, no one with a job is homeless. Surely, no one free of an addiction is homeless.

"This is America," a Georgia State student said to me last Wednesday. "You can work and be successful in America. These people are just lazy-asses." I remind him that a lot of homeless people do have jobs that don't even pay them enough to keep a room. His response: "Then get another job."

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Several weeks ago, I listened to a homeless woman talk to a group gathered along the steps of City Hall. She said, "I'm homeless. Do you know anything about me? You just call me HOMELESS. What is homeless? I had a job. It got cut. I work when I can and where I can and I can't afford a place. What do you know about me?"

That woman spoke more profoundly and truthfully about "the homeless" than anyone in any position of power in this city 1 have heard thus far. So, who are the homeless?

Mothers. Fathers. Sisters. Brothers. Aunts. Uncles. Short order cooks. Maids. Housekeepers. Loft builders. Dishwashers. Waiters. Day labor. Temps. Keyboardists. Workers.

People who need homes.

Rules of the Road

"Students report that their fears and prejudices diminish or disappear, that they are moved by the experience of helping others, and that they feel a commitment to help more. This is a remarkable accomplishment, to be sure. But it is important to note that these responses tend, quite naturally, to be personal, to report perceptions and emotions." Bruce Herzberg

If you ask any class of first-year comp students to tell you what they know about writing, eventually one (and, often, several) will tell you never to use first person, in fact, to avoid the word "I" entirely. Nobody wants to read what you think. That isn't quite what Bruce Herzberg was warning against over a decade ago in his critique of service­learning, but that distrust of the personal (though guarded in Herzberg'S argument) is a strong element of the lesson our students carry with them about writing that counts

It is a lesson that works for a lot of things, but it doesn't work well for .

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the kinds of newspapers and newsletters my good friend and ever-more­frequent collaborator Paula Mathieu and I have been reading, writing about, and occasionally writing for over the past several years (George; George and Mathieu; Mathieu and George). We have begun calling the work we encounter in those publications a "rhetoric of dissent," a rhetoric that can be, and often is, nakedly angry; this is a rhetoric that demands the presence of a real voice, an outraged individual writing to expose injustice, laugh at the absurd, or put into stark relief actions and language so common they nearly go unnoticed-that is, unless you are on the receiving end.

A Lenten Reflection • from Hospitality, April 2004

In my life outside The Open Door, I [was at the time this was written]

a Professor of Humanities at Michigan Technological University in

the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It is a place with long winters, deep

snowfall, and close friendships. So, while I [was] in Atlanta, I [had] been

sending reports back to my home parish, st. Anne's Catholic Church in

Chassell, Michigan. The people at St. Anne's responded with warmth

and generosity. Even people I didn't know or barely knew have written

to me about the work at The Open Door. When Obie Anglen, a friend

from the yard, died in February, I sent this Lenten Report. I share it now

with Hospitality readers ...

Dear Father Larry and St. Anne's Parishioners,

On the Monday before Ash Wednesday, we began the morning reflection with a reading from Matthew that most of us have heard every year at the beginning of Lent:

But take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may

see them ... when you give alms, do n.ot blow a trumpet before you, as

the hypocrites do ... to win the praise of others .... When you pray, do

not be like the hypocrites who love to stand and pray in the synagogues

and on street comers so that others may see them .... When you fast, do

Reflections. 15

not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They neglect their appearance, so

that they may appear to others to be fasting .... When you fast, anoint

your head and wash your face, so that you may not appear to be fasting,

except to God who sees what is hidden and will repay you.

That reading struck me as especially powerful this morning because I believe it helps me explain why I've been so silent since before Christmas. I haven't written much since then because there are times when I'm not sure what the letters are really all about. Doesn't [that passage] tell us to pray privately, fast privately, give privately?

I've sometimes wondered if my letters back home are just my way of being like the hypocrites in Matthew's Gospel-doing good works so that others will notice.

But this morning, as I listened to that reading, I remembered all the years after I had left a small Catholic elementary school and had started high school in the public system. On Ash Wednesday, I would go to school wearing ashes, ~nd, inevitably, my friends would gently whisper that I had something on my forehead, that I'd gotten into the ink or smudged myself on my homework. And, I would feel a shock of embarrassment rush up my neck as I explained that the smudge was from ashes; I'd been to church that mornmg.

On those days, I resented that reading from Matthew. I'd sit and stand and kneel in the Church early in the morning before school and listen to that reading all the while thinking, "Well, if we aren't supposed to walk around wearing our fasting on our faces, why are we getting this stuff smeared across our foreheads for everybody to look at?

I didn't want to be embarrassed.

Reflections. 16

What 1 should have remembered, though, is what the Sisters had taught me about ashes. When we would complain about being embarrassed, they would say, "The ashes are a reminder. Look in the mirror. Don't think about the way you look. Remember why we fast on these days. Remember why we pray. The ashes will fade very quickly, but you should still remember." . . .

Two weeks ago, one of our friends from the streets died. His name was Obie, and he has been on my mind for a long time now.

Back in October, 1 called the ambulance for him. He was having a heart attack in our front yard, but 1 didn't know that. In fact, the first time 1 saw him that day, 1 thought he was probably on a binge. He was struggling down the sidewalk and could barely walk a straight line. 1 was going in the opposite direction and stopped to say, "Obiel What's going on? You look a little fuzzy this morning." He didn't make eye contact, just said, "I need to get to The Open Door."

Three hours later, 1 was on house duty and one of the residents here came in to tell me that Obie was in bad shape. He needed an ambulance.

1 went out to talk to him. No odor ofliquor. In fact, the people around him told me that Obie didn't really drink, so 1 called the ambulance and then went out into the yard to sit with him until they came.

The next day we heard that Obie was having a heart attack; he would have died if! hadn't called the ambulance.

1 was feeling pretty good about myself-having mostly forgotten my earlier judgment that he was on a bender and heading down the street to sleep it off in our front yard. After all, I'd saved his life. The doctor said he needed open heart surgery. Just in time, 1

Reflections. 17

thought. Ifwe hadn't gotten him in, that would have been the end.

Three days later, Obie was in our yard again, and I was shocked. "Obie!" I called, "I thought you needed open heart surgery. Why are you here?"

"I have to wait to get an appointment. They don't tell me nothin' there."

For the next several weeks, the nights got colder and wetter. In the evenings when I passed out sandwiches, Obie would be there, still waiting to hear about surgery. He was sleeping in the streets most of that time, in the coldest, wettest, hardest part of the winter. And, he needed open heart surgery.

One night when I had to clear the yard, Obie was there bedded down with some others. He needed open heart surgery, and I had to wait while he slowly and with difficulty put his shoes back on and packed up to ~ove on down the street.

I was ashamed of myself.

The doctors told Obie that he needed open heart surgery and sent him out to sleep in the streets.

I knew he needed open heart surgery, and I sent him out to sleep in the streets.

It is good - if you pray - to pray in private, but I believe now that the ashes remind us to act in public.

We live in a country that has some of the best health care in the world, and yet, we ask an old man with a life-threatening heart condition to go live in the streets until there's a place in line for him to get the care he needs.

Reflections. 18

We live in the wealthiest nation in the world, and yet men and women live in the gutters and under highway overpasses. The CEOs of some of our largest, most prosperous companies make salaries large enough to pay dozens of workers a fair wage, and yet we fight legislation to guarantee everyone a living wage.

I am ashamed of myself that I have to send sick and dying men and women back into the streets after I have handed them a sandwich, and I am ashamed of a system that makes that necessary.

When you are living and working at a place like Open Door, there are a lot of things to get mad about. You can start just by getting mad at the system. In the end, though, a paper like Hospitality forces writers as well as readers to admit their own part in making that system possible.

As I reread that reflection (confession, more like), I am both chagrined and struck by how much more apt it is today than it was in 2004. Since at least 1996, the number of public hospitals across the country has continued to decline steadily (Andrulus and Duchon) which means that today it is harder than ever for homeless men and women to find a spot at a place like Grady. That is primarily because there aren't many Gradys left, and yet the fight to stave off universal health care continues as bitterly as ever. The scene I wrote about in 2004 has likely played itself out, with variations, dozens of times since then in cities all across this country. In my mind, that means that this is the kind of story that needs to be told over and over again.

The community paper does, indeed, have the tendency "to be personal, to report perceptions and experiences," to echo Herzberg, but the personal in this context does not inevitably mean the writer will "not search beyond the person for a systemic explanation" (Herzberg 309). One does not cancel out the other.

Reflections. 19

What Was I Writing? Just about the last piece I wrote for Hospitality that year was the one that worried me more than anything I had written the entire year:

Hearing Voices from Hospitality, July 2004

One morning in May, I was sitting in my room trying to finish up a paper I had promised for a conference at the end of the month. Below me, the yard was filled with the sounds of people lining up for showers and waiting for soup kitchen. A lot of the time, these sounds worry me.

Earlier that very morning, about 5:00, it was the sound of Spanish-urgent and angry-in an argument with someone bedded down against the wall of our side yard. I didn't know if it was a fight about to erupt or just the singular and hard frustration of spending the night on the ground and having to wake up early enough to get a number in the shower line. But it was over nearly as soon as it woke me, so I let it melt into what was left of a restless dream and forgot it for the time.

At my desk later that morning, I sat trying hard to concentrate, trying hard to block out the noise of conversations and soup kitchen pots and sirens and truck traffic and singing.

Yes. Singing.

Suddenly, the noise of pots and traffic and people milling about the yard had arranged itself into music-beautiful, rhythmic, a cappella voices-in close Motown harmony, rich in the soul and gospel tradition of Black churches and side streets. Four men had circled in the drive and were making startlingly beautiful music. It went on for over an hour.

Reflections. 20

I stopped to watch and listen from my window, and as I watched I thought about how much I've written about the suffering and how easy it is to forget the pure joy ofliving, whether in the streets or in houses and apartments. People find joy even within the outrage of having to stand in our front yard waiting to be served a meal, waiting for a clean shirt, waiting for a shower, waiting for a job, waiting for justice in this country of all countries.

Of course, there is that echo of Jack London there at the end, but I worried then and continue to worry that I had just offered up one of those happy-peasants-dancing-in-the-Iandscape paintings that I loved to critique when I was studying art history. It is a true story and it was one of those bits oflight that surprised me and made me immeasurably happy that year, but there are dangers in it. It is too neat, too much the tableau, too easy.

I do know poverty and not simply from reading and writing about it. I also know that those moments of joy and beauty happen. What worries me in that piece is how muted the outrage has become; how it seems precious-a Hallmark moment. In the end, it could have been written for any mainstream newspaper; it could have been a human interest spot on any half-hour network news show. In my mind, it is a failed piece of writing because it very likely is more about me and my own desire for a resolution to the year than anything else, and as Mom would say, "When you have hungry mouths to feed, it isn't about you, is it?"

The Place for Principled Dissent and Sincere Outrage

"I should have called it something you somehow haven't to deserve." Robert Frost

Near mid-year in our stay at Open Door, Chuck and I used a line from Robert Frost's The Death of a Hired Man in an article about homes

Reflections. 21

and homelessness (Harris and George). Frost writes that home is "something you somehow haven't to deserve." A few friends read that piece and asked if maybe we had gotten that one wrong. Didn't Frost write, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in"?

He did. He wrote both lines. They occur back-to-back when the farmer Warren scoffs at his wife for telling him that the Hired Man had "come home to die":

"Home," he mocked gently.

"Yes, what else but home?

It all depends on what you mean by home.

Of course he's nothing to us, any more

then was the hound that came a stranger to us

Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in."

"I should have called it

Something you somehow haven't to deserve."

And, then the argument turns to the Hired Man's rich brother, living somewhere close by, who really ought to be taking him in.

I'm an English teacher, and so it seems I've known those lines almost since childhood-though I am sure I didn't read the poem until I was in high school. Still, I have read those lines and studied those lines and taught those lines many times. It is only in living and working at The

Reflections. 22

Open Door that I have understood those lines and especially that I've understood the difference between the two.

The Death of a Hired Man is a poem still taught in most American high schools, probably in the third year in American literature classes. It is a common enough assignment to ask students to turn the poem into theater (it is nearly a play, already), to act out the parts in reader's theater, even to design a set for a full-blown stage production. It is not a very common assignment to ask students to understand what is going on in that poem beyond the drama between a farmer and his wife arguing over whether or not to take in a hired man who has come back to the farm to die.

To think of home as "the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in" is to admit something of an inevitability. Like it or not, if you drag yourself home in need - even after years of turning your back on the whole lot of them - the family is supposed to take you in. That's just the way things are. It doesn't always work that way, of course, but that's basically where Frost is going with that line. The farmer's wife (speaking with the same clarity that rang in my mother's words) is talking about a different kind of social contract. She isn't talking about responsibility or the deserving poor or family ties or expectations of friendship or even (thinking about the Hired Man, here) labor relations. She is saying something profoundly revolutionary, at least in Capitalism: Home is basic. Nobody ought to have to earn the right to a home. It is, quite simply "something you haven't to deserve." It is that kind of understanding of human rights that leads a publication like Hospitality away from rhetorical decorum and toward principled dissent and sincere outrage which, as Paula Mathieu and I would argue ("A Place for the Dissident Press"), is the rhetoric of dissent.

Reflections. 23

Works Cited

Andrulis, Dennis P. and Lisa M. Duchon. Hospital Care in the One Hundred Largest U.S. Cities and their Suburbs: 1996-2002. The Social and Health Landscape of Urban and Suburban America Report Series. SUNY Downstate Medical Center. August 2005.

Forest, Jim. "The Catholic Worker Movement," available at <http:// www.catholicworker.comlcworkjf.htm>.

George, Diana. "Hearing Voices." Hospitality 23.7 (July 2004): 3. --. "A Lenten Reflection." Hospitality 23.4 (April 2004): 1; 9. --. "Lessons from Los Angeles: Pray that We Never Get Used to

This." Hospitality 22.11 (November-December 2003): 4; 9. --. "On Being Told that the Economy is Improving: A Note on NPR

and Jack London." Hospitality 23.2 (February 2004): 5; 10. --. "Sticks and Stones: Language that Kills." Hospitality 22.10

(October 2003): 5. --. "William Sheppard, 1865-1927: Missionary, Explorer, Human

Rights Activist." Hospitality 23.2 (February 2004): 1; 10. --. "The Word on the Street: Public Discourse in a Culture of

Disconnect," Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy. 2.2 (2002): 6-18.

George, Diana and Paula Mathieu. "A Place for the Dissident Press in a Rhetorical Education: Sending up a Signal Flare in the Darkness," forthcoming in eds. John Ackerman and David Coogan, Rhetoric and Social Change: The Public Work of Scholars and Students.

Harris, Chuck and Diana George. "The Gospel of Prosperity in a Land of Famine." Hospitality 23.5 (May 2004): 6.

Herzberg, Bruce. "Community Service and Critical Teaching." College Composition and Communication 45.3 (October 1994): 307-19.

London, Jack. People of the Abyss. Chicago: LawrencG Hill Books. 2004.

Mathieu, Paula and Diana George. "Not Going it Alone-Small Press

Reflections. 24

Papers and the Circulation of Homeless Advocacy," College Composition and Communication 61.1 (September 2009): 156-175.

Roberts-Miller, Patricia. "John Quincy Adams' Amistad Argument: The Problem of Outrage: Or, the Constraints of Decorum," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32.2 (Spring 2002): 5-25.

Notes

At the time that I wrote article, I was on sabbatica11eave from Michigan Tech. In 2005, I took my current position at Virginia Tech. This was a letter originally addressed to my home parish in Michigan after what had been a long period of silence. Hospitality chose to run the letter as is with the short introduction setting up the context.

Reflections. 25

Toiling in 'the land of dreamy scenes': Time, Space, and Service-Learning Pedagogy

Joe Letter and Judith Kemerait Livingston, Thlane University

This essay examines Katrina's impact on service-learning pedagogy, in

particular how the instability of the storm's aftermath has generated

alternate approaches to service project planning and implementatiori.

Tulane's mandatory service-learning requirement following Katrina led

.' the authors to develop a joint project at New Orleans City Park, which

~ combined five sections of writing students who worked clearing

storm debris. The weekly movement from an idealized campus space

through devastated areas of the city and park served as the basis for

two complementary pedagogical approaches, one treating Katrina's

disruption of space; the other treating the storm's disruption of time.

"It is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space." Foucault

"Way down yonder in New Orleans In the land of dreamy scenes, There is a garden of Eden ... "

Joe Turner Layton, Jr. and Henry Creamer!

Introduction

Hurricane Gustav struck the Louisiana coast on Labor Day 2008, almost exactly three years after Katrina broke the levees and just after our first week of fall classes. We had spent that first week

explaining the plans for a service project at New Orleans City Park. Ironically, our project plan--which combined five sections of students from our two writing-intensive courses--was to restore areas of the park damaged by Katrina. Gustav was a typical hurricane, the kind that

Reflections. 74

-.-~.-.. -,,-"-" .. ~---.. --,----""-"-.--,,-,,------,-,-"---.---.--~.-'"-.----""" .. --- "----'"-.--------"-"-.-"-"--.--.---,--.. --.. --.. -.,---~------,,-.-,-,,-~

comes along every year or two in New Orleans, but it marked the first major test since Katrina of the city and state evacuation plans, as well as the emergency plan that our university had implemented. Although the evacuations worked with remarkable efficiency, a full week of classes was lost, and the service project that we had so carefully designed was altered beyond recognition.

The Gustav experience was a lesson in "post-Katrina New Orleans," a manifestation of the city's changed sensibilities and how they have affected every aspect oflife here. For New Orleanians "post-Katrina" means a heightened awareness of place and time. The storm forced residents to come to terms with where they live, their neighborhoods, home :flood elevations, and evacuation routes. It also affected the tempo of life in the city: an increased focus on "hurricane season," adjustments to academic and work schedules, and a general sense of anxiety and tension unknown in the "Big Easy" before.

We begin with these observations because they illustrate something fundamental about project planning and implementation for service­learning courses in post-Katrina New Orleans and also because they reveal how the environment invariably affects service-learning pedagogy. The service project that our essay discusses remains in a state of:flux--even as we write in the spring semester after Gustav--as do the park and the city. In other words, teaching anything in post­Katrina New Orleans carries ~ith it a certain degree of instability

Reflections. 75

--,----"'",

and anxiety (everyone had to adjust their syllabi because of Gustav, no matter what they taught), but teaching service-learning courses intensified these factors even more. Nevertheless, rather than designing service courses and projects that are somehow impervious to change, we have chosen to embrace the unstable and anxious reality that life in New Orleans represents as part of the process of coming-to-terms with the city's "ill structured problems."2 We have made this choice in part because it feels more honest, more in keeping with the imperatives of service-learning pedagogy, which privileges active engagement, however messy, over abstract knowledge and rational order.

Despite the obvious difficulties of building a pedagogy upon present instabilities, we have developed a method to address these problems; in what follows we explain how our approach works. It should be noted that our observations are tentative, that much of this is still unfolding, but we believe that the time has come for us to reflect upon the experience of Katrina and attempt to distill what we have learned. In many respects the City Park project is a microcosm of the complex interactions necessary for any restoration effort in post-Katrina New Orleans, and therefore we believe it serves as a model for projects in the city and other places where service-learning poses significant logistical problems.

Our particular project developed from an earlier partnership with City Park where two sections of students worked to restore a softball complex ruined by Katrina.3 After a full semester of hard work at the complex, park administrators decided to re-designate the area. Its community of users had not returned, or they were still busy with other problems, and the space was abandoned. Frustrating as that situation was, it offered clear insights into the harsh realities of service post-Katrina. While the complex was temporarily restored then re­designated, whole-neighborhoods of citizens had gone through the same frustrating process with their homes, places of employment, and schools. There si~ply was no certainty about the space of the city, and

Reflections. 76

service-learners gained some very powerful experience in the tangled and ill-structured problems of any effort to "restore" the city.4

Thus, in fall 2008, when we decided to return to City Park with five sections of student volunteers, we resisted the urge to define a single project for the semester. Instead, we left our work assignments up to the park's volunteer coordinator who placed us in the areas of greatest need. Students performed hard physical labor, often with no clear sense of its role within the larger plan for the park's recovery. For example, one Saturday was spent mulching trails in an area of the park that seemed otherwise abandoned. Another was devoted to working at a ruined greenhouse and nursery, which had lain dormant since Katrina. Students were thrust into the immediate problems that City Park was facing, and yet they did fine work. Their efforts produced amazing results: trails were established; the greenhouse became functional. At the end of the semester, students knew they had made contributions. Residents passing through the park repeatedly stopped to thank them, and subsequent trips to the park revealed new vibrancy.

The question was how to make sense of the experiences and generate "learning" from these unstable service encounters. For us, the answers lay in the experiences and in the park's relation to the recovery of the city. We realized that there was a process to be gleaned from our hard work, one associated with meaningful service in the park's recovery, however separate from the structured learning environment of the campus. That is, encountering the space and time of City Park signified an altogether different arrangement for knowledge-making from the familiar one of the campus. It involved an experiential immersion in the realities of New Orleans' recovery that made demands on students physically as well as intellectually; in doing so, it exposed radically opposite ideological approaches to experience. Why was the realitY of the park so different from the reality of our campus? How was the park's space and time arranged differently from the campus and c~assroom? How did these differences impact what was deemed

Reflections. 77

"useful work" in the two spaces? And, how were individual students negotiating and coming-to-terms with these differences?

Students at our university come from all over the nation, and in many respects they are disconnected from the reality oflife in New Orleans

because of the romantic myths about the place that have been cultivated through songs, stories, movies, and

i marketing. In our service-learning ·'i courses we use the bitter physical

reality of Katrina as a vehicle for raising consciousness: the park exposes the ill-structured problems of the city and the city reveals the ill-structured problems of the nation. Students are encouraged to come to terms with their own relation to these problems. Thus, a project that begins with the simple act of physical engagement-getting one's hands dirty by clearing

debris, pulling weeds, demolishing ruined structures, planting wetlands grasses-resonates outward with each week's repetition.

We do physical work at City Park, which is to say that the service is grounded in sensory experiences. At the very least, this raises eyebrows from colleagues and others who inquire about our service-learning course and then question its "academic" value. But no writer would deny the significance of sensory detail and immediacy, and therefore, we see the harsh physical experiences at City Park as a starting point for the writing work that occurs in both of our courses. Physical detail, what might in other circumstances be considered trivia, serves as the material core from which resonances emanate, and when that felt

Reflections. 78

reality can be brought into the classroom a real articulation between service and learning occurs.

New Orleans City Park has never been "central" to the life of the city. It is much closer to what Foucault calls a "heterotopic" space, like a cemetery or mental hospital, an "other space" on the social periphery that cannot be integrated within the logical order of the dominant center. Foucault argues that "other spaces," like City Park, function "[a] s a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live" (24). Heterotopias are real places that "have the curious property of being in relation to all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect" (24). The service-learning relationship between City Park and our campus, then, generates a perspective that students can explore and develop over the span of a semester. And this, of course, has important temporal implications as well because such heterotopic spaces lend themselves to the kinds of disconnections that alienate the temporality of New Orleans from the rest of the nation.

City Park has always been treated as a marginal space. It was the city's dueling grounds in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then became an unsuccessful plantation that eventually fell into bankruptcy shortly before the Civil War. Because the city could not afford to pay the back taxes on the land and the state was unwilling to do so, it fell into disuse and disrepair until 1891 when a group of New Orleans citizens established what would become the Friends of City Park, a community association that assumed responsibility for taking care of the site. To this day, City Park remains a disputed and liminal space with unresolved funding issues and dependency upon the citizens of New Orleans for its continued survival, this despite the fact that it houses the city's premier art museum and botanical gardens, a historic carousel, two sports stadiums and two public golf courses, among numerous other attractions.

Reflections. 79

Our two writing-intensive courses take different, but complementary, approaches toward engagement with City Park; one stresses the ideological implications and effects of place and the other stresses those of time or temporality. The two courses are meant to intersect in ways that allow students in one course to draw upon work being done in the other, but such coordination has proven difficult. If!; the end, the spatial and temporal structures of campus life are deeply ingrained, and thus, our campus represents another kind of disconnected spatio-temporal environment, a utopic, rather than a heterotopic space. In much the same way as heterotopias, utopias contradict the typical space and time of society, but utopias contrast with heterotopic spaces because they do not represent an alternate "othered" space so much as an unreal or idealized one. Foucault describes utopias as "sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected fonn, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces" (24). Thus, the negotiation that we ask of our service students first involves a recognition of the very different spaces and times our courses move between, but then also requires students to discover their own individual relation to these spaces. Ultimately, we believe that service-learning pedagogy has as much to offer for considering the problems of the campus as it does for considering those in the community. Both the campus and the community encode ideologies of space and time that emerge through active physical engagement and guided reflection.

Place and the City Park Project: The course on place works to come to tenns with the complicated physical and cultural landscape of post-Katrina New Orleans. Physical elevation, discussed in other regions in tens, hundreds, even thousands of feet, is scrutinized here in inches. And, these inches detennine whether residents' homes stay dry when the stonns come or are inundated by waters that destroy everything inside. New Orleans's unique cultural traditions are also closely linked to place: Mardi

Reflections. 80

Gras Indian tribes hail from specific streets or wards; Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs and their Second-Line brass band culture are rooted in individual neighborhoods. Even among the more tourist-oriented Mardi Gras celebrations, several of the prominent krewes that parade down St. Charles Avenue trace their history to tightly-knit neighborhoods across the city.

To date, rebuilding efforts in New Orleans have produced highly uneven results across these neighborhoods. Those on high-ground largely escaped flooding from the levee breaks and thus repopulated quickly after the storm. Boasting return rates of nearly one hundred percent, they give the appearance of full recovery: streetcars rattle down St. Charles Avenue; local restaurants and music venues open their doors to residents and tourists, alike; and children and college students make their way to nearby schools. But not far away is a vast network of flood-damaged neighborhoods in varying states of repopulation and physical rebuilding. Some have promising signs of life, while others continue to falter, with as many as sixteen neighborhoods regaining less than half of their pre-Katrina populations more than three years after the storm.5

Despite the close proximity of still-devastated neighborhoods, it is very easy on our campus to have almost no awareness of the complex spatial diversity that surrounds us. Our university occupies relatively high-ground in the Uptown area of New Orleans, but its long, narrow campus undergoes a nearly imperceptible fall in elevation. Because of this change, the academic quad escaped flooding after Katrina, while waters reached into the first floor of low-lying buildings in the middle and back of campus, causing financial losses estimated at $600 million.6

But you wouldn't know it walking across campus today. There are no markers to the water's reach, nor are there obvious signs of the work performed by a disaster recovery team that numbered in the thousands. The expansive lawns and flower beds are carefully manicured, new sculptures dot the academic quad, and students playing softball share

Reflections. 81

space with others studying on blankets in the sun-a seeming utopia once more.

The pace of recovery on campus is a tribute to the efforts of many, but the very success of these efforts has contributed to a further isolation of students from the ongoing struggles of residents and neighborhoods across the city. This type of relationship between students and the surrounding community is not unique to our university, of course, nor is it a post-Katrina phenomenon for us. As is often the case, the current separation between our university life and the rest of the city is reinforced by both physical and cultural barriers, and these barriers have a long history.7 Physically, campus is bordered on three sides by busy streets and on the fourth by a tall, chain-link fence. Although there are few locked gates or security entrances, these borders discourage people who are not affiliated with the university from entering campus.8

Students do move outward across these borders in large numbers, but their movements are typically limited to areas they see as part of the "Tulane bubble." They make themselves at home in the stretch of high­ground along the Mississippi River, nicknamed the "Isle of Denial" after Katrina, which is home to New Orleans's famous tourist centers: the French Quarter, the Garden District, the Uptown universities. Throughout these neighborhoods, students crowd local po 'boy and gumbo shops; they congregate for shows that feature a Neville or Marsalis family member; and they line parade routes for two weeks during Mardi Gras season. Their presence is obvious as they claim, experiment with, and consume New Orleans traditions. But their negotiation of the city remains largely restricted to the scenic views and traditions that grace tourism brochures.

However, living in post-Katrina New Orleans demands more from students, and from all of us, than a quick sampling oflocal culture followed by an easy retreat to the comfort of campus life. To come to terms with our city-that is, to take it seriously, to learn from it,

Reflections. 82

and to invest ourselves in it-we must grapple with our geographic surroundings, not as a simple physical context, nor as a stable cultUral signifier, but as a socially-produced space fraught with tension and competing interests (Soja 20). For us, this mandate is rigorously academic as well as political. Our campus cannot be understood by simply looking at the beautiful scenery and seeing its relative safety and survival after the storm as lucky twists of circumstance. In the same way, our current circumstances cannot be understood without recognizing their intricate ties to, and dependence upon, national trends and priorities. In fact, everything we see around us is a symptom of centuries of complicated social relations or "Second Nature," to use Henri Lefebvre's terminology. As Lefebvre argues, the space in which we live is hardly objective or innocent. Instead "[it] is political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies" (Lefebvre 31 ).9 And, in order to see this truth more clearly, it is necessary to shift perspectives, to move away from the classroom and campus and attempt to re-see our surroundings from another vantage point.

The class on place attempts to do just this. Students come together three times a week for class and then again across town at the service site for five Saturday work dates. Assigned readings focus on the city of New Orleans and theories of place, and a series of writing prompts encourages students to engage in a collaborative discovery process. Where this discovery wi11lead, however, depends upon the students themselves. Because the circumstances we face in New Orleans defy our attempts to stabilize or define them, we communicate that reality truthfully to our students. 10 We introduce the syllabus as a guide, not an unbending document, and we spend the first week helping students adjust to a class that resists rigid structures or predetermined outcomes. The usual disclaimer "All dates and assignments are subject to change" allows us to replace assigned readings with new texts. in order to ensure that the questions and problems raised by students' work at the service site infiltrate the classroom walls and, thus, retain our central focus. Fundamental to this discovery process, then, is the class members'

Reflections. 83

work at City Park, the country's sixth largest urban park, which borders several diverse neighborhoods in the northern section of New Orleans. To get from campus to the park, students ride from Uptown through Gert Town and Mid-City, decaying areas before the storm and ones that received a tremendous amount of damage during it. This fifteen-minute ride to the park moves through different geographic and temporal frameworks, and that movement reinforces the pedagogical process of both of our courses. Each trip to the park complicates the tension between the city's ideological extremes. Furthermore, the park itself contains these extremes.

Even a cursory tour through City Park reveals the tensions between its carefully cultivated image and the radical flux of its present state. The levee breaks during Katrina flooded all thirteen hundred acres of City Park with anywhere from three to nine feet of water. The front of the park, which includes its most important tourist attractions, was fairly quickly restored to pristine condition. As one moves toward the back of the park, the reality of its struggle to return becomes increasingly apparent. This reality is also reflected in the neighborhoods that border those areas, which remain fragmented, unstable, and uncertain about their future. The entrances to City Park hold most of its historical landmarks; the rear included public golf courses, a driving range, a large softball complex, walking trails, plant and tree farms, horse stables, and a vast lagoon system for freshwater fishing. Those back areas, so representative of the city's vitality, remain very slow to return, and most of our service work is done there. Their current state is not reducible to their elevation or physical geography. Rather, the quality of investment and infrastructure before the storm, as well as the status of surrounding neighborhoods and competing demands for park resources after Katrina, has hindered efforts to restore these areas of the park.

The landscape of City Park thus serves as a microcosm for both the problems of an uneven physical geography and the variant socially­inscribed spaces of the city. Students ne~otiate these spaces as they

Reflections. 84

move from campus to City Park and back again, and between service sites within the park. During the semester, writing prompts and service work come together in an iterative process. This begins with students' initial observations about the physical space of the park and the work they are performing, then moves onto critical dialogues between readings and the socially-constructed spaces of the park, and finally culminates in critical analyses of how these spaces resonate outward from the park to the campus and larger city. Our physical investment in City Park thus allows students to work toward a kind of experiential authority that invites an active and ambitious dialogue with both course readings and romantic narratives about the city, foregrounding crucial questions that preoccupy and divide New Orleans residents: What will our city look like in the future? Which neighborhoods are receiving substantial investment, and which ones are being left behind? If certain areas of the built environment are abandoned, what will be lost? And, where do we as members of the university community fit into the larger social fabric of the city?

Over the course of the semester, then, students repeatedly return to a landscape that one student likened to a "funhouse" mirror for their well­loved campus. This carnival~sque simile seems especially appropriate because City Park shares many physical and land-use similarities to our campus and neighboring Audubon Park, but students' reactions to the two environments are often inverted as they come face-to-face with

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the devastation that has been successfully erased from our campus. The course on place foregrounds this mirroring relationship between the two sites, and, in doing so, the classroom becomes a "sort of mixed, joint experience" that lies between the utopic and heterotopic spaces. As Foucault defines it, the intrigue of the mirror is that "it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there" (24). To put it differently, service work at City Park coupled with guided reflection in the classroom allows students to recognize their immediate environment of the campus in post-Katrina New Orleans as simultaneously real and unreal, both embedded in the city and its spatial complexity and separate from all that surrounds it: the FEMA trailers, the shuttered schools with signs still welcoming students back to the 2005-2006 school year, the block after block of empty homes slowly giving themselves over to weeds.

Through their writing, students are encouraged to read their work at City Park as a "text," but one not to be defined, understood, or mastered in isolation. Instead, the academic importance of their work stems from the way the heterotopic space of the park reveals the "messy, ill constructed, and jumbled" space of the surrounding city (Foucault 27). In this way, the park becomes a focal point, along with the campus and the city, in a process that emphasizes, as David Thornton Moore puts it, an "image of meaning as situated and fragile; of knowledge as negotiated and interactional; and of learning as dialectical and active" (275). Notably, this course design has resulted in few identifying moments for students to see others in the community as "just like me." More typically student drafts-both individual efforts and collaborative compositions-focus on difference, and they struggle with the difficulty of bridging sucq difference. In one example, a student used the difficult task of pounding in support stakes for dozens of trees at City Park to help him come to terms with a frightening but evocative event he had recently experienced. He begins his essay by describing an afternoon

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trip he and two friends made across town to the Lower Ninth Ward to witness and videotape a neighborhood Second Line parade. Rather than participating in the fun and returning to campus with a great story to tell, the students are accosted by a musician from the parade's brass band, and the video camera is smashed. As the musician charges the writer's friend who is holding the camera, he repeatedly yells, "Get outta here white boy, you stealin' our culture! You don' belong here." The draft begins with a description of the tense scene that engulfs the parade. It then shifts to a detailed consideration of the students' relationship to the parade's other participants and to the Ninth Ward itself. In doing so, the draft resists eliding the differences exposed by the incident:

I came to Tulane anticipating many wonders. I was excited about the Aaron Nevilles and the Cowboy Mouths and the Snug Harbors and the Hot 8s. Many students at Tulane share this passion ... Despite all my zeal and anticipation, I ultimately found myself victim of the Tulane Bubble, trapped with thousands of other students. I only left campus to go to the Superdome on Saturdays. Other than that I existed solely between the confines of Broadway and Calhoun. Separated from the city that I called my new home. Alienated from the culture that I had been so eager to join. Although I came to New Orleans to rejoice in its rich cultural intricacies, I ended up forsaking them for a life of ease on McAlister [ ... ] So that is who stood on the street in the lower ninth, a man who turned his back on a city that was willing to adopt him. I am no better than a tourist, in spite of my two and a half years of residence. I haven't contributed to the community. I haven't lived through the tragedies the residents of the ninth ward have. I don't share wounds from Katrina with the rest of the city, because I don't have any. When [my friends] and I attended the second line and tried to film it, we really were stealing their culture. They were a community, celebrating survival, memorializing the fallen,

. thanking each other and God for successes, reconciling themselves

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with their failures. Our intent was pure; we only wanted to show those still stuck in the Tulane Bubble the amazing stuff that goes on out there. However the tuba player and his associates feared that we were taking their celebration for ourselves, to rejoice in survival and success we did not earn.

In the draft, the student takes seriously the ethical problems associated with examining, evaluating, even enjoying cultural traditions from the idealized, but separate space of the university. Notably, however, he does not conclude his draft with a simple mea culpa. Instead, he turns to an analysis of his service work at City Park both to understand what citizenship in post-Katrina New Orleans requires and to begin his movement toward it. By coupling his labor at the park with his reflections on the space of the city, he, like many of his classmates in their writing, grapples with the incredible significance of the contemporary moment and seeks to claim a place within it, thus touching upon theoretical concerns that students in the course on temporality explored directly.

Temporality and the City Park Project The effects that Katrina had upon the space of New Orleans, and for our purposes, City Park in particular, were so profound and overwhelming that they served to conceal the perhaps more insidious problems of time. In other words, New Orleans, especially in the ways that the city advertised itself as a tourist attraction for the rest of the nation, had become quite good at romanticizing the slow decay of a place that was suffering many of the same problems of crumbling infrastructure that affected urban spaces everywhere in America. Urban decay was part of the city's charm, what paradoxically made it "timeless." Like other "timeless" places around the world, New Orleans was portrayed as somehow operating in a different temporality, one exempt from the real, modem problems of contemporary urban America. When Katrina struck, it not only destroyed the spatial fayade of New Orleans; it also

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interrupted a temporal fayade that was invisible to most US citizens, and unfortunately, to many citizens of New Orleans as well.

New Orleans has vested itself in this temporal denial. The romantic myth of the city draws tourists, but it also allows certain neighborhoods to remain isolated from the modem temporal flow. And this occurs on both ends of the economic spectrum. Antique streetcars still carry locals and tourists alike down st. Charles Avenue, a scenic district lined with ancient live oak trees and pristine nineteenth-century mansions. A trip across the Industrial Canal (currently a popular one for "disaster tours") shows the locations of levee breaches, but the canal also marks a temporal breach between the city and the impoverished underclass of the Ninth Ward, where many lived isolated and among ruins even before the storm. Obviously, New Orleans is not alone in its opportunistic and disjunctive temporalities. Ghettos, barrios, neighborhoods "across the tracks" are not only geographically but also temporally isolated from the life of a city. But Katrina brought a special kind of attention to the larger, "national" resonances of such problems, and the course on temporality uses this as a theoretical framework.

In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson theorizes that modem nations were formed as a result of a new sense of temporality that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The new secular time of the modem industrial era gradually displaced the sacred time of the historical past, which had been built around the hierarchical order of the Church and feudal society. For Anderson, the secular temporality of the nation is de-centered, dominated by the "homogeneous, empty time" of the present (a phrase he takes from Walter Benjamin). Modem print media, like newspapers, which people read every day, create an "imagined community" that coheres around the implied present that all its readers share simultaneously. II Of course, no time-perhaps least of all, the present-is either "homogeneous" or "empty" and the events of Katrina illustrate the differences that make America a radically heterogeneous and

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ideologically complex nation. Despite that, Anderson's theories help contextualize the temporal effects that over-simplified media representations of Katrina created. For our students, who mostly experienced the storm through newspapers and national television reportage, the complex reality of New Orleans was reduced to two equally false extremes, the two disjointed temporalities that "other" the city: either New Orleans was depicted sentimentally as the romantic and timeless world of "dreamy scenes" or it was portrayed as a "third world" cut off from the modem temporality of the rest of the nation by horrible poverty and ignorance. Both of those representations are

"empty" and "homogeneous," but their power comes from an ideological simplicity that allows the nation to distance itself from its own involvement in such formations.

Because our students come from many other places, they represent a national perspective on New Orleans, one dominated by the mythical temporalities of the city. Moreover, students spend most of their "free time" on campus and build their school days around the rigid time schedule of classes;

in effect, the campus creates an additional barrier against reality. It suggests another kind of empty, homogeneous, and disjunctive space that the course on temporality articulates with. This means that the writing classroom becomes a site of engagement, a temporal contact zone between utopic campus and heterotopic service work. Rather than objective detachment or ethnographic documentation that attempts to remove subjectivity, we try to engage and replicate the unstable and

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heterogeneous reality of New Orleans through the act of writing, which parallels the direct physical interaction of the service experience.

Most student writing is posted to a wiki, an online format that allows constant editorial emending and amplification as well as collaborative contributions. Students write in an online environment that parallels the alternate temporalities that the course is built around, and they modify their writing as the semester progresses. Thus, student writing mirrors the open-ended, heterogeneous complexities that physical work in the community suggests. Moreover, it embraces the movement of the present in a way that corresponds with the movement through space that any service-learning course necessitates. Collaborative work complicates subject and object; it resists both purely subjective personal expression and objective documentation.l2 Therefore, student work relies upon the notion of writing as an open-ended process, but we believe this also has important implications for how students come to understand their own relation to the institutional settings in which they have been educated.

In rhetorical terms, a course on present temporality means a course built upon the classical notion of kairos, which loosely translates as "timeliness." Typically, kairos suggests an awareness of one's rhetorical situation, an ability to tailor a performance to suit the specific circumstances of time and place. But in that sense kairos only adds context to ethos, pathos, and logos. Our course foregrounds kairos, and makes the immediacy of an unstable present the key component ofthe pedagogy. Students come to terms with the city's kairotic significance through their writing. Thus, the course on temporality builds a dialogue between the present reality of service work and the various ideological assumptions of students, one that resonates with each iteration of service work and written reflection. Such resonances are not merely theoretical; rather they actualize the spatial movements between classroom and campus, campus and City Park, City Park and New Orleans, New Orleans and the nation, and the best student writing

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captures this movement. For example, students often use their writing as a metaphorical or allegorical vehicle that interprets the differences they experience as they move between the campus and City Park. Some produce narrative projects; others use a journal format, while still others experiment with new media possibilities. The only formal requirement is that they attempt to come to terms with the complexities of their experiences in a grammatically clear way.

The bus ride from our campus to City Park exemplifies the resonance between simplified ideological uses of time and the complex present, and students experience this transition each time they go to perform service. 13 A kind of triangulation occurs when students move from the utopic space of campus through the devastated areas of New Orleans to the heterotopic space of City Park, and we try to recreate that complex negotiation among alternate spaces in the writing that they produce for the class. That is, if the move from the campus to City Park suggests a kind of national awakening to the realities of post-Katrina New Orleans, then the move back to campus makes specific demands on us, on our own willingness to allow that unstable and complex present into the "timeless" or utopic order of the campus and the highly-controlled scheduling of our syllabi.

Undoubtedly, the campus often functions as a cocoon or "bubble" that students retreat into after their service forays, and so to resist that ideological retreat, the course on temporality uses written reflection as a means of bursting the bubble from the inside out, so to speak. Writing and discussion prompts ask students to articulate the relation between present conditions at the service sites and how those conditions relate to the changes that Katrina has wrought upon the community and culture of New Orleans. Students use the physical immediacy of the work as a source for invention; thus, artifacts from the experience become markers of the park's history and its potential future: a ruined greenhouse inspired essays about the city's decline and decay; plastic

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kiddie pools for new iris plants prompted essays about the lack of resources and makeshift circumstances of life in post-Katrina New Orleans. In effect, the classroom becomes the primary site for keeping the service experiences open and immediate, and also fostering the larger resonances that the work continually suggests. The campus itself retains a utopic fayade, of course, but the classroom represents a space where present instability is foregrounded as a means of interrupting and destabilizing the temporal framework of campus life.

Though students write individual reflections, some of their most interesting work comes from collaborative group projects, which allow them to reinforce the heterogeneity of the service experiences. Students bring multiple perspectives into conversation with one another and then negotiate a coherent expression of their service project. The syllabus provides writing prompts that move from a series of short assignments toward the final group project, which represents a group's last statement on the service. They are encouraged to be creative, rather than strictly objective in their writing. Formal objectivity lends itself to static approaches, and attempts to document, classify, or define the service­experience all reinforce traditional assumptions about knowledge as fixed and removed from the situated realities of service encounters. In our experience, requiring academic formality drains the writing of the genuine engagement that is necessary to the larger course goals. It also reil?-forces the boundaries between how knowledge is made in the university and how it is made through reflective practice and real world expenence.

In the course on temporality an unstable and open-ended relation at the center supplants the traditional teacher-centered (or even student­centered) writing classroom. Thus the collaborative process of making knowledge from the service experience drives the course pedagogy. In fall 2008, students from the temporality course produced eight projects. All of the these re-presented the move from a physical service experience to a realization about the "i11-st~ctured" problems

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"--"--"--""""""-""--- -- --"-----"-"---"--"--"--"----"-"-"--"----"-"------"-"-"-"--"""

that Katrina restoration poses for New Orleans. For example, one group used the repetitive act of weeding at a tree farm as a vehicle for discussing the problems of disuse that currently plague the rear portion of the park:

The overgrown dead space on the west side accurately reflects what is on most of City Parks 1,300 acres. Before Hurricane Katrina, the park played host to a variety of strategically planted flora, including orchids, staghorn ferns, and brome1iads. In its wake Katrina destroyed the many years of labor devoted to growing and maintaining these plants and gave rise to a vast colony of weeds .... But the amount of workers in the field is proportional to the number of people using the park. The absence of pedestrian presence is evident in the empty streets leading to the tree farm. It shows through the cracked and yellowing signs on the backwood trails that once educated walkers, joggers, and nature enthusiasts. Underneath the highway that runs through the park, row upon row of cement tables sit in various states of disrepair. If a weed is a plant growing where it is unwanted, then what does that say about the want of the weeded areas of City Park? ("Weeds")

Another group examined the same problem-nature's encroachment upon the cultivated space of the park-but took an entirely different perspective on the issue, one that exposes the problematic conflict between nature and culture in the city:

Yes, this was in-fact a war between man and nature: nature's arsenal including fire ants and hurricanes, man's arsenal including Voodoo-Fest and weed-wackers, have been battling it out ever since the park was first established. This battle between man and nature remains the living struggle that makes City Park what it is today. The conflict is real; despite how hard either party tries, neither will ever have complete control. City Park represents a

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unique balance of ownership, it belongs to both nature and to those who try and change it.

"Man, it is way too early to be thinking this deep," I thought out loud. Behind me the service learners were picking out gloves and rakes from the back of a trunk. I quickly turned to run and grab a pair of gloves before all of the good ones were gone but after I took my first step I heard something squish under my foot. I lifted up my shoe to reveal a flattened black widow. ("An Unexpected Experience")

Such alternate student perspectives, even when they simplify (neither fire ants nor hurricanes are purely "natural" interventions), situate present instability at City Park and express the uncertainty about recovery for all of New Orleans. While student responses to the City Park project varied in their degree of articulation with the realities of post-Katrina service, they nevertheless produced an honest record, an interpretive moment that we can consult as the project moves forward. 14

It is clear that our experiences to date at City Park undermine hopes for any final recovery of the park or of the larger city and region. Talk of "recovery," as it plays out in contemporary discourse, implies an endpoint or point of stasis that, once attained, constitutes a long­awaited conclusion to the trauma of Katrina. This search for a stabilized end is problematic in several ways, most obviously because the work needed to build and inhabit homes, establish businesses, and open schools in neighborhoods across the city remains staggering. The same is true, if on a smaller scale, of the work at City Park. Even as individual sections of the park are redeveloped, its socially-variant space or Second Nature remains. As we've seen in the neighborhoods surrounding our campus, the appearance of recovery only serves to conceal the spatial and temporal disjunctions that surround us. The landscapes of the park and the city continue to be in a constant state of

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flux. As a result, our course designs must evolve as we go forward. It is equally clear that future attempts to grapple with local temporal and spatial registers are best served by projects that move students beyond the so-called "recovered" areas, help them physically engage their environment, and encourage them to re-see their relationship to campus and to the larger city.

Conclusion As we hope this essay has illustrated, our energies in developing a pedagogy for service-learning in post-Katrina New Orleans have focused primarily on the relationship between the park, the city, and the campus, which has left little time for refining the relation between a course on place and one on time. Nevertheless, we believe such connections are possible, not least because students from both courses

work together on the service project. That is, our work readily achieves a sense of shared experience and social interaction among the various sections and courses when we are at the site, but that same sense is much more difficult to achieve when confronted by the boundaries of classroom spaces and rigid time schedules in the campus environment. Though our institution fully supports the initiatives of community engagement and service work, going so far as to require two service-learning credits for graduation, it, like so many other institutions around the country,

abides by an order that is radically different from the spatio-temporal one of the community that surrounds it. In our courses this physical distinction manifests an ideological one that represents the boundary

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between "learning" outcomes for a class and real citizenship. As one student in the course on place described it:

Every other day I walk into this classroom panting from the three flights of stairs I've successfully conquered ... Awkwardly, my classmates and I sit and wait for our professor to arrive aware of the painful silence surrounding us but too apathetic to be the first to alleviate it. We've all spent weekends now together planting flowers, laying mulch, weed whacking, sharing hour-long conversations, laughing, commiserating. But now we are timid .. These four walls transform our friendships into clumsy business relationships [ ... ] Our uneasiness is justifiable. Most of us come from different social circles or age groups that don't have much interaction unless forced to interact through service learning requirements. When provided a common goal to work towards, such as our goal to help in the regeneration of New Orleans' City Park, the divisions between us began to deteriorate and we were able to work together and find common ground.

Ultimately, the very heterogeneity and instability that students encounter through their physical interactions with the space and time of the real post-Katrina New Orleans offer their own kind of foundation for understanding what civic engagement means. Such realities cannot be neatly structured, or tightly arranged within a linear progression of assignments, an observation that only reveals the relative impossibility of measuring learning outcomes within the utopic space of a campus. In ways that go far beyond our course designs, what Katrina has taught without question is that even our most sacred, timeless spaces, the ones we arrange our whole lives around-home, church, campus-are subject to radical interventions and flux. What service-learning in post-Katrina has taught is that such flux can be a part of acquiring kllowledge and ultimately of becoming real citizens.

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Endnotes

I See Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces" (22); and Joe Turner Layton, Jr., and Henry Creamer, "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans."

2 Here we follow Janet Eyler and Dwight E. Giles who note, "most of the problems we face in our communities are not what social scientists call well structured .... Problems in the social sciences, and certainly the issues faced by most of these service-learning participants, are ill­structured problems." See Where s the Learning in Service-Learning? (102-104).

3 Both the earlier project and our current one respond to institutional changes following Hurricane Katrina. As part of its 2006 restructuring plan, Tulane added a two-tier service learning graduation requirement for incoming students. As of Fall 2006, all students entering Tulane must complete one class with a 20-hour service learning component and a second with 40-hours of service or an unpaid internship with a local nonprofit.

4 The whole notion of "restoring" New Orleans raises questions about the nature of change following Katrina. We believe the recovery process, like any restoration effort, should not suggest a naive return to the way things used to be in the city; thus, both our courses complicate restoration by acknowledging current spatial and temporal instability and loss. New Orleans is not the "Mona Lisa," but "painting over" Katrina's damages without accounting for the changes that the storm has brought is not only a cultural denial, but also risks the very life of New Orleans should another storm hit.

5 Most notable is the Lower Ninth Ward, which received substantial media attention in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. Despite determined efforts by local residents and outside benefactors such as Brad Pitt, the Lower Ninth Ward's return rate has stalled at eleven percent of pre-Katrina numbers. See the Greater New Orleans Data

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Center's August 21,2008 press release for an estimate of return rates for all neighborhoods in the New Orleans.

6 Estimates of damages to the university campus have continued to rise in the post-Katrina period. This estimate comes from Tulane University President's report for the FY 2007. Universities across the city and region likewise suffered catastrophic damage, with Dillard University and Southern University of New Orleans experiencing flooding that damaged most of their buildings.

7 Tulane's new service learning graduation requirement is part of a concentrated effort by university officials to redress historical divisions between campus and the surrounding community while increasing civic commitment among students.

8 See Ellen Cushman's "The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change" for an early, detailed analysis of the physical and cultural barriers that separate universities from their surrounding communities as well as a clear discussion of how these separations inform service-learning pedagogies.

9 See Nedra Reynolds's "Composition's Imagined Geographies: The Politics of Space in the Frontier, City, and Cyberspace" for an examination of geographic metaphors in composition studies. Reynolds's analysis focuses on the material space of university classrooms and writing activities in order to examine their impact on students' writing efforts. Our course design builds on Reynolds's analysis by fore grounding the multiple spaces that students inhabit and analyzing the links between these different spaces.

10 The post-Katrina planning process in New Orleans has attracted national and international experts in urban planning and design. At the same time, these planning efforts produced few obvious successes and, instead, left many residents bewildered and additionally traumatized. Critics of the process single out the planners' logical, "white board"

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approach to rebuilding the city as disconnected from both the material realities and the desires of the residents needing help.

11 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Anderson's work focuses on the development of nations and nationalism in the nineteenth century, but it also has interesting resonances for how other communities, for example "discourse communities" or campus communities, are imagined as homogeneous and atemporal.

12 Though we both advocate new media formats, like wikis, we also structure assignments in ways that allow us to meet the more traditional essay requirements of our writing program. For example, students are required to submit hard copies for each assignment before they modify their work to suit the online format. This offers the additional benefit of reinforcing rhetorical discussion of the differences between traditional academic discourse and the discursive possibilities of new media.

13 See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other for an in-depth theoretical discussion of the "ideological uses of time" primarily in the field of anthropology. Fabian's work also complicates any discussion of "objective" documentation ofservice-leaming experiences. For more discussion of Fabian in the context of post-Katrina New Orleans see "Floating Foundations: Kairos, Community, and a Composition Program in Post-Katrina New Orleans," College English 72.1 (Sept. 2009): 676-694.

14 To view all of the City Park assignments for the course on temporality and the links to final projects, see <http://tulane263. wikispaces.com/>.

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Works Cited

. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London: Verso,

1991. Baum, Dan. "The Lost Year." The New Yorker (21 August

2006). April 18, 2009. <http://www.newyorker.com! archive/2006/08/21 1060821 fa fact2>

Cowen, Scott. "Tulane Talk." E-mail to university list-serve. 19 July 2007. <http://www2. tulane.edultulane _ talk/tt _071907 .cfm>

Cushman, Ellen. "The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change." College Composition and Communication 47.1 (1996): 7-28.

Eyler, Janet, and Dwight E. Giles, Jr. Where s the Learning in Service­

Learning? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its

Object. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Trans. Jay Miskowiec. 16.1

(1986): 22-27. Layton, Joe Turner, Jr. and Henry Creamer. Sheet music. "Way Down

Yonder In New Orleans." New York: Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., 1922.

Lefebvre, Henri. "Reflections on the Politics of Space." Trans. M. Enders. Antipode 8 (1976): 30-37.

Moore, David Thornton. "Experiential Education as Critical Discourse." In Combining Service and Learning: A Resource Book for Community and Public Service. Ed. Jane C. Kendall. National Society for Internships, 1990.273-283.

Plyer, Allison. "New Data Reveals 16 New Orleans Neighborhoods Have Less Than Half Their Pre-Katrina Households." Press Release. (21 August 2008). April 18, 2009. <http://gnocdc.

s3.amazonaws.com!mediaiGNOCDCAug21-08.pdJ> Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession 91. New

York: MLA, 1991. 33-40.w

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Reynolds, Nedra. "Composition's Imagined Geographies: The Politics of Space in the Frontier, City, and Cyberspace." Teaching Composition: Background Readings, 2nd ed. Ed. T. R. Johnson. Boston: BedfordiSt. Martin's, 2005. 68-90.

Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London and New York: Verso, 1989. "Tulane263." Wikispaces. 2007. 18 June 2009 <http://tulane263. wikispaces.com/>.

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Desktop Publishing for Community and Social Justice Organizations

Karyn Hollis, Villanova University

This article describes how to set up a course in which students create

publications for social justice organizations and non-profits. Careful

~ planning is required, but the news articles, media releases, flyers and

newsletters are often crucial to the success ofthese organizations, and

therefore, student rewards are great.

As we search for ways to provide students with significant and socially beneficial writing experiences, creating publications for community and non-profit organizations seems the ideal

project: students assist groups working for the public good and social justice; they learn about the realm of the non-profit sector in terms of civic engagement and career possibilities; and they gain professional­level publishing and writing experience. Indeed, having taught such a course for nine years, I can vouch for such impressive outcomes; however, they don't materialize without a great deal of advance preparation and close monitoring of students and their projects. Given the harried staff at non-profits and the over-committed students short on time and occasionally dedication, I've set up checks and balances in my course to keep students on target while enabling me to respond quickly to any problems that arise. When things go well, the achievements are immense, especially for the students, who begin to understand the discursive potential and problems of the human service sector in our society. The non-profits themselves attest to the many rewards of hosting a volunteer, from the practical assistance provided by a volunteer who can assume a variety of importan~ but time consuming

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writing tasks to the more significant satisfaction of introducing a young person to the life of social justice work.

Be forewamed, however, such a course is a big undertaking for the instructor. The teaching requirements are weighty. At a minimum, the instructor must master the software for publishing, image editing, and image creating; she needs to understand the principles of document design and news writing style; she must also maintain contact with the non-profits hosting student volunteers and be familiar with non-profit organization and culture.

Organizing the Course I teach my "Desktop Publishing for Community and Social Justice Organizations" course in the fall semester, taking time over the summer to contact social service and community organizations about hosting a "writing volunteer" in the fall. With 15 students in the class, I need to contact twice that number of agencies in July to be sure I have enough hosts come September. Unfortunately, my university does not have an office that makes these connections for faculty, so I do the legwork myself and am always on the lookout for appropriate organizations. I find them through word of mouth, non-profit directories on the Internet, the phone book, and various campus volunteer offices. Of course, over the years I have built up a cadre of sites that host volunteers semester after semester, a much appreciated contribution to the success of the course.

Most students volunteer for organizations located close to our suburban campus, but they also work for groups in downtown Philadelphia and on-campus. Students have been paired with community centers, public art projects, senior and women's centers, neighborhood groups, hospices, environmental organizations, the YMCA, special needs schools, unions, religious congregations, and peace activists. The wide variety of organizations and locations helps in accommodating students with a diversity of social interests and transportation possibilities.

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However, I encourage students to work off campus in the "real world" if possible where they will learn more about human service sector employment needs, deadlines, pressures, and satisfactions, Off campus work also impresses potential employers after graduation. An additional advantage is that work done well off campus builds good town/gown relationships.

Once an organization shows interest in hosting a student by answering my email, I send a longer reply which explains the course in greater detail (Appendix A). I also attach a timetable of our semester projects, and an "Information Sheet/Publication Order Form" (Appendix B) which asks for basic contact information and a description of any writing projects the non-profit might have for a writing volunteer. While I must admit that few hosts fill out the order form, when they do, the volunteer is much aided. I advise hosts that over the semester the class will progress from easy to more complex projects. The first assignment is a news article to be written using InDesign software but with minimal document design requirements. Next, students proceed· to a media release on letterhead that they design. Later, students create a double-columned biographicaVfeature article with a photograph in the center of each page; thus with each assignment, design complexity increases slightly. During the second half of the course, students produce more complex publications using InDesign and Photoshop as they create a fiyer, a brochure, and a newsletter based on design principles described in Robin Williams's The Non-Designers Design Book (see below).

When an organization returns the forms, I follow up with a short phone call to "seal the deal." I emphasize to hosts that although we aim to produce publications that will save them time and money, the student volunteer will nevertheless need guidance which requires a time commitment on the part of the staff. Before finally accepting a writing volunteer, I ask staff members to consider the following two questions: Can you pr~vide the volunteer with adequate orientation

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and supervision while on site? And, will you have the resources for photocopying, printing, and distributing any materials produced by the volunteer? If the answers to these questions are yes, we are ready to begin our partnership.

Syllabus and Course Components My students need a lot of guidance and monitoring to do a good job for the organizations they are working for. Over the years I have fine-tuned my syllabus accordingly (Appendix C). Course schedule, guidelines and requirements are spelled out carefully. Students must meet face-to­face with their organizational contacts three times over the semester.

The course has three main components: the rhetoric and style of news and feature writing; desktop publishing and principles of document design; and the economics, politics, practice, and theory of community organizations and non-profits. Related to the latter is a unit I include on Catholic social teaching-which emphasizes a commitment to social justice. Also, each student is assigned to monitor an online journal or newsletter for non-profits. At nearly every class meeting, a student summarizes a pertinent news item gleaned from an assigned web page. (Appendix D) .

. It is also helpful for students to spend time doing a rhetorical analysis of the style, content, images, tone, and audience of any previously published organizational documents and written materials. In addition, students need to inquire about logos already in use as well as style sheets and preferred fonts.

Areas of Special Concern We devote time to deconstructing and complicating the dichotomies of charity/justice and server/served, so that students become aware of the idealized aI).d problematic notions they may carry with them to their organizations. Of course students writing for non-profits deal mostly with administrators and have little contact with clients, so we talk

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about the limits of this situation. And to progress beyond them a bit, one writing assignment calls for a biographical feature article which includes an interview. When possible, I encourage students to write about one of their organization's clients. Other topics for reading and discussion include U.S. poverty and social problems and the intricacies of working with people from different class and racial backgrounds.

Software and Technology Deciding on the right software for the course has not been easy. Ultimately, I have chosen to use InDesign publishing software because it has become the industry standard. Since InDesign is relatively expensive, we have put it on a Citrix server so that students can access the software from home. In addition, I teach Photoshop, the professional choice for graphics, artwork, and photography. The Photoshopped images students create are for use in InDesign documents. InDesign and Photoshop are on the computers in our classroom, and students have access to these computers part of the day. Also, Adobe also allows for free thirty day downloads, but of course the semester lasts three months. For teachers without these software options, I believe the course can be taught with Microsoft Publisher or even Word and an online version of Photos hop such as Splashup or Picnik. And since these programs are more commonly encountered, they sometimes help to avoid the problem discussed next.

Another software related problem concerns the fact that non-profits don't typically have either InDesign or Photoshop. When students produce publications for their organizations, therefore, they must send the documents as pdf files. This works well for the most part; however, since pdf files can't be edited, organizations have no way of changing any information should it become outdated, for example.

- It is important to teach the class in a computer classroom because of the centrality of software in the publishing and editing assignments. However, many such rooms discourage class discussion. I am fortunate

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to have been able to design my computer room with pedagogical needs in mind. The computers are in a horseshoe-like arrangement around three walls ofthe room. In the center is a seminar table. With this configuration, the class can have engaging face-to-face discussions around the table and quickly move to the computers for writing and design. There is a projector attached to my computer for step-by-step demonstrations of InDesign and Photoshop creations as well as student projects, non-profit web pages and the like.

News Writing Pedagogy It has been my experience that students need much practice perfecting the news writing style used for most of their writing projects. Time at the beginning of the course is spent improving writing and editing skills, including a grammar and punctuation review. Many class sessions will be conducted as workshops for sharing and critiquing student publications. Students have trouble writing concisely, using active verbs, being specific, and varying their sentence structure as well as the more mundane punctuation and grammar infelicities. They also need help with writing leads and with organizational concerns such as using the inverted pyramid structure to order the news from most to least important. Accordingly, I also devote class time to discussing the attributes of news and writing leads and headlines. I assign plenty of self-paced online news writing, style, and grammar exercises. All writing and publications are peer-critiqued and discussed in class before being revised.

Course Wiki I have found that wikis (collaborative websites) are a tremendous resource in the writing classroom and for this course in particular. I use a free wiki hosting site, Wetpaint.com for this purpose. A wiki's public nature as an online publishing venue where students share work and organizational information leads to more polished and thoughtful prose. Because of their frequent interaction on social networking sites, students enjoy introducing themselves to each other on the wiki

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accompanied by pictures and personal information. More importantly, students use the wiki to discuss class activities, create online blogs and journals, and post information about their organizations for class presentations.

Additionally, students keep a record or "log blog" on the class wiki of all contacts and attempted contacts with their organizations. They are required to make three face-to-face visits. They also include copies of any email communications they send or receive. Students are instructed to post the purpose of contact, topics discussed, plans made, agreements and deadlines decided on. I ask them to explain whether or not their contacts have been helpful and to note the progress they are making (or not making) on any writing projects undertaken. Also, they are to record their feelings about their work, any problems they may have encountered, questions they have, and any other thoughts or reflections. I warn students that emails or phone conversations do not count as face-to-face meetings. Log journals are evaluated three times over the semester.

Another useful wiki component are the "Writing Practice Pages" that can be set up for each student. These wiki pages allow for in-class writing practice visible to all for immediate comment and feedback. Again, all online wiki material can be viewed on students' home or classroom computers, as well as on the big screen projection from the instructor's computer.

Course Texts Texts used correspond to the three areas of focus in the course:

• Brereton & Mansfield, Writing on the Job presents a useful guide to most of the writing genres we cover in the class; also has chapters on basic news writing and grammar.

• Robin Williams, The Non-Designer's Design Book offers easy to follow techniques for creating effective and forceful print designs.

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• Loretta Pyles, Progressive Community Organizing: A Critical Approach for a Globalizing World. This wonderfully accessible and engaging book provides much material for rewarding discussions on both the theory and practice of community orgamzmg.

• Lester M. Salamon in The Resilient Sector: The State of Nonprofit America offers an overview of the non-profit sector, its problems and potential.

• Andrea Lunsford, Easy Writer, a grammar handbook which corresponds to the online exercises assigned in the class and found on BedfordiSt. Martin's Exercise Central web site.

Heading Off Potential Problems As we all know, non-profit staffs are extremely busy. Students must therefore be persistent in attempts to arrange meetings and plan projects. Many times it will be up to the student to take the initiative in proposing publications. Sometimes students may even have to convince their "client" of the need for a particular publication. I encourage them to be enthusiastic and cordially insistent about their work. This too is part of a professional relationship in the publishing world. And since students are indeed working with professionals, they are expected to be professional themselves. They should, of course, arrive on time to any meetings, follow up communications when appropriate, and stay in touch with their contact person. I alert students to the fact that the contact person will be asked to evaluate their performance at the end of the semester.

As the course proceeds, I keep in touch with hosts by email and by checking the student log blogs on the class wiki (see above). I read and evaluate the log blogs three times over the semester, roughly corresponding to the three required onsite visits. This keeps students engaged and helps me head off any problems that may be brewing. I also have a writing workshop/social for organizational contacts

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and students once a semester during class with a guest speaker and refreshments. This seems to be much appreciated by the professionals.

Another problematic area involves matching the requirements of an academic schedule to the publication needs of a non-profit organization. On the academic side, my students must proceed over the semester from easy assignments (news articles and flyers) to the more difficult (newsletter). This schedule mayor may not coincide with a non­profit's publication needs. As indicated, I send organizational contacts a copy of our schedule for the semester in order that they know what we will be working on and when. I also tell students that if they wish, they may work on projects like newsletters for their organizations before we get to them on the class syllabus, but they must nevertheless adhere to the class schedule and syllabus in turning in all assignments on time. In other cases, organizations won't need a news article even though a student volunteer will have to write one because it is on our syllabus. Frankly, sometimes the class and organization schedules are so diverse that students must "invent" an assignment, i.e., write a news article about an event that has already taken place, for example. I have learned to tolerate such occasions. Undoubtedly, from an educational perspective, a student still benefits in many ways from the experience.

Finally, I have found that while the majority of students work hard for their organizations, a few may slack off over the semester. One last way I have arranged my course and syllabus to combat this problem is by stipulating that to earn an "A," students must produce two documents that are published and used by their organizations. To earn a "B," they must produce one such document.

Examples of Student Work and Partnerships One highly successful partnership last year was with Art-Reach, a Philadelphia non-profit aimed at increasing access to the arts for traditionally underserved audiences such as people with disabilities, people who cannot afford events, older citizens who lack transportation,

Reflections. 111

and the like. Art-Reach distributes donated and discounted tickets from perfonning-arts venues, museums and other cultural institutions to human-service agencies and schools, brings the arts directly to members through on-site perfonnances and arts activities at participating agencies and schools, provides in-depth, participatory arts programs that address specific social needs, and give people with disabilities and their family and friends the infonnation they need to attend cultural events. (Paraphrased from the Art-Reach website, http:// www.art-reach.org/ARR_Mi.html).

The first assignment that my student, Margaret Mallon, produced for Art-Reach was a news article for the Art-Reach newsletter (Appendix E). In the flyer assignment Maggie incorporated the Art-Reach logo and designed and wrote an infonnationalleaflet that went to regional arts organizations encouraging them to mention disability friendly venues in ads that go into the Philly Fun Guide. (See Art-Reach flyer below, Appendix F.)

Maggie Mallon also created a brochure describing the Art-Reach "Volunteer Ambassador Program" (Appendix G) and designed and created a newsletter with two other students in my class (Appendix H). Other students created brochures for the local YMCA (Appendix I) and the campus Bigs and Littles program (Appendix J).

Final Reflection Paper As current service learning pedagogy emphasizes, students gain a lot by reflecting on their experiences. Hence I assign a reflection paper toward the end of the course which asks students to: 1) reflect on their role in fulfilling the organization's mission of social good, 2) discuss the kinds of problems encountered in working for the organization and how they were or were not overcome, and 3) describe how their organizational experience related to this class and the issues we read about and discussed over the semester.

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The insights gleaned from these papers offer further proof of the value of the course if more is needed. In these papers, and also in the thank you notes that students write to their organizations at the end of the semester, students attest to their increased maturity and greater awareness of the urgency of the projects they have been a part of. The hosts are usually equally pleased and impressed with the volunteers. Sometimes students continue to volunteer or are even offered jobs at the non-profits. In any case, the benefits gained for both parties are impressive, and the payback may be a better-informed citizenry which supports community organizations and the non-profit sector, and understands their crucial endeavor for social good.

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Works Cited

Brereton, John C and MargaretA. Mansfield. Writing on the Job: A Norton Pocket Guide. Updated edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.

Lunsford, Andrea. Easy Writer. Boston: BedfordiSt. Martin's, 2006. Pyles, Loretta. Progressive Community Organizing: A Critical

Approach for a Globalizing World. New York and London: Routledge, 2009.

Salamon, Lester M. The Resilient Sector: The State of Nonprofit America. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003.

Williams, Robin. The Non-Designer s Design Book. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press, 2004.

Appendix A - Invitation to Host a Volunteer

Dear Non-Profit Professional:

As Director of the Writing and Rhetoric Concentration at Villanova University, I am writing to tell you about my "Desktop Publishing for Community Organizations" course which covers the basics of news writing and flyer, brochure and newsletter design. In the past (as you may well know), I have matched students with non-profit agencies and community organizations in the area. I would like to offer you the opportunity to host a "Villanova Writing Volunteer" this fall.

The benefits of the project are immense, especially for the students who begin to understand the possibilities and problems of community service and activism in our society. Hopefully your organization will also benefit from a volunteer who' can assume some important but time consuming writing tasks.

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I must point out, however, that matching an academic schedule with the needs of a non-profit organization can be difficult. Over the semester my class must proceed from easy assignments (flyer) to the more difficult (newsletter). This schedule may not coincide withyour publication needs at all. If that turns out to the case, I am truly sorry. But from an educational perspective, a student would still benefit greatly from working at and observing your organization.

This year I will require that students visit your organization at least three times over the fall semester (September-December). They will study your workplace, assess writing needs, analyze the purpose of written materials you may need, and work out a schedule with you for writing, editing, printing and distributing publications.

I am enclosing a tentative schedule of our publication projects over the semester. I am also sending a "Publication Order Form" to assess your publication needs. Obviously, the sooner we know about any specific publication needs you may have, the more likely we can work on them in class and meet your deadlines. Feel free to fill out as many Order Forms as you like.

Before accepting a writing volunteer, I would ask you to consider the following two questions: Can you provide the volunteer with adequate orientation and supervision while on site? And will you have the resources for photocopying, printing or internet publishing any materials produced by the volunteer? We will be using InDesign desktop publishing software, and since you may not own it, we will send all files as pdfs to facilitate printouts.

If you can answer yes to the above questions, please fill out the enclosed Information Form and Publication Order Form and return them to me as soon a~ possible. Also, any printed materials you can send us about your organization would be much appreciated.

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Thank you for your time and attention. I hope you will be interested in working with a Villanova writing volunteer this fall. I feel sure than any partnership we establish will be fruitful and rewarding. If you have questions or concerns, please call me at (home) 610-642-0546 or (work) 610-519-7872 or send me an email: karyn.hollis@villanova.edu.

Fall classes begin Monday, August 24.

Sincerely,

Dr. Karyn Hollis

Appendix B-Publication Order Form for Community Organizations

Please list any documents you may want your writing volunteer to produce. Be as specific as you can when you describe the projects. If you have more than one project in mind, please photocopy the sheet and fill it out for each project. Then return to your student volunteer. Thank you.

1. Your Organization: _____________ _ 2. Address: ________________ _ 3. Contact person in organization: _________ _ 4. Phone: --------------------5 Fax Number: -----------------6. E-mail address: ---------------7. Web Page address: ____________ _ 8. Date: __________________ _

9. Check types of writing volunteer might be involved in:

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Leaflets Letters to the Editor News Article _Feature Story Interview Brochures _Press Releases, packets Newsletters Other: ________ _

Describe each type of publication you will need in as much detail as possible: Type ofPublication: ______________ _

10. Purpose ofpublication: _____________ _ 11. What will contents include:

-Types of articles: -List important dates, times, locations of events to be publicized in document:

12. Where is information to be included in document to be obtained? _Supplied by someone in organization? Who? _Written by student intern? _Articles written by organization's staff? _Articles written by organization's clients _Photographs needed? When, where, of what?

13. Who is the audience for the publication? -How many pieces/pages will be printed or designed? -How will they be distributed or published on an internet server?

14. Is there a logo or format that has become identified with the organization or publication that should be continued? If so, please describe and include a copy if possible.

15. Project Deadlines:Rough draft mock up needed by: ___ _ -Final copy due date:_~ ___________ _ -Distribution/mailing date: ___________ _

Please include any additional information on the back of this form or below and return to your writing volunteer.

Thank you!

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Appendix C-Course Syllabus Syllabus--Desktop Publishing for Community and Social Justice

Organizations

This course focuses on the visual and written rhetoric used by organizations working for peace, the environment, social justice and the like, in Philadelphia, suburban communities, and occasionally on campus. Using desk-top publishing software, students will write and design flyers, brochures, newsletters, news articles and media releases for these organizations. Students taking the course must keep in close contact with the organization they are working for, making at least three on-site visits over the semester. In so doing, students will gain valuable "real world" writing experience while providing useful services to those who need them.

Students will also devote time reading and discussing the practice and theory of community organizing, the non-profit sector, poverty, and serving those of different class and racial backgrounds according to Catholic social teaching. Time at the beginning of the course will be spent improving writing and editing skills, including a basic grammar review. Many class sessions will be conducted as workshops for sharing and critiquing student writing and design.

Course Aims: • Students will increase their understanding of the non-profit sector,

its problems and potential • Students will learn basic principles of print design • Students will master news writing and feature writing style • Students will learn InDesign and Photoshop software • Students will produce flyers, brochures, and newsletters • Students will improve oral presentation skills • Students will review conventions of grammar and punctuation • Students will learn about Catholic principles of social justice

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(

Required Texts and Software Brereton & Mansfield, Writing on the Job Loretta Pyles, Progressive Community Organizing Andrea Lunsford, Easy Writer Lester M. Salamon, The Resilient Sector Robin Williams, The Non-Designers Design Book Adobe InDesign - available in e-media room and on Citrix server Adobe Photoshop - available in e-media room and on Citrix server

Grades Writing assignments Average grade 40% Professionalism & Class Participation 20% Mid-term Exam grade 10% Final Exam grade 20% Grammar & Newswriting Exercises; 10% Log Blog, Portfolio

Additional Requirements • To Earn an "A" = Students must have TWO assignments published

or used by their organization as well as earning an "A" average as outlined above.

• To Earn a "B" = Students must have ONE assignment published or used by their organization as well as earning a "B" average as outlined above.

Course Schedule Day 1 'Overview of Course

• Post Student Introductions to Wiki on "Class Personalities & Pies" page.

Day 2 .Organizations to be assigned in class--call for an appointment immediately. ·"Organizational Information Sheet" Take the sheet with you to your meeting and fill out • Discussion: Charity vs Justice and Server vs Served

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• Begin Online Grammar Exercises Day 3· Read and discuss Brereton & Mansfield, "Introduction and

Writing Process" • Read Pyles Chapter 1 • Aristotle's Rhetorical Triangle--keep it in mind when

creating your publications • Getting familiar with InDesign • Online Grammar Exercises due • Go to the wiki and start your log blog.

Day 4· Arrange first meeting with your non-profit organization if you haven't already.

• Fill out and post the "Organizational Identification Worksheet" to the wiki.

• Invite Organizations to Workshop/Social on Wednesday, October I--during class

• Also ask organizational contact for information for upcoming assignments:

o Assignment I-News Article o Assignment 2-Media Release o Assignment 3-FeaturelBiographical article, with photo (Assignments 1-3 Should be saved as p,?ssible copy for brochure and newsletter, Assignments 5 and 6)

• Begin news writing exercises, 1 and 2: "Writing concisely"

• Practice Writing Headlines--PowerPoint • Read Salamon, Chapters 1 and 2 • InDesign workshop

Day 5· Read Brereton, Chapter 2, "News Stories" and Chapter 11, "Editing"

• Online Grammar Exercises due • Read Pyles, Chapter 2 • In class practice on wiki practice pages: writing leads

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• Assignment #l--News Article: Begin a news article as defined by Brereton & Mansfield about your association. The article should be 250-500 words, double-spaced, using InDesign in designated layout.

Day 6· Read Brereton, Chapter 10, "Writer's Guide" Chapter 11, "Editing"

• InDesign Workshop • Read Pyles, Chapter 3 • Read Salamon, Chapter 3 • More on writing leads • Student class presentations on organizations from Wiki • Online Grammar Exercises due • News writing exercises 3 and 4 due, "Using active verbs" • Assignment #1, first version due. Bring one hard

InDesign copy to class for peer editing. Day 7· Peer Editing Sheet for Assn #1 (Print out and bring to

class) • Practice writing leads in class on wiki • Present Organizations from wiki • Online Grammar Exercises • Non-profit news presentation - Click here for The Non­

Profit Times • Tum in news writing Exercises, 3 and 4: "Writing with

Precision and Clarity" Day 8· Assignment #2: Media release of upcoming

organizational news or event. 300-500 words. Use InDesign and designated layout.

• Online Grammar Exercises • Read Brereton, Chapter 4, "Press Releases and Press Kits" • Optional--email InDesign file of Assn #1 to Dr. Hollis for

anonymous class editing session. • News writing exercises 5 and 6, "Eliminating Cliches,"

and "Sexist Language"

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• Present organizations from Wiki • Photoshop & InDesign -- Letterhead design for media

release--Assn#2 • Non-profit news presentation - Click here for

Pennsylvania Association of N on-Profit Organizations Day 9· Assignment #1 due -- News Article

• All graded assignments are to be revised for placement in portfolio--due November 5.

• Non-profit news presentation - Click here for Philadelphia Foundation

• InDesign with graphics • Read Pyles, Chapter 4 • Present organizations from wiki • Online Grammar Exercises due • News writing exercise 7 due, "Writing concise sentences" • Log Blog Check and Grading--Please be up to date. Your

first meeting with your contact should be described as well as plans for the news article.

• Schedule 2nd meeting with your organization for this week or next.

Day 10· 1st version, Assn#2 due -- 300-500 words. Use InDesign, print out a copy and bring to class for peer editing.

• Click here for Peer editing sheet for Assn#2 • Non-profit news presentation - Click here for Chronicle

of Philanthropy Day 11· Speaker: writing for non-profits; invite your non-profit

staff • Bring edited papers to class with editing sheet and return

to writer. • Online Grammar Exercises due • Make 2nd visit to your organization this or-next week.

Ask about a biographical feature article.

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• Take/obtain photos for the article--perhaps at your first f2f meeting or a 2nd one.

Day 12· Assignment #2 due - Media release • Begin Assignment #3 -- Feature/Biographical Sketch!

Interview--Write a 250-500 word article according to guidelines in Brereton for the genre. Use InDesign and designated layout.

• Read Brereton, Chapter 2, "Feature Stories" • Read Salamon, Chapter 4 • Non-profit News presentation-- Chick here for Stanford

Social Innovation Review • Read Putnam, "Bowling Alone" • Online Grammar Exercises--All exercises are due today.

• •

Day 13 •

Day 14 • Day 15 •

• • •

Day 16 •

•

You cannot take the Mid-Term unless all exercises are finished. Sample media releases Mid-Term Exam Study Guide Mid Term Exam--You must finish all grammar exercises before you will be allowed to take the mid-term. Fall Break 1st Version, Assn# 3 due-- Bring one print out of your media release to class for peer editing. Email yourself a copy of your media release for in-class editing on computers. Editing Sheet Assn#3 Read Pyles, Chapter 5 Non-Profit news presentation - Click here for The Philanthropy Journal Assignment #4--Flyer with graphic: advertise an event or activity Bring edited papers Assn #3 to class with editing sheet and return to writer.

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• 2. Log Blog Check and Grading--Please have them up to date.

• Non-profit news presentation - Click here for Network for Good

• Looking at sample flyers. • Read Salamon, Chapter 5 • Read Brereton, Chapter 5a - "Flyers" • Read Williams, Design Book, Chapter 1-6, "Design

Principles," Day 17· Assignment #3--DUE (Media Release) Send final,

revised version as InDesign file to Dr. Hollis and to yourself. Tum in hard copy of 1st version and editor's sheet in class. Graded assignments are to be revised for placement in portfolio--due November 2.

• Make appointment for 3rd visit with your organization • Read Pyles Chapter 6 • Non-profit news presentation - Click here for Non-Profit

Online News • InDesign Workshop on Assignment #4-Flyer • Come to class with a sketch (mock up) of the Flyer you

will put into InDesign • Read Williams, Design Book, Chapter 7, "Extra Tips and

Tricks" Day 18· 1st Version, Assn#4 due--Bring copy for peer editing.

• Editing Sheet, Assn#4 • Read Salaman, Chapter 6 • Non-Profit news presentation - Click here for

Philanthropy News Digest Day 19· Bring edited flyers to class with editing sheet and return

to writer. • Assignment #5 --.6 Sided Brochure, Self-Mailer --You

may use copy from Assns # 1-4 for this

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• Non-profit news presentation - Click here for Non-Profit Quarterly

• Read Brereton, Chapter 5b, "Brochures" • Read Williams, "Brochures" • Read Pyles, Chapter 7 • Critiquing sample brochures

Day 20· Assignment #4 Flyer due. Tum in final hard copy, 1 st version and editor's sheet.

• Read Pyles, Chapter 8 • Non-profit news presentation - Click here for The Non­

Profit Times • Workshop on Brochure -- Design a brochure that you can

"pitch" to your organization. What do they need? Figure it out and give it to them! I expect to read about your brochure proposal in your log blog. Let me me know what your contact thought of your ideas or publication.

• You may use copy from assignments 1, 2 & 3 in this brochure--unless your contact has requested other content.

Day 21· 1 st Version Assn. #5 Brochure due -- Email yourself your brochure as a InDesign file for computer critique in class; peer editing finish at home

• Read Pyles, Chapter 9 • Brochure editing sheet • Wikipedia Public Domain Images • Non-Profit news presentation - Click here for

Philadelphia Foundation Day 22· Return peer editing Assn #5 to writers

• In-Class critique of brochures-bring 8 copies • Read Pyles, Chapter 10 • Non-profit news presentation -- Click here for Chronicle

of Philanthropy

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•

Day 23 •

• • • • •

•

Day 24 • •

•

Day 25 • Day 26 •

•

•

Day 27 •

• • •

Day 28 •

Organizing Assignment #6 -- Four Page Newsletter-­Again, copy from earlier assignments can be used for this one Assignment #5 Brochure, Final Version Due--6-sided, self-mailing brochure with editing Sheets Print out color copy and tum in to Dr. Hollis Assignment # 6 - Newsletter Workshop Sample Newsletter Makeovers Read Pyles, Chapter 11 Non-Profit news presentation-- Click here for The Philanthropy Journal Visit organization this week or next. Get newsletter information and say goodbye! --Take brochure and other printouts for them. Assignment # 6 - Newsletter Workshop Non-Profit news presentation -- Click here for Stanford Social Innovation Review 3. Log Blog Check and Grading--Please have them up to date. Thanksgiving Vacation The Problem with Commodification of Public Life: Read Henry Giroux, "Neo-Liberalism and the Demise of Democracy: Resurecting Hope in Dark Times" Non-Profit news presentation -- Click here for Network for Good 3. Log Journals Due -- Should have report on 3rd f2f visit and other contacts. Assn # 6 - Newsletter Workshop Assn # 6 - Newsletter Workshop Read Pyles, Chapter 12 Non-Profit news presentation -- Click here for Non-Profit Quarterly Study Guide for Final Exam

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• Assn # 6 - Newsletter Workshop • Begin Reflection Paper

Day 29· Assn #6, Newsletter due -- Print out to turn in • Print out corrected copies of Flyer, Brochure and

Newsletter for organizations • Thank you's to organizations • Continue work on reflection paper

Day 30· Final Exam • Complete portfolio due (Assignments 1-6) --Visual

check in class. Make this nice. It can become your "clip book" for a future employer to appreciate. For grading purposes, please include the graded version of each assignment and one last final, polished copy. Also, please print out extra copies in color of your brochure and newsletter. I want to send them to your organizations with your thank you letter.

• Reflection paper due

Appendix D-Online Non-Profit Journals and Newsletters

Chronicle of Philanthropy -- http://philanthropy.com/ Network for Good -- http://www.fundraising123.org Non-Profit Online News --http://news.gilbert.org/ Non-Profit Quarterly -- http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/ Non-Profit Times -- http://www.nptimes.com! Pennsylvania Association of Non-Profit Organizations -- http://www. pano.org/ Philadelphia Foundation -- https://www.philafound.org/default.aspx Philanthropy Joumal-- http://www.philanthropyjouma1.org/ Philanthropy News Digest -- http://foundationcenter.org/pndl Stanford Social Innovation Review -- http://www.ssireview.org/

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Appendix E, F, G, H, I, J- Samples of Student Work

Appendix E: Margaret Mallon's News Article for Art-Reach Appendix F: Margaret Mallon's Flyer for Art-Reach Appendix G: Margaret Mallon's Brochure for Art-Reach Appendix H: Margaret Mallon's Newsletter for Art-Reach Appendix I: James Farwell's Brochure for the YMCA Appendix J: Kathleen McFadden for the Bigs and Littles

Materials will be made available on the Reflections webpagelreflections.syr.edu.

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Speaking With One Another" in Community-Based Research: (Re)Writing African American History in Berks County, Pennsylvania

Laurie Grobman, Penn State University- Berks

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.

On November 5, 2005, at the 18th annual National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Reading, Pennsylvania branch Freedom Fund Banquet, Mr. Frank

Gilyard, Director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, asked the audience to support the expansion of the museum. He implored, "Let us tell our own story." Several minutes later, I, a white faculty member at Penn State University, Berks campus

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in Reading, stood before the mostly African American crowd as I was introduced as the team leader of a joint community-based research project between the NAACP and Penn State Berks, herein referred to as the Berks County African American History project, to uncover, document, and disseminate to the public African American history in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Suddenly, I felt what I had already known: "Anytime a White person assumes a position of authority in a community space that is used primarily by communities of color, problems oflegitimacy, intention and practice emerge" (Zimmer 13). In this case, the "community space" was not only the banquet room itself, but more importantly, the erased local histories of African Americans.

The result of this collaboration is a volume of short essays and facts called Woven with Words: A Collection of African American History in Berks County, Pennsylvania and a corresponding website (<http:// www.readingnaacp.orglbook.html».l As a work of public history and community-based research (CBR), dissemination has taken several fonns: the book and website's debut at the Reading branch NAACP annual Freedom Fund banquet in November 2006; distribution of over 500 complimentary copies of the book to every educational institution, library, and historical institution in Berks county (this dissemination, undertaken by the executive board of the NAACP, is in progress); availability of the book at the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, PA; three student conference presentations at the 2006 Annual Pennsylvania Conference on African American History2; publication of two articles by students in The Berks Historical Review, the quarterly magazine of the Historical Society of Berks County; and appearances by Gilyard and me on a local television talk show called For the People. Moreover, members of the NAACP Board presented the book to the Reading Public School District Board of Education and to the Berks County Intennediate Unit. Faculty in the Elementary Education program at Penn State Berks are working with future teachers to present African American history from Woven with Words to the Boys and Girls clubs throughout the city of Reading and

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to develop Social Studies curricula to be used in the Reading public school system.

Despite these accomplishments, the discomfort I felt on that evening in 2005, and the question of whether it is "valid to speak for others" (Alcoff7), remains a significant issue in the project under study and in CBR generally. The "problem of speaking for others" (98), as Linda Alcoff defines it, is that when individuals from a privileged or dominant group speak for individuals from an oppressed group or the group itself,

. the speakers may, and often do, reinforce that group's marginalization (99). All four faculty in the Berks County African American History project are white. Three of the 18 students who participated in the historical research are African American while 15 are white. The four male students who created the website are also white.3 Therefore, we must ask: Were the white faculty and students in the project speaking for Berks County's African Americans and the students of color?

In this article, I suggest that, through great effort and awareness by everyone involved, the Berks County African American History project approached a model of CBR in which whites and African Americans spoke (and wrote) with one another.4 I do not suggest that the project was "successful" in every way. Rather, I assert that a productive collaboration between community partners, students, and faculty­what one community member I interviewed described as "one of the best things that happened in our community in a long time"-is also a complex web of interrelated issues that disappear from view only to reappear again. It reminds all of us interested in university-community partnerships that theoretical understandings ofhybridity, border­crossing, 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.

In spite of, and because of, these challenging matters, Gilyard, Jefferson, Williams, Johnson, and I envision a long term relationship

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between Penn State Berks, the local NAACP, and the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum to ''jointly create work and knowledge" (Bushouse 32). As Brenda Bushouse argues, these relationships will progress only if the community and university acknowledge their complexity and invest time and resources to address them (32). Studying identity politics in the Berks County African American History project is one such undertaking to move this relationship forward. Moreover, I use this experience and the voices of the community partners to recommend strategies that will aid others involved CBR to create venues that approach equal authority rather than paternalistic service.

Methodology: Multiple Voices How does a scholar who partners with students and community members on a research project write a scholarly article for a scholarly journal to be read by a small community of scholars? I thought about this question at length as I began preparing my research, and again later after receiving revision suggestions from Steve Parks, Reflections editor, and the anonymous reviewers. As Marie Sandy and Barbara Holland note, "there are few published studies documenting the perspectives of community members in partnership with universities" (30). Clearly, if university and community partners are to speak with one another, teacher-scholars must include community voices in our research. I chose a methodology that includes two forms of primary research aimed at giving voiceto community partners and students: an interview with the four Reading branch NAACP members central to the project (see Appendix A for Interview Questions) and a student questionnaire. 5

The individuals I interviewed were central to this project and remain instrumental in our ongoing partnership. Robert Jefferson, the primary liaison between the NAACP and Penn State Berks, was at the time the Vice-President of the local NAACP and is currently the President. -Gilyard, who is on the NAACP executive board, foun~ed and directs

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-- ---------------------------------------- --------------------------------

the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, a small museum housed in a church that once served as a way station in the Underground Railroad. Jefferson and Gilyard gave permission to use their real names. The other two interview participants chose to remain anonymous, and I will refer to them as last names Williams and Johnson. The interview is my attempt to bring these individuals' voices directly into the scholarly community. Our interview evolved into a 2.5 hour five-way conversation, meandering in many interesting directions.

-I distributed questionnaires (see Appendix B) to student participants in March 2006, more than a full year after students' participation in the project ended and after several had graduated. Although only five students, two African American (I call them Betty and Sherie) and three white (I call them Carolyn, Mark, and Jenny), filled out the questionnaires, their voices are compelling. At the same time, their comments as a whole must be interpreted cautiously because they are limited in number and may not represent the perspectives of the entire group. Because I had not planned on this research study, I did not save student writing from the classes, except for the research articles published in Woven with Words.

The Effaced Histories of Berks County's African Americans Berks County, located in the southeastern portion of Pennsylvania, was founded by Conrad Weiser in 1752. Berks County was settled by Swedes, Quakers, German Amish, French Huguenots, Mennonites, and English. Reading, the county's city, and Berks County were named for Reading in Berkshire, England, the English home of William Penn's family (Penn founded the province of Pennsylvania). Migration and immigration have over time changed the ethnic landscape of Berks County to also include African Americans, Asian Americans, Germans, Greeks, Italians, Jews, Latinos, Native Americans, and others. African Americans were first brought to Berks County as slaves, although few county residents know this fact and it is rarely spoken of in local schools. Until the late 18th century, the majority of African Americans .

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in Berks County were either slaves or indentured servants. By 1850, the U.S. Census lists the African American population in Reading at 285 persons, all of them free.

U.S. Census records indicate that in 2000 whites made up 88.2% of the population of Berks County and 59.2% of the city of Reading. From 1990 to 2000, the Black or African American population increased from 9.7% to 12.2% in the city of Reading and the Hispanic or Latino population, comprised of Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and DomiriicanAmericans, increased from 18.5% to 37.3% in the city of Reading.

Berks County's "regular history," "the history most students expect" (Filene 483), is white, European, and male: William Penn; Conrad Weiser; Daniel Boone; a rich agricultural heritage; Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site (the furnace was in operation from 1771 to 1883); the Reading Railroad (which has appeared in the board game Monopoly for decades); the textile industry in first half of 20th century; and in general the county's history as a major industrial center, helping to supply war efforts from the Revolution through WWII. When locals boast about their cultural heritage, they cite John Updike, Wallace Stevens, and Pennsylvania German folk art and architecture.

But as my students discovered, there are other histories that must be told, and our primary venue for so doing was through writing. History is, as Michael Olneck observes, "selective. It excludes as well as includes, forgets as well as remembers, hides as well as places in view" (335). Historical memory and narratives construct past and present social positions and legitimate current practices. But telling new stories and constructing different memories challenges and resists exclusionary ideologies. Rewriting history is more than telling the same story a new way; it is re-orienting.

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In this project, students learned that the histories of minority ethnic groups must be "dug out from between the lines of biased white accounts" (Gilman 226). John Kuo Wei Tchen points out that "making the historical experiences of the excluded and marginalized manifest" involves "extending the net of what historians have usually considered acceptable historical subject matter" (202). This is precisely what Karen James of the Pennsylvania Museum and History Commission told to my students during a class visit: "Doing African American history," she stressed, is not the same as "doing white history."

Students worked with primary sources, including documentary evidence, photographs, newspapers, advertisements for runaway slaves, and census data. They explored relevant aspects of material culture, including, for example, architecture and housing, industry, domestic and vernacular arts, and artifacts speaking to ethnic and cultural identity. Several times during the semester, members of the local African American community came to Penn State Berks and held hours-long research sessions with students. Students learned to conduct oral history, including such elements as focusing on a specific group for interviews, developing questions, and writing narratives, and they spoke often with Gilyard at the Berks campus and at the museum. While studying and writing history, students became "producers rather than consumers of knowledge" while also "serv[ing] immediate public needs and purposes" (von Joeden-Forgey and Puckett l32, emphasis in original). In doing history, students' writing played a meaningful role in the world outside the classroom; most important, their writing helped to secure African Americans' place in Berks County's history.

Whose "Community Space"?: Community-Based Research and "the Problem of Speaking for Others" The Berks African American history project may be categorized as community-based research (CBR), a form of service-learning that involves "research with and for the community" (Strand 85).6 I use the term "c0!llmunity" in CBR as defined by Randy Stoecker:

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"the community is the people living with the problem and those organizations that they democratically control" (41). In the project under study, then, the community includes members of the local branch of the NAACP, the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum, and the African American community in Berks County. The four individuals interviewed for my study assumed leadership roles in the project and therefore represented their respective organizations and the community.

I also want to complicate Stoecker's definition, however. Stoecker explains that "The outsiders trying to solve the problem or the funders who are paying the outsiders to solve the problem are typically not part of the community, though there may be bridge people who have roots in the community and can help build relationships between the community and outsiders" (41). Although not African American, I am an involved member of the Berks county community. I have lived here for over 20 years, raise my children here, and am committed to bettering the lives of all who live and work here, especially those from marginalized and disadvantaged groups. Moreover, one of the participating African American students has deep roots in Berks County, while the other two African American students identified as insiders by virtue of being African American, although they had only lived in the county for one or two years of college. Some of the white students born and raised in Berks County identified as community members while recognizing that their whiteness also placed them outside the immediate African American community. As I will explain later, this notion of communities as both separate and overlapping had a consistent presence throughout the project.

As a form of CBR, the Berks County African American History project was fairly unique. The "problem" addressed is not among the social ills often associated with much of CBR, such as poverty, underfunded schools, or homelessness; rather, the problem is a largely invisible, eras.ed history.7 Yet the community members saw this project as crucial

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to their ongoing agenda of calling attention to the long neglected history of African Americans in Berks County and to continued efforts to empower their people, especially the children. As Jefferson stated in the interview, he and the other individuals who initiated the project wanted "to open that door" to document our community's history, to give our children a "tool to change attitudes about themselves," and to "educate the whole community." Jefferson added, emphatically, "We did accomplish this."

Mark Chesler and Carolyn Scalera distinguish between two primary models of community service learning: those that work within social frameworks to provide services to oppressed and disadvantaged populations, and those that attempt to dismantle those structures that control the allocation of resources to oppressed and disadvantaged populations (19). The project described herein was ofthe latter kind: by writing Berks County African Americans into the county's history, we hoped to challenge, resist, and revise "official" versions of local history. Thus, among the most important goals of CBR is to "democratize the production and control of knowledge" by "recognizing the legitimacy of the knowledge and world views of powerless people and by sharing authority wherever possible in every stage of the research process" (Stoeker 85).8 Moreover, CBR has a critical action component: "to contribute in some way to improving the lives of those living in the community" (85) and to "help the community acquire some information that they see as important to their ongoing work" (85).

If, as Stoecker argues, a crucial objective ofCBR is to "undermin[e] the power structure that currently places control of knowledge production in the hands of credentialized experts" (36), how does a CBR project led by "credentialized experts" in the academy undermine rather than reproduce dominant power structures? In this particular case, how can a project to write African Americans into U.S. history carried out primarily by whites work against the structures that have effaced such a history in the first place?

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The "problem of speaking for others'~ is associated with the broader, multifaceted notion of identity politics, which covers a range of issues related to the nature and origins of individual and group identity, political views, and mobilization efforts of particular marginalized groups to challenge and resist dominant structures, definitions, and social positions. Generally, identity politics is based on the idea that group members themselves are the best hope for improvement of that group's marginalized status. In other words, these groups should speak, write, and act for themselves. Indeed, as Alcoff and Satya Mohanty suggest, many successful social movements that have greatly improved our society and increased social justice, for example the civil rights movement and the women's movement, "were led, never exclusively but primarily, by the oppressed themselves" (2). Further, as Abdul Alkalimat suggests, the dual mission of Black studies is to rewrite American history to account for erased histories and "to establish the intellectual and academic space for Black people to tell their own story" (qtd. in Graham, with Dietzel, and Bailey 196; emphasis added). Yet, is there room in the "intellectual and academic space" for whites to tell African Americans' stories? Does doing so inevitably distort non­white histories and perpetuate historical inaccuracies and injustices, or can it perhaps facilitate more accurate historical retellings?

The interview reveals that Jefferson, Gilyard, Williams, and Johnson agree that African Americans should tell their own histories because African American history has been ignored, erased, orland obscured in the nation's master narratives. Johnson was very emphatic that "most African Americans are skeptical of whites telling our stories" since "whites have always been in control of history, even today ... Our [African Americans'] story is not told." Gilyard observed that there is no funding set aside in Pennsylvania to train teachers about African American history. He asked, "How do we get to the point that our history is told?" Williams echoed this sentiment: "We need to be included in [U.S. history]." Gilyard and Jefferson stressed their view that Berks County's African American history has been grossly

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distorted by the only daily newspaper in the area, The Reading Eagle. Still today, they asserted, the newspaper "slants the news about African Americans." Significantly, Johnson added that there are "still a lot of naysayers" in the local community who are upset that Woven with Words was written primarily by whites. Their view aligns with Jane Phillips who explains, "In recent years, marginalized groups in American society have come to realize that the histories of their communities are best preserved through their own stories" (173, emphasis added).

Nonetheless, Jefferson, Gilyard, and Williams knew that by seeking out Penn State Berks as a collaborator, they would be reaching out to predominantly white faculty and students (although not realizing how few faculty of color are at Penn State Berks, they expected to have some non-white faculty participation). Jefferson was gratified that Penn State was so willing a partner and saw the collaboration as a significant opportunity; Williams echoed these views: "We needed a formal project to make this happen ... we wanted [our local history] documented, [and] this was a way to make it happen." Gilyard acknowledged being pleased when he first met the students because there were three African Americans. Jefferson stated that when he first met the 8-10 white faculty at our first meeting together, "I did feel apprehensive because it was clear that some faculty in that room were apathetic ... I was concerned about the attitudes of these professionals and suspected some would fall out, and they did." Yet the four individuals I interviewed also agreed, in Jefferson's words, that "There are some whites who are dedicated and committed" to redress past wrongs.

"Speaking with One Another": Sharing the Intellectual and Academic Space Scholars generally believe that identity-based academic programs such as ethnic studies produce "better, more truthful and less distorted scholarship on the lives and experiences of marginalized identity groups ... when the faculty in the academy itself became more

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diverse" (Alcoff and Mohanty 2). There are clear advantages to forming such group-based allegiances within higher education: individual and group empowerment for those whose voices have been suppressed by dominant discourses; a sense of belonging, especially within an often hostile institutional setting; and, importantly, a political power base that can propel changes which otherwise might not occur. Ethnic studies programs or critical communities of a particular discipline play significant roles in ensuring that scholarly work that has been historically unrepresented or underrepresented is included in curricula: "Institutionally, minority studies have been made up by necessity of whatever has been excluded from the canon and the mainstream work of the disciplines, the afterthought of the academy, if thought at all" (Alcoff and Mohanty 8).9

A strict form of identity politics asserts that one's identity should align the individual with a political perspective and, therefore, problematizes an outsider's authenticity or right to speak within or for a particular group. 1 0 However, I suggest, like Alcoff, that there are legitimate reasons for speaking for others and that to "simply retreat from all practices of speaking for" substantially "undercuts the possibility of political effectivity" (107). But when academics consider whether and when it is appropriate to speak for others, "we need to analyze the probable or actual effects of the words on the discursive and material context" (113). We do this, Alcoff asserts, through dialogue and learning as much as we can about the reception of the speech. Ultimately, Alcoff argues that we must ask, "Will it [speaking for others] enable the empowerment of oppressed peoples?" (116).

As a teacher-scholar specializing in multicultural literature, I regularly cross cultures as I research and teach literature by writers of color. Doing so, I firmly believe, will facilitate, in small but important steps, "the empowerment of oppressed peoples." I want to participate in this work, and I know the realities of higher education where to prohibit white instructors from teaching multicultural literature is to inevitably

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erase these writers' voices. Equally important, I continually learn and develop my knowledge of the literature and cultures represented and develop pedagogical methods and strategies for teaching these texts responsibly.

Delores Aldridge argues that teaching Black Studies, in particular, requires "the strength to know the truths behind the accepted truths" (70). Joyce Joyce concurs: "[T]hough the issue is complex, race is not the essential criterion for a teacher of African-American literature" (28). Rather, "Whites [who teach in Black Studies or who teach African-American literature] must understand that Blacks', Whites' and

. other peoples' of color thought patterns have been shaped by racism and that these patterns have been shaped differently" (52). That is, if white teachers do the necessary work to become informed and to interrogate our socially constructed beliefs and ways of knowing-to "unlearn our largely white, middle-class biases" (Green 19)-all teachers of African American history can teach sensitively, responsibly, and knowledgeably.

Yet I also know that crossing cultures is quite complicated. As the project under study illustrates, issues of cultural boundaries, ownership, and appropriation elicit strong views and emotions from everyone involved. Group-based differences and identities are sometimes necessary and cherished. African Americans, in particular, have resisted and survived centuries of cruelty and oppression by working together against dominant, white power structures. This racial group, perhaps more so than any other, has fought to establish its collective identity in a nation that for too long denied their very humanity. Centers become margins, margins become centers, outsiders become insiders, insiders become outsiders and, for fleeting moments, binaries do break down, only to resurface.

I could not have participated in the Berks African American History project without a sense of my and other whites' obligation to sometimes

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speak for others. Equally important, I concur when Alcoff advocates that "we should strive to create wherever possible the conditions for dialogue and the practice of speaking with and to rather than speaking for others" (110-11). My sense that I should become involved, and especially to become the team leader, could only work if I consistently monitored the complex dynamics of the group and proactively worked with faculty colleagues, community partners, and students to get us as close as possible to the point that we would speak with one another. Facilitating such a partnership generally took place at two levels: in the classroom and through collaborations with community partners.

In the Classrooms The first course in the Berks County African American History . project was American Studies 322, American Ethnicity, an upper-level requirement in the American Studies major, which I taught; the second a Special Topics course called "Writing History" created for this project and taught by Gary Kunkelman, which filled an advanced major requirement for the Professional Writing major.11 Both courses were situated and taught within a framework of critical multiculturalism, which works against appropriation and erasure of difference by explicitly addressing specific social categories of difference. Working collaboratively, we challenged poorly documented, erased histories, and the structures that allowed such histories to disappear from view. Although we taught our classes differently, Kunkelman and I shared similar learning objectives and pedagogical strategies to help students to see themselves as equal partners rather than white knights. Below, I discuss each of these three strategies separately, but in reality they overlap.

1) Foster students' understanding of entrenched white power structures and white privilege, especially how these concepts work to erase histories of non-white groups.

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Simply put, all students must learn about white privilege and its relationship to discrimination, prejudice, and poverty, even if they don't fully accept it (and many do not). I used Adalberto Aguirre, Jr. and Jonathan H. Turner's textbook, American Ethnicity: The Dynamics and Consequences of Discrimination to promote these complex understandings, supplemented by several readings on race and ethnicity, stereotypes, cultural appropriation, and cultural hybridity. After reading Frances Kendall's "Understanding White Privilege," I had students write from Kendall's perspective and then their own about the Berks African American History project, specifically to addresss Kendall's points that white privilege involves "discounting people of color" (7) and "the privilege of writing and teaching history only from the perspective ofthe colonizer" (9). In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, students also read and discussed this human tragedy by examining issues of race, white privilege, poverty, the media, and rhetoric.

2) Expose students to the complex nature andfunctions.ofwriting revisionist histories.

Students must also learn United States history differently so they understand what it means to write history. 12 As Richard Lowy puts it, the "critical mission of ethnic studies-both in terms of political praxis and intellectual insight-is to declare, discuss, and debate the meaning of Eurocentric hegemony and to refute the false universalism" typically associated with Eurocentric views (724). I encouraged students to "try on" a non-Eurocentrist view, at least during the period of their research and writing, by using this interpretive lens as they address the content of the course. I assigned Michael Harper's poem, "American History," newspaper accounts of the Birmingham church bombing, and history textbook excerpts as an introduction into these concepts. Students read historical and literary writings that revise aspects of U.S. history.

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Against the background of white privilege and the erasure of African American histories, students were able to turn to (re)writing local histories. They began to consider issues of historical truth and interrogated traditional versions of American history. In so doing, students came to understand how writing inscribes and (re)inscribes realities, how histories are written by socially constructed individuals, and how they as student-scholar-writer-historians might step outside master narratives to write responsible and truthful histories.

The white students' responses indicate how doing local African American history promoted a deeper understanding of how white privilege affects historical renderings. For Mark, "the fact that libraries and museums only had a limited amount of sources and documents regarding African American history also opened my eyes to the aspect of white privilege." Carolyn's detailed response is replete with insight:

As someone who had already previously conducted historical research and written articles as the culmination of that research, Woven

with Words made me realize that much of my previous scholarship focused--quite narrowly-within my race. I do not, nor have I ever considered myself racist; however, an inner ethnocentrism existed without me even being aware of it. This ethnocentrism was created by cultural influences-the amount of scholarship already available (and published by a journal or publishing house) shapes the research process, many times without our realizing it. ... I always understood that African American history was not as readily accessible prior to 1900 as white history is, but I only began to comprehend the full implications of this during the project. Time and again, I was confronted with incomplete records, a lack of records, and/or history documented by white historians (not always unbiased) rather than African Americans. Much of a rich cultural heritage and historical heritage was lost.

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The questionnaires provide some evidence that students were aware of the enormity of what they were being asked to do. Carolyn writes,

[The African American community members we interviewed and spoke with] were all excited to discuss their heritage with us and thrilled to see their history and culture being explored. Many of them recalled times of segregation and the destruction of their history (African American war heroes' grave stones being paved over for a parking lot, for instance) in our own times.

Betty "was impressed with the amount of oral history that we were able to gather. It was like they [community members who shared their histories] were so happy to share their experiences and so happy that someone was going to use it in such a positive way." Jenny's comments reveal her effort to step outside her cultural constructions to reach some level of objectivity;

We had material that guided us, but the class discussion and Gary's [Kunkelman] comments on our writing were the most beneficial. He was/is a newspaper man. We found all material we could and were taught how to look at it from not a personal point of view, but just as a newspaper reporter reporting the facts. When in doubt, we could always tum to our guide book, email Gary or each other. I emailed and talked to [an African American classmate] on several occaSIOns.

Gilyard "wasn't concerned that students would distort or slant [our history]. The students didn't question [the veracity] of the stories of the people who were there." Like the students in Boyle-Baise and Binford's Benjamin Banneker School project, "Knowledge oflocal history made students feel more connected to their community" and students "found themselves 'b~coming more aware' of racism in their town."13

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3) Facilitate open discussions of race in our classrooms.

Jenny's remarks above also point to the third primary strategy: to facilitate open discussions of race. Several scholar-teachers in multicultural education and service-learning have discussed the difficulties associated with classroom discussions of race (see, for example, Davi, Dunlap, and Green; Green; Moya; TuSmith and Reddy). I agree with Ann Green's points that the presence of African American students in the classes "made discussions of race harder for majority students to dismiss" and "helped me to think and learn about race as well" (24). However, addressing race in the classroom is especially challenging when only a handful or fewer students are of color. In my course, the one African American student was the only student from a visibly minority background. Citing Hans Herbert Kogler's contention that dialogue is "capable of leading us to new insights and critical self-reflection through experiencing the other" (qtd. in Tchen 200), Tchen argues that teachers "must be mindful of hegemonic power that constrains open discussion" (200). In a classroom where an instructor and the majority of students are white, an African American student may rightfully question her white teacher's ability to explicate issues of race. Instructors should be aware of the pressures that students of color may feel in these classrooms. Thus, I was always careful not to put this African American student on the spot or to make her feel like she was the spokesperson for African Americans, and I was always mindful of her potential discomfort.

Four students who completed questionnaires felt that, overall, racial barriers were overcome and tensions alleviated through open communication. Betty wrote, "I was heartened by the [white] students' reception to the project and the work they did. I wasn't sure, in the beginning, that they would really want to participate. Many of them went beyond 'lip service' and really developed an appreciation and understanding." Jenny's perspective aligns with Betty's: "[An African 1\merican classmate and I] both came to an understanding of what it

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was like to be in the other's shoes when it came to race. Talking and communication was the key to being sensitive to the cause, but at the same time, professional about it." Jenny also comments:

In class, we had discussions on the material and the African American students spoke up to offer an opinion or suggestion ... at least [one student] did. I did hear [another student] mumble under her breath sometimes if she didn't like something, but I spoke to her later about how she was feeling and brought it to the attention of the class ... I think we were as honest and open as possible because we were ... a team that had been together for several years [as students in the same major] already ... a tight knit group. I can say that there was a little animosity that was brought up, but I felt it got cleared up. If it hadn't, I spoke to the African American students and encouraged them to speak up. There were a few things outside of class that lead to animosity within the class, but I really thought all the students were more concerned and excited about the research ... we all learned together through this .. .In the end, it's communication, the ability to ask questions in a constructive way, that leads to understanding and acceptance ... Caucasian students weren't afraid to say, "Hey, I'm white, I don't know what it's like to be African American, so show me and help me to understand." African American students were called on frequently to discuss all of our research. We shared our writing and commented on it, just as we had been trained [as writers] to do .. .I tried to get people to look at all sides before I did my research and tried to look at all sides of my research to keep it that way. I constantly discussed my research with other African Americans to see if I wasn't doing justice to the project. They gave me honest feedback. As stated before, there was at least an attempt for every non-African American culture to step into the shoes of African Americans ... to fight to build bridges.

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Yet Sherie's remarks remind us that despite our best efforts, creating safe and productive spaces for students of color is challenging and must continue. Sherie comments: "I found myself not putting the effort because I felt like the token black kid in the group." I know Sherie well-

I have had her in two classes both before and after this semester­and we continue to talk about her experiences as a black woman in a predominantly white college. In fact, Sherie and a small group of African American students met with me and a colleague over dinner several times to discuss such issues, and the students asked us share their insights and perspectives with the faculty. It is this kind of dialogue that will help me to learn, to share what I learn with my colleagues, and to develop better ways to assist minority students to feel comfortable in predominantly white classrooms.

In a current Life History partnership between my Ethnic America class and the NAACP leadership, I have two African American students in a class with nine white students. I have tried to carefully monitor the African American students' classroom experiences by paying attention to class discussions and by speaking to them about how they are feeling about class discussions and related matters. For the life history assignment, I assigned to each of these students a community member who I knew would serve as a role model and mentor. I also try to walk that fine line between engaging non-white students privately outside the classroom while without making them feel "singled out," something Sherie and I have discussed at length. But I remain acutely aware of the difficulties students of color face in these projects, and while I do not have all the answers, I will continue to work with students of color to help navigate these difficult waters.

The University-Community Partnership Ideally, CBR is initiated and undertaken jointly to address a problem or concern identified by the community. These projects recognize

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the value that all constituents-students, faculty, and community members-bring to the table. CBR is research that is done "with rather than on the community" (Strand 85, emphasis in original). The Reading branch NAACP initiated the Berks County African American History project; with Board approval, then-President Steven McCracken approached Penn State Berks seeking faculty and student involvement. Jefferson saw the collaboration as a significant opportunity for the community and the students. He "felt good about [the researchers] being students." The work would be "a lesson for them in life and [provide] a different perspective, an opportunity for [students] to be objective [about African American history]." But to make this happen in a way that created as close to an equal partnership as possible, given each person's role, responsibilities, and educational and work experiences, several shared understandings had to be put into place.

1) Recognize the expertise each individual brings to thecollaboration.

I was an expert in certain aspects-teaching, ethnic studies, and writing, for example-and community members were experts in their own histories and communities. Gilyard's knowledge of Berks County's African American history is encyclopedic. He has made it his mission to document and disseminate what he has stored in his mind and in his museum (and he has stacks of documents and artifacts in his home). He is passionate about sharing family and community stories with all people, including the time his home was firebombed in the 1970s after moving into one of the Reading suburbs. Mark, one of the students, writes this about Gilyard:

To be able to put into words what I have learned from Frank Gilyard would be quite a task. I learned more from him than I learned from any book or historical document regarding African Americans. I not only learned about some crucial historical information, but also the personal struggles of being African

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American, and the success stories of Frank Gilyard and his many accomplishments.

Jefferson was a master at encouraging community participation, mounting community support, organizing research sessions, and bringing issues to the NAACP Executive Board. Both Williams and Johnson were intimately familiar with the community they were representing, they knew what the community wanted and how the community might respond, and they worked hard to mediate and deflect criticism.

2) Share the work and decision-making.

Community partners and members were involved at every stage of the process. We met regularly for more than a year, from planning through completion. The NAACP board members' initial goal was a 40-page pamphlet, but as the project progressed, together we decided to pursue a more comprehensive collection.

Gilyard, Jefferson, Williams, and Johnson read drafts of all articles before final printing and shared these drafts with other NAACP members. Several revisions were put into place as a result. Together, we brainstormed about the title and cover design of the book. Many of us sought images of a quilt and collectively selected the image on the cover and on the website (with permission from the designer). During

. these meetings, Gilyard taught us all about the meanings of these quilts in the Underground Railroad. We also held several meetings with the student web developers, who were taught in their classes to listen to and work for clients' needs. At each meeting, we discussed, debated, and ultimately ended up with an attractive and usable website for the local NAACP and the history project.

3) Faculty and students must "listen closely" to the community partners (Green 19, emphasis in original).

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What this meant for Woven with Words was telling stories of and through community members, whether by interviews of the living or documents reflecting the lives of the dead. We had to be mindful of the larger objective (in addition to the details of course requirements, grades, etc.) of telling history through those who have lived it. I view our work as "intercultural inquiry," as Linda Flower defines it, or a "literate action" in which the partners involved "attempt to use the differences of race, class, culture, or discourse that are available to them to understand shared questions" and to "transform both the inquirers and their interpretations of problematic issues in the world" (186). Students and community members negotiated meanings-of and about local history and racial injustices-in sustained intercultural dialogues.

Whose Community in Community-Based Research? On November 11,2006, I stood side-by-side with Robert Jefferson at the 19th annual National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Reading, Pennsylvania branch Freedom Fund Banquet as Jefferson, Gilyard, Williams, and Johnson unveiled Woven with Words to the largely African American audience. We were thrilled and proud to be there. However, when it was my turn to speak, having been asked to do so by my community partners, my legs and hands were shaking. I had written my speech with great care, still somewhat insecure about how I would be received by the crowd. My voice trembled with trepidation:

This book is for all of you. But it is also, in my view, for all of us. And it is especially for all our children. All our children need to know the truth of history, its good and its bad. My own children are 12 and 14, and throughout the process, I talked with them, not only about the facts my students uncovered, but the implications of what they uncovered. Complimentary copies of these Books will be in all our schools and libraries and other educational institutions throughout Reading and Berks. Hopefully, all our childr~n will

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learn about your rich heritage-your despair and your triumphs--as you became the strong community you are today. (emphasis added)

I was cognizant and tentative about my use of "my" and "our" and "your." In the community created through the partnership we were often, but not always, able to break down the Black/white binary, and it took diligent effort and shared goals to do so. But outside the community we together created, the binary operated in ways that were instructive. For example, some members ofthe community insisted that a substantial piece of the article written by Brian Engelhardt on African Americans and Berks County baseball be deleted, as this section focused on the efforts of a white man, Gordon Hoodak, to create a baseball field for inner-city youth. 14 To Engelhardt, including Hoodak's story illustrated how far race relations had come in Reading baseball. However, from what I could gather, to the community partners whose African American history had for too long been buried under white histories, Hoodak's story overlaid their own. One group's history rarely happens in isolation, but must its telling always include all parties? Maya group have its own history? Does telling one group's history inevitably distort or erase another's? These multifaceted questions yield no easy, or perfect, answers.

Ultimately, I believe that the Berks County African American History Project was a success, but it was a complex moment of success in a morass of more complex moments. Together, community partners, students, and faculty gave the gift of history to the African American community and the entire Berks community. Universities and communities can and must work together across racial groups, but we must also be mindful that despite the successes we attain, there are larger issues to be addressed, and work still to be done-in the classroom, in the communities, in American history, and in the banquet room.

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Notes

1 1500 copies of the book were printed with funds from a Pennsylvania State House legislative grant acquired by Representative Thomas Caltagirone and by Penn State University.

2 All students were invited to present their work, but only four students, all white, chose to do so.

3 At Penn State Berks, the vast majority of students are white. The project was open to all students, but to participate, students had to enroll in one of two courses. With the help of the Multicultural Counselor and Equal Opportunity Director, I actively recruited students of color. However, the two courses for which students could enroll to participate were upper level courses serving the American Studies and Professional Writing majors and would count only as electives for students in all other majors. The faculty at Penn State Berks is also primarily white, with very few African Americans. The then Academic Dean sent an email to all faculty asking for participation in the project, and several responded, although some dropped out before the project began.

4 I reject the phrase "speaking with and to rather than for others," as suggested by Alcoff(llO-ll). See also ethicist Sharon Welch who states, "We must work with, rather than for, others" (qtd. in Green 19, emphasis in original). Although I understand that in these contexts, Alcoff and Welch use "others" to acknowledge the dominant/non­dommant status of white and African American groups in the United States and to recognize the erasure of African American history by white power structures, I am concerned that the term "others" perpetuates the notion that whites are the central norm against which all nonwhites should be measured.

5 I received approval to conduct research on human subjects for this project through the Penn State l!niversity Compliance Office.

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------------------- --- ------------------------------------- --

Community partner's interview statements are unedited. I am using pseudonyms for my students. Student's questionnaire responses are unedited, except for obvious punctuation errors, spelling errors, and typos.

6 "Because it is a form of service-learning and thus involves students, CBR is distinguished from other forms of activist, community, and university research collaborations (Strand 86).

7 See also Elisa von Joeden-Forgey and John Puckett, who taught CBR projects in which undergraduate history majors at the University of Pennsylvania worked with West Philadelphia high school and middle school students on local history projects and were "doing history" (120, emphasis in original).

8 Although I understand Stoecker's use of the word "powerless" and believe it applies to the historical erasure of African Americans in U.S. history, I do not believe it applies to the community leaders of this project. These individuals, all of whom are retired but lead full lives as volunteers, are deeply involved in bettering the lives of African Americans in Berks County and can point to many important successes.

9 Alcoff and Mohanty use the term "minority" to indicate the amount of a group's power and access to resources.

10 A rigid identity politics also problematizes what an insider should or should not say, that is, essentialist claims that, based on an individual's politics, he or she is not '''Black enough,' or 'Queer enough,' or 'real feminists,' etc." (Jacobs 4).

11 I had hoped that Gary Kunkelman would collaborate with me on this article, but he was unable to do so. He and I co-edited Woven with Words, and we spent a great deal of time before, during, and after the project discussing the issues it raised.

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12 Teacher-scholars who use service-learning in the history curriculum

tend to agree that the combination offers "a starting point for history, a present situation with immediate and pressing problems" (Harkavy

'and Donovan 1). By addressing local concerns and integrating the community into the curriculum, "historians can engage a wider public than they normally do in specialized monographs or traditional college courses," and students find that history is more relevant to them (Bailey, et al. 1722). Through community service learning, "students will struggle to define their responsibilities to a diverse public, including persons who might not be part of their own social groups and those who do not share their values or culture" (1723).

13 Boyle-Baise and Binford's students investigated the history of the Benjamin Banneker School, a segregated school that operated from 1915-1951 in a Midwestern college community.

14 In the original draft of the article, Engelhardt (one of two contributors to Woven with Words who were not students) wrote about the efforts ofHoodak, in his twenty-fourth year as principal of Lauer's Park Elementary School in Reading, to work toward establishing an inner­city baseball field. It was announced on October 22, 2004 that in a partnership between the Reading Phillies and the Olivets Boys and Girls Club, a baseball facility on the site of the former Lauer's Park baseball stadium would be built, which the Olivets would lease from the Reading School District for one dollar a year. A $200,000 donation was received from an anonymous donor who conditioned his gift on the field being named after Gordon Hoodak. The Gordon Hoodak Stadium opened in 2006.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Barbara Roswell, Stephen Parks, and three anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback and assistance in improving my article.

Works Cited

Aguirre, Adalberto Jr., and Jonathan H. Turner. American Ethnicity: The Dynamics and Consequences of Discrimination. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004.

Alcoff, Linda. "The Problem of Speaking for Others." Cultural Critique 37 (1991): 5-32. Rpt. in Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity. Ed. Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1995.97-119.

Alcoff, Linda Martin, and Satya P. Mohanty. "Reconsidering Identity Politics: An Introduction." Alcoff, Hames-Garcia, Mohanty, and Moya 1-9.

Alcoff, Linda Martin, Michael Hames-Garcia, Satya P. Mohanty, and Paula M L. Moya, eds. Identity Politics Reconsidered. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.

Aldridge, Delores P. "The Kitchen's Filled-But Who are the Cooks?: What It Takes to Teach Black Studies." Phylon 49.112 (1992): 61-70.

Bailey, Douglas, Gabby DeVinny, Carre Gordon, and Paul John Schadewald. "AIDS and American History: Four Perspectives on Experiential Learning." The Journal of American History 86 (2000): 1721-1733.

Bushouse, Brenda K. "Community Nonprofit Organizations and Service-Learning: Resource Constraints to Building Partnerships with Universities." Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 12.1 (2005): 32-40.

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Boyle-B'aise, Marilynne, and Paul Binford. "The Banneker History Project: Historic Investigation of a Once Segregated School." The Educational Forum 69.3 (2005): 305-14.

Chesler, Mark, and Carolyn Vasques Scalera. "Race and Gender Issues Related to Service-Learning Research." Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning spec. iss. (2000) 18-27.

Davi, Angelique, Michelle Dunlap, and Ann E. Green. "Exploring Difference in the Service-Learning Classroom: Three Teachers Write about Anger, Sexuality, and Social Justice." Reflections: Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy VI (2007):

41-66. Filene, Peter G. "Integrating Women's History and Regular History."

The History Teacher 13.4 (1980): 483-92. Flower, Linda. "Intercultural Inquiry and the Transformation of

Service." College English 65 (2002): 181-201. Gilman, Rhoda R. "Exploring Multicultural Perspectives in History."

Minnesota History 53.6 (1993): 225-29. Graham, Maryemma, with S. B. Dietzel, and R. W. Bailey. "Review:

Historizing the Black Experience or Telling One's Own Story." College English 52.2 (1990): 194-202.

Green, Ann E. "'But You Aren't White:' Racial Perceptions and Service-Learning." Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 8.1 (2001): 18-26.

Harkavy, Ira, and Bill M. Donovan. Introduction. Harkavy and Donovan 1-9.

Harkavy, Ira, and Bill M. Donovan, eds. Connecting Past and Present: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in History. Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education, 2000.

Harper, Michael S. "American History." Dear John, Dear Coltrane. 1970. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985. 62.

Jacobs, Walter. "Living & Learning Difference that Makes a Difference." Multicultural Education 9 (2002): 2-10.

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Joyce, Joyce A. Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews. Albany: SUNY P, 2005.

Kendall, Frances. "Understanding White Privilege." 2001. <http:// www.uwm.edu/%7Egjay/Whiteness/Underst_White]riv.pdf.> 23 Apr. 2007.

Lowy, Richard F. "Eurocentrism, Ethnic Studies, and the New World Order." Journal 0/ Black Studies 25.6 (1995): 712-36.

Moya, Paula M. L. "What's Identity Got to Do With It? Mobilizing Identities in the Multicultural Classroom." Alcoff, Hames-Garcia, Mohanty, and Moya 96-117.

Olneck, Michael R. "Re-naming, Re-imagining America: Multicultural Curriculum as Classification Struggle." Pedagogy, Culture and Society 9 (2001): 333-54.

Phillips, Jane. '''We'd Be Rich in Korea': Value and Contingency in Clay Walls by Ronyoung Kim." MELUS 23.2 (1998): 173-88.

Sandy, Marie, and Barbara A. Holland. "Different Worlds and Common Ground: Community Partner Perspectives on Campus-Community Partnerships." Michigan Journal o/Community Service Learning 13.1 (2006): 30-43.

Stoecker, Randy. "Community-Based Research: From Practice to Theory and Back Again." Michigan Journal o/Community Service Learning, 9.2 (2003): 35-46.

Strand, Kerry J. "Community-Based Research as Pedagogy." Michigan Journal a/Community Service Learning 7 (2000): 85-96.

Tchen, John Kuo Wei. "On Forming Dialogic-Analytic Collaborations: Curating Spaces WithinlBetween Universities and Communities." Alcoff, Hames-Garcia, Mohanty, and Moya 193-208.

TuSmith, Bonnie, and Maureen T. Reddy, eds. Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002.

von Joeden-Forgey, Elisa, and John Puckett. "History as Public Work." Harkavy and Donovan 117-33.

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Zimmer, Steve. "The Art of Knowing your Place: White Service Learning Leaders and Urban Community Organizations." Reflections: Writing: Service-Learning, and Community Literacy VI (2007): 7-26.

APPENDIX A

Interview Questions for NAACP Executive Board Members and Director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum

1. What were your initial goals for this project? 2. Before meeting with anyone from Penn State, did you have

any expectations or preconceived ideas about the races and! or ethnicities of the Penn State students and faculty who might become involved with this project?

3. When the project began and you met face-to-face with participants from Penn State Berks, how did you feel, given the racial and ethnic make-up of the project team?

4. Please describe your feelings about working on this project about African American history with primarily white students and faculty.

5. Do you think there are any problems or concerns, generally, with whites telling the stories or writing the histories of African Americans?

6. If you answered yes to Question #5, do you think these problems or concerns were alleviated to some degree in the Woven with Words project? If so, how? If not, why not? Please explain.

7. What is your response to the first few sentences of the introduction to Woven with Words, written by Gary Kunke1man and me:

On November 5, 2005, at the annual NAACP Reading Branch Freedom Fund Banquet, Mr. Frank Gilyard, Director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum on North

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10th Street in Reading, asked the audience to support the expansion of the museum. He implored, "Let us tell our own story." Although many of us from Penn State Berks who

. worked on this project are neither African American nor from Berks County (some students live here while going to college, while others commute to campus from their homes elsewhere), we knew from the start that the African American community in Berks does, indeed, need to tell its own story. We worked diligently to ensure that these stories were told through the community's eyes.

8. How pleased are you with the final product, Woven with Words? 9. Are you aware ofthe Berks African American community's overall

response to Woven with Words? What positive comments have you heard? What negative comments have you heard?

10. Has this interview led you to think differently about any matters we have discussed? Please explain.

APPENDIXB

Questionnaire for Penn State Berks Student and Graduate Participants in the Woven with Words Project

Please respond to the following questions with as much detail as you can. If there are any questions you wish to skip, that's fine.

1. To what extent did your involvement with Woven with Words lead you to reflect on your race/ethnicity?

2. To what extent did your involvement with Woven with Words lead you to reflect on and learn about the poorly documented, even erased histories of African ~mericans?

3. If you are a non-African American student: To what extent were you comfortable writing about a marginalized group's history? Did

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it initially raise any discomfort for you? If so, to what extent was that discomfort alleviated throughout the project?

4. If you are an African American student: To what extent were you comfortable with your non-African American peers writing about your group's history? Did it initially raise any discomfort for you? If so, to what extent was that discomfort alleviated throughout the project?

5. To what extent did this project and course help you to understand the concept of white privilege? Please explain.

6. To what extent, in your view, did the course materials and content infonn the Woven with Words project? Please explain.

7. To what extent, in your view, did the Woven with Words project infonn the content of your course? Please explain.

8. If you presented your research at the annual Pennsylvania African American History Conference in Harrisburg in April 2006, what did it feel like to be speaking to a primarily African American audience? Please explain.

9. If you presented your research at the annual Pennsylvania African American History Conference in Harrisburg in April 2006, how do you feel the primarily African American audience responded to your presentation? Please explain.

10. In addition to historical infonnation, what did you learn from your conversations with members of the Berks African American community? Please explain.

11. As you are aware, the courses contained elements of ethnohistory, the process of becoming so integrated into a group as to alter one's angle of vision. To what extent was your "angle of vision" altered? Please explain.

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Composing Cultural Diversity and Civic Literacy: English Language Learners as Service Providers

Adrian J. Wurr, University of Idaho

.

This paper reports on recent research investigating the effects of

service-learning on linguistically and culturally diverse college

students enrolled in a first-year composition course. Two separate

. studies, a pilot and main study involving native (NS) and non-native

(NNS) English speaking college students, explore how students

: from diverse sociolinguistic backgrounds respond to and gain

~ from service-learning. The results were mixed, with the initial study

indicating NNS students often experience more difficulty finding and

successfully completing work in the community while the main study

found a similar group of NNS students to expect and gain more from

service-learning activities than a comparative group of NS students.

Implications for introducing diverse student populations to service­

learning activities are discussed in light ofthese findings.

Despite the increasingly diverse student populations found in American schools, research investigating the efficacy of involving linguistically and culturally diverse learners in

service-learning programs is not well represented in the literature. Although service-learning has been applied to some foreign language contexts, including the teaching of Spanish (Beebe and De Costa; Gerling; Hellebrandt and Varona; Hellebrandt, Arries, and Varona; Olesksak), Russian (Leaver), and English (Kendrick et al.), examples of

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using service-learning with ESL students have only recently begun to appear (Barfield; Heuser; Minor; Seltzer; Wurr; Wurr and Hellebrandt).

Involving NNS students in service-learning activities, however, may raise issues typically not seen in foreign language contexts. As Hamp­Lyons notes, there are at least two distinct groups ofNNS students on most American college campuses (227). One consists of immigrants who often have lived in the country for several years, attended American schools, and have a high degree of integrative motivation. This group is often referred to as generation 1.5 because linguistically they may exhibit NNS traits but identify themselves as more culturally aligned with NS students. Another consists of international students whose first day outside their home country is often their first day in an American classroom. Although well-educated and highly motivated, international students may not intend to live in the United States permanently, and thus might position themselves differently than immigrant or generation 1.5 students in respect to the surrounding local community. Such complexities may be unique to the NNS student experience and need to be investigated more thoroughly in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) literature related to service-learning. As Adler-Kassner, Crooks, and Watters noted nearly a decade ago, there is (still) a need to gain

a better understanding of how ideologies connect and affect interactions and under-standing among students, instructors, academic, and nonacademic institutions and community members, each of whom may bring different ideologies and politics to the table. (11)

With this in mind, I review some early reports on service-learning in TESOL, then describe two studies, a pilot and main study, involving NS and NNS students enrolled in first-year composition courses that included a service-learning component. While earlier reports from the same studies have focused on student writing performance and research

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methodology (Wurr, "Service-Learning" and "Text-Based Features," respectively), this article focuses on student motivation and social orientation in service-learning.

Service-Learning in TESOL Initial research on using service-learning in the teaching of English as a second or foreign language has been largely limited to case studies, as illustrated in the following examples. Richard Seltzer was one of the first TESOL practitioners to explore the use of volunteer activities in his classroom. In a paper presented at the 15th annual Rocky Mountain Regional TESOL, Seltzer described how he had involved lower­intermediate level NNS students at Glendale Community College in service-learning projects as conversation partners for senior citizens at a local nursing home. The students, both resident immigrants and those on student visas, wanted native-speaking English conversation partners who might offer more insights into American culture. Since the goals for the speaking skills course included creating opportunities for the students to practice listening and speaking in real-life situations, creating volunteer opportunities for the students to work with native English speakers in the community made intuitive sense. So with the help of a service-learning coordinator at his school, Seltzer was able to find several community organizations that welcomed the students' interest and involvement in their programs.

In a handout distributed at his presentation, Seltzer echoes the sentiments of foreign language teachers who have incorporated service­learning into their classes:

Since I started connecting the volunteer/service learning program to my ESL classes (primarily in the upper levels of listening/ speaking), I have seen a golden opportunity to connect students with people in the community who can benefit greatly from what the students can bring them, while at the same time getting much needed practice in using English in real-life situations with native

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speakers. Further, students can get a real picture of what life is like for some Americans, without the sugar coating of a video or a glossy textbook about American culture. Most importantly, human contacts develop far beyond the period of service for which student receives credit.

Integrating service-learning into NNS courses such as Seltzer describes adheres to the principles of good practice in service-learning identified by Congress and educators. As such, Seltzer is justified in describing the project was "a win-win situation" for everyone involved.

In 1999, Noah Barfield published a Web site outlining a rationale for using service-learning in ESL composition, and described one such course he taught at Washington State University. One unit of the course involved students in a service-learning project in which they researched environmental issues in an American city of their choice, analyzed the data from various perspectives, and then applied their knowledge to local volunteer activities such as writing information brochures for nonprofit agencies and cleaning up a local river bed. Though Barfield's account is mostly descriptive in nature, he claims that learning outcomes for the course included an increase in student motivation, engagement, and writing quality.

One of the most significant early publications on service-learning in TESOL is an article by Linda Heuser that appeared in the winter 1999 edition ofTESL Canada Journal entitled "Service-Learning as Pedagogy to Promote the Content, Cross-Cultural, and Language­Learning ofESL Students." The article describes a sheltered-content course called American Society for Japanese college sophomores studying in the United States. Drawing on approximately six years of trial-and-error experience in integrating service-learning into the course, and invoking a critical pedagogy rationale enriched by the works of bell hooks, Ira Shor, Henry Giroux, and Paulo Friere, Heuser

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describes the goals ofthe sociology and intensive ESL courses as being. met through an inquiry- and experientially-based approach to learning.

All students accompanied instructors on two days of intensive community service at a youth and homeless shelter. Toward the end of the service activity, students had the option of joining one of two groups led by one ofthe instructors: either a women's crisis center or a residential mental health facility for adults. The two groups then reconvened to process their experiences together through a series of oral and written prompts that moved from the concrete to the abstract, from the personal to the social. Although this group reflection activity was followed up by an individual writing assignment in class the next week, Heuser admits that such limited exposure to and reflection upon such complex social issues was not enough to sufficiently challenge students' preconceived beliefs on the issues.

Such limited interaction threatened to reinforce, rather than to call into question, existing stereotypes and preconceptions. Thus, the questions that need to be addressed are: how can short­term activities be performed in a manner that is not patronizing or disrespectful, and how can they be carried out in a way that promotes content, cross-cultural, and language learning? (68)

Heuser concludes that although the impact ofNNS service-learning activities on both the student and community partners must be carefully assessed, the opportunity for increasing language proficiency and cross­cultural understanding holds great promise.

However, the recent publication of an edited collection of works of service-learning in applied linguistics (Wurr and Hellebrandt) offers a glimpse of a second generation of scholarship on service-learning in TESOL and related fields. As Edward Zlotkowski notes in his forward to Learning the Language of Global Citizenship: Service-learning in

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Applied Linguistics, scholarship in service-learning has matured across the disciplines significantly in the last decade.

Although it seems hard to believe, only a decade has passed since one had to make a case for the relevance of service-learning .... While one of the primary goals of the AAHE series was to demonstrate service-Ieaming's academic legitimacy within individual disciplinary areas, the present volume has been able to take advantage of a far more receptive intellectual climate to reach out to a truly global scholarly community. (xv)

One of the sections included in Learning the Language of Global Citizenship is devoted to research reports, including a two-and-a-half­year ethnographic study by Gresilda Tilley-Lubbs that documents the emerging relationships between Spanish university students and members of the Latino community in southwest Virginia as they cross socially constructed boundaries of ethnic groups, educational levels, and socioeconomic status. Through numerous observations, interviews, and reflection papers the author concluded that both groups benefited from their service-learning partnership in enhanced understanding of and appreciation for diversity in second language acquisition and learning, and in building cross-cultural friendships. Research reports such as this and the ones reported below respond to repeated calls over the last decade by service-learning experts to move beyond anecdotal evidence in reports on research service-learning to ensure broader acceptance for service-learning among educational and political leaders (Eyler and Giles; Gelmon, Furco, Holland, and Bringle; Zlotkowski).

Pilot Study The pilot study outlined here contributes to the above case studies by introducing a more systematic exploration of the efficacy of using service-learning in TESOL. The goal of the study was to compare -the impact of service-learning on NS and NNS students enrolled in a literature-based first-year college composition class. The course sought

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to strengthen students' awareness and skills as readers and writers in different personal and social contexts. Readings and class discussions focused on the various forces-personal, social, economic, political, historical, and/or psychological-that shape the world in which we live. Community-based research assignments were included in order to provide students with "counter-texts" (Pietrykowski 93) to the portraits of the people and communities provided in the readings. Students struggled in their writing and class discussions to resolve the tension between what they read and what they observed; that is, they had difficulty resolving the dissonance created by the counter-texts of the secondary and primary sources of information on their research topics.

Formal and informal writing assignments given before, during, and after the students' engagement in service-learning activities were analyzed to determine the effects of service-learning on students' writing, critical thinking, and perceptions of community, academia, and self. The results of that study suggested that service-learning does appear to have a positive effect on participants' self-perception as students and community members, but that NNS students face greater challenges in successfully completing service-learning assignments than NS students.

Although NS participants were initially skeptical of the assignment while NNS participants were enthusiastic, the NS participants' opinions changed for the better once they became involved in their work while NNS participants became frustrated by their inability to overcome linguistic and sociocultural barriers-real or perceived­that stood between them and their research objectives. For example, NNS students' journals often spoke of frustration and disappointment in navigating their way through the social services bureaucracy, particularly those related to children's welfare such as daycare centers and homes for abused or at-risk children. One NNS stUdent wrote in her journal,

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When I mentioned to Mike that I want to volunteer to work there, he told me he has to interview me first, after that then I will know whether I will be able to work there. When I discovered that the earliest appointment he can make is early April, I know I'm in trouble. I hunt for another childcare.

This result was kept in mind in designing the main study, and additional attention and support was provided to assist NNS students in finding suitable service-learning placements.

Main Study The main study was conducted in an introductory first-year composition course grounded in rhetorical traditions of the early Greeks. (The pilot study was conducted in the second-semester part of the year-long sequence). This first-semester composition course introduces students to conventions of analytical, persuasive, and personal-reflective writing and to academic research practices and conventions. Native and non­native English-speaking students are typically placed into parallel versions of the course (English 101 for NS and English 107 for NNS); the writing assignments, grading standards, and required texts are the same in both, but the exclusive non-native English speaking student population in English 107 allows instructors to provide special attention to language and cultural issues that may arise in class discussions, assigned readings, and written work. A limited number of combined English 1011107 sections are also offered to students interested in international careers to provide increased opportunities for cross­cultural discussions and interactions.

Over the course of the semester, students wrote in and out of class to develop a repertoire of writing skills and prepare for different writing situations in the university and in public life. Service­learning composition classes such as those in the pilot and present study reported here apply an Aristotelian theory of rhetoric to public discourse. Students in these courses typically write for and!

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or about local community groups, gaining the benefit of writing for real audiences and purposes, and on matters of importance to both the writer and the community. In the main study, students selected service projects related to the course theme of the land and people of the Southwest. Representatives from a variety of public schools and non-profit organizations were invited to the university to describe their organizations and projects so that the students could make a more informed choice concerning which organization to volunteer with, or whether to find others on their own that were better suited to their interests and needs.

Method The main study focused on issues related to student writing performance, motivation, and social orientation. The general research question guiding this inquiry was "In what ways does participation in service-learning impact student learning?" As mentioned earlier, the portion of the main study related to writing performance has been previously described in this journal (WUIT, "Text-Based Features") and another publication (WUIT, "Service-learning") and indicates service-learning had a positive impact on student writing (also see Feldman et al. for an extension of this work). The specific research questions pursued in this paper are concerned with the issues of student motivation and social orientation:

1. Do NS and NNS students anticipate the benefits of service-learning similarly? Why or why not?

2. Are NS and NNS students affected by service-learning similarly? Why or why not?

Following the service-learning assessment model advanced by Driscoll and her colleagues, these questions were addressed using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research techniques. Data collection and analysis included course syllabi, assignments, pre- and post-treatment surveys, semi-structured interviews with representative samples of

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students in the service-learning courses, informal and formal student . writing, course evaluations, a reflective journal kept by the teacher­

researcher. Those related to the research questions discussed in this article are outlined in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Research questions, data collection, analyses, and variables

Question Data Analyses Variables DoNSandNNS Classroom and Coding for attitude Attitude toward students anticipate community and motivation in current service; the benefits of observations; completing course awareness service-learning analysis of formal assignments and of personal similarly? Why or and informal community service. strengths, limits, why not? writing samples; goals, and fears;

interviews and understanding surveys. and application of

community service to course content.

Are NS and NNS Classroom and Coding for social Reactions to students affected community orientation, demands and by service-learning observations; attitude, and challenges of similarly? Why or analysis of formal motivation, service; plans for why not? and informal including and attitudes to

writing samples; references to future service; interviews and personal, academic, change in perceived surveys. civic, and/or career understandings;

goals or plans. current and intended roles in school and society.

Two surveys were used to measure the impact service-learning on student learning, motivation, and social orientation. The pre-activity survey was administered in the 8th week of the semester after most participants had settled on a service project but before they had started the service activities; the post-activity survey in the 14th week after most participants-had completed their service activities. The surveys consisted of 22 questions with 5-point scaled responses (e.g., very much, some, little, not at all, and no opinion). The surveys asked

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students questions such as: Prior to this class, how much experience have you had volunteering or with service-learning? How challenging is/was the service at the agency? To what extent does/did community service help you understand course concepts? To what extent does/ did community service enable you to learn about a culture or cultures different from your own? To what extent does/did community service enable you to understand how communities and cities in America work or function? Does/did community service increase your sense ofbelongingness in the community? Does/did community service increase your intentions to volunteer in the community in the future? One week after the surveys were administered, semi-structured follow­up interviews were also conducted by independent researchers with a representative sample of the participants in order to explore further salient trends in the survey data.

Formal and informal writing assignments given before, during, and after the students' engagement in service-learning activities were also analyzed to determine the effects of service-learning on students' writing, motivation, and perceptions of community, academia, and self. As outlined in Figure 2 below, formal writing assignments consisted of three essays: a rhetorical analysis, a persuasive essay, and a reflective essay. Traditional library research and background knowledge on the topic formed the knowledge base for the writing students produced in the comparison groups, while students in the service-learning groups could also draw upon first-hand observations gleaned from volunteering at non-profit community agencies for 15 hours or more over a one-to­two-month period.

Informal writing assignments consisted of approximately 25 short writing assignments completed in class and online. These short writing assignments helped students develop ideas for their essays and community documents, reflect on course concepts and community engagement, and practice different writing styles (e.g., children and adul~ audiences) and genre (e.g., personal letter, business memo, email

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to peers or instructor, and newspaper editorial). Interview data and infonnal and fonnal writing samples were analyzed and coded for referents related to the major research questions.

Figure 2: Essay Assignment Sequence and Descriptors for Service­Learning and Comparison sections of English 101 and 107

Service-Learning Sections

1. Rhetorical Analysis essay (5-7 pages): Students research a local environmental or social problem from various viewpoints.

2. Persuasive Essay (4-6 pages): Students suggest ways to solve or reduce the impact of the environmental or social problem they researched.

3. Reflective Essay (4-6 pages): Students write a preface to a portfolio on their accomplishments over the semester, explaining why they chose the texts they did, whom they are intended for, and what purpose the texts or portfolio is meant to serve.

Participants

Comparison Sections

1. Rhetorical Analysis essay (5-7 pages): Students closely examine one or more texts to better understand the rhetorical strategies used by the authors.

2. Persuasive Essay (4-6 pages): Students research a controversial issue and attempt to persuade readers to their view of the Issue.

3. Reflective Essay (4-6 pages): Students reflect upon their semester-long inquiry of an issue or discipline.

Participants consisted ofa select group ofNS and NNS students enrolled in separate sections of English 101 (for NS students) and 107 (for NNS students). Each class section (labeled C1-C4 in Figure 3) had a total enrollment of between 17 and 20 students and one graduate student or adjunct faculty instructor. Students in the service-learning sections did not know about the service-learning component of the course before enrolling, but were infonned of this and other work related to the course in the first week of the course.

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Figure 3: Language by curricula factorial design

NS (English 10 1 ) NNS (English 107)

Service-Learning Cl (N=19) C2 (N=16)

Comparison C3 (N=19) C4 (N=19)

There were a total of 19 NS participants in the service-learning section of English 101, 16 NNS in the service-learning section of English 107, 19 NS in the comparison section of English 101, and a combined total of 19 NNS students from two different comparison sections of English 107. Male and female participants were roughly equal in numbers and age, yet came from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds: English, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. Additionally, over halfthe participants in the service-learning courses stated some religious affiliation in a demographic survey. The majority of these students identified themselves as Muslim, Christian, or Catholic; other religious groups identified included Jewish, Hindu, Greek Orthodox, and Lutheran affiliations. Students in the service­learning sections of the course also differed in their familiarity with service-learning or volunteer work. NS students in the service-learning sections had significantly more prior experience volunteering than NNS students. In these and other ways, the participants represented the cultural and linguistic diversity typically found on college and university campuses in America today.

Results Do NS and NNS students anticipate the benefits of service-learning

similarly? Why or why not?

The data analysis to this question considered early differences in the participants' attitude and motivation in completing their service­learning and course assignments. Pre-activity survey and interview

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responses, as well as class and community observations noted in a teaching journal composed the bulk of the data.

Overall, students in both groups displayed a similarly positive response to the service-learning component of the course, but the reasons for this response differed from group to group. Participants in both groups appeared to believe strongly in the ability of one person to make a difference in the world, as can be seen in the response of both groups to the pre-activity survey question, "Do you think that one can make a difference in this world? 4 = very much; 3 = some; 2 = little; 1 = not at all." The mean scores were 3.5 for NS and 3.7 for NNS students in English 101 and 107, respectively.

In the mid-term interviews, participants were asked, "Do you believe one has a social responsibility to help those in need?" One NS student responded, "I think so. It's just a Good Samaritan sort of thing. You might as well go out and help people because at some point in your life you'll need help as well. So why not?" This response was typical of the level of optimism and personal agency exhibited by participants in both groups.

Where the two groups differed was in what they believed they would gain from helping others as they completed their community service assignment. While both groups believed helping others was good, NNS students also mentioned the academic and personal benefits they would gain from service-learning more than NS students. In all, there was a significant difference between NS and NNS students on 7 out of 22 pre­activity survey questions focusing on cognitive and affective domains of learning, as well as task interest and prior volunteer experience.

In all cases except prior volunteer experience, the NNS students' mean score was greater than that for NS students, indicating that NNS students thought that service-learning would have greater benefits for them than the NS students did. Specifically, in terms of cognitive and

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affective factors, NNS students felt more strongly that service-learning would allow them to learn about cultures different than their own and about how communities and cities in America function. In terms of academic benefits, they also thought the tasks in the community were a more interesting and useful way to learn about composition than did their native English-speaking counterparts. For example, in the interviews, all participants said they felt a responsibility to help others in need if they could. But NNS students also mentioned other reasons for doing community service, including the potential cultural benefits and opportunities for practicing English conversation skills. Likewise, in their informal writing assignments during the first half of the semester, NS participants were much more likely to mention civic­minded motivations for doing service-learning such as helping others and giving back to the community while NNS students tended to focus on academic and career-related benefits. This difference between each group's written and interview comments is summarized in Figure 5 and gives some indication of the differing motivations each group had for engaging in service-learning.

Figure 5: Percent of pre-activity comments by class and category

English 101 (NS) English 107 (NNS)

Career/Academics 52% 66%

Civics 33% 13%

Personal 15% 20%

As will soon be discussed, the NNS students remained more positive about service-learning throughout the semester than did the NS students. This result is both interesting and encouraging since it differs from results obtained in a pilot study. The teacher-researcher was the same in both studies, and so the results of the pilot study were fresh in his mind when the main study was conducted. Thus, the difference

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in the NNS students' response to service-learning in the pilot and main study may be attributable to teacher-intervention to prevent the problems that occurred in the pilot study from reoccurring again.

Are NS and NNS students affected by service-learning similarly? Why or why not?

To answer this question, comments gathered towards the end ofthe semester from NS and NNS participants regarding their service­learning experience were analyzed. These post-activity comments included excerpts from participants' final reflective essays, informal writings, and post-activity survey and interview responses. The comments were analyzed in order to document any changes in student perception or understanding over time.

In the previous section; the results indicated that both groups responded positively to service-learning, but that NS and NNS participants were attracted to service-learning for different reasons. The question now is, "Were the students' expectations realized?" and the answer in large part is "Yes!" Though the actual service-learning experience was not an unqualified success, post-activity results indicate that most students left the course with positive feelings about having contributed to, and learned from, the community. The sentiments expressed in the survey results were reinforced by those expressed in the students' written comments.

What did the participants in each group learn? There was a significant difference between groups on 5 of the 22 post-activity survey responses. Perhaps most significant among these was the survey question which asked, "How much did you learn working at your community agency?

4 = very much; 3 = some; 2 = little; 1 = not at all." As in the pre-­activity survey, both groups answered the question positively, but NNS

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l

students remained more enthusiastic than NS students did. The mean score for NNS was 3.4 compared to 2.8 for NS students.

The relative positions ofNS and NNS participants in American society may help explain the difference between groups, particularly when, as was the case in this study, the NNS participants consisted largely of international students with little previous experience living in America. Such students are often eager for opportunities to interact with, and learn more about, American people and society, as the popularity of the program Heuser describes indicates.

Although few students initially saw a connection between their work in the community and the lessons they were learning in their composition class, more students began seeing some connection towards the end of the semester. The strongest course-community connections students noted towards the end of the semester tended to focus on rhetorical concepts such as audience awareness or the use of rhetorical appeals and details to support a point, as illustrated by the following excerpts from student journals:

[M]ost of the techniques that I learned in class, I was able to apply in helping Fort Lowell. This helped me learn exactly what works and why. Fort Lowell became a practical application of the techniques I learned in class. I learned in class to research for our Rhetorical Analysis and persuasive essay, but for Fort Lowell I did not have the luxury of a teacher pointing me in the right direction every step of the way. I had to do all of the research alone. [ ... ] Overall, the work that I did for Fort Lowell Elementary School really helped me to connect the techniques I learned in class to the real world. (NS student)

The more I worked at Shalom House the more l began to experience totally different environment that I had been ever exposed to. [ ... ] The more one can understand others' concerns

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the better he can communicate with them and help them to solve their problems. [ ... J I learnt that the knowledge about my audience helps me to choose the right techniques in communication with them. But throughout my service learning project and my research I realized that knowing not only who they are but also what kind of people they are, what are their main concerns or problems makes me even more effective in interacting with them. And this discovery became a purpose of presenting my work to the young people, especially in college. (NNS student)

Civic participation, the sense of giving to and becoming part of the local community, was also a strong motivating force for both groups throughout the semester. But NNS students often also noted personal gains such as increased confidence and cultural awareness, while NS students were more apt to note an increased sense of altruism as well as gaining better organizational and time management skills.

As I carried on with my work, I realized that being an International student coming to the u.s. for the first time, it is very important to get oneself acquainted with the culture. Service learning has not only helped me achieve that, but it also helped me to build confidence in myself, and to improve my interpersonal skills in terms of persuasive and communication skills. (NNS student)

Looking back on my experiences with underprivileged children I am left with a feeling of satisfaction and pride. However, there were many distractions to my service learning and I accomplished to face them as small obstacles that one can overcome. After reviewing my work as a whole, I realized that I have learned a lot from my recent experiences and that putting them down on paper has helped me to mature as a writer. (NS student)

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Civic and personal benefits were also complemented by an increased understanding of social issues. When asked, "Because of your experience, what community needs have you become more aware of?" interview participants were able to cite specific problems in the community and possible solutions to these. Comments such as: "After school programs and sports seem better than jails in deterring kids from getting into trouble with the law" or "We need to provide homeless people with programs to help them. I became more aware of how we need to not so much give them money, but help them get back on their feet again" help indicate the more complex understanding of social issues students developed. While such comments might sti11leave something to be desired, they do indicate a developing awareness of salient factors in the social issues discussed, and this after a short semester and 15 hours spent in the community.

To summarize the results to the second research question, then, NS and NNS students were affected similarly by service-learning on some measures and differently on others. Both groups left the course with a positive sense of having contributed to, and learned from, the community. Though NS participants acknowledged the academic benefits of service-learning more frequently in their post-activity responses than in pre-activity responses (a 1 0% increase), NNS participants remained more enthusiastic about what they learned from the community overall. These written comments suggest that the different language and cultural backgrounds of both groups had a significant impact not only on how the members of each group initially perceived the benefits of service-learning (research question #1), but also on what they ultimately gained from participating in such programs (research question #2).

Discussion This study found that service-learning had a generally positive effect on social, cognitive, and affective factors related to student learning. However, the results also show a marked difference between NS .

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and NNS students' response to service-learning. This between-group difference is largely due to the students' differing sociocultural backgrounds. NNS students had significantly less prior volunteer experience, and thus lacked what language professionals refer to as "process competence" (Legutke and Thomas 227) and service­learning specialists more specifically refer to as "civic literacy" (Barber 44). With regard to service-learning, civic literacy can include the background knowledge on service organizations in America, interactional patterns and performance routines likely to occur at a service site, as well as an understanding of the historical and cultural values and traditions associated with volunteering in America. NS students more familiar with volunteerism and the service industry in American society can more readily draw upon this knowledge to help them complete the task at hand.

This result underscores the importance of recognizing individual differences in students' awareness of and preparedness for service­learning activities. Many service-learning professionals already do, in fact, recognize this on some level as they select different types of service activities-from individual or group "one-shot" service assignments (e.g., Barfield; Gottschalk-Druschke, Pittendrigh, and Chin) to more involved projects that may continue for a semester or more and be explored through several different courses and disciplines (e.g., Flower and Heath; Herzberg; Warschauer). Service-learning providers could build upon this knowledge of how to scaffold service projects to better match a task's complexity to the leamer's present abilities by considering more carefully the differing needs and motivations ofNNS students in successfully completing a service­learning project.

One reviewer of an earlier version of this article noted similarities between the NNS students described in this article and the Basic Writers described in Rosemary Arca's chapter in Writing the Community. 'Ybile NNS and Basic Writers often do share feelings of

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marginalization in society, they also may have differing motivations to overcome this problem, as the responses ofNS and NNS students to service-learning in the main study here suggest. Given that awareness of the similarities and differences between learners can help educators make more informed decisions in how best to adapt curricula to specific teaching and learning contexts, I conclude by offering some suggestions and resources for service-learning practitioners working with diverse student populations.

Applications for Instruction The difference between NS and NNS participants' previous volunteer experience in the present study suggests teachers and service-learning program coordinators might want to allow students new to service­learning to work in groups on projects of relatively short duration. The security and collective knowledge that group work fosters can be comforting to students venturing into unfamiliar territory. Helping students negotiate cultural differences is a common topic in the service­learning literature, particularly that focusing on multicultural education. (e.g., Boyle-Baise; Dahms; Dunlap; O'Grady). Below are some tips culled from these and other resources that I have found useful when involving NNS students in service-learning.

To assist in placement decisions, introducing students to the role volunteering and civic participation play in American society can be a useful first step in activating their schema for engagement in such activities. Inviting international students to describe service organizations and projects in their home countries with which they might be familiar also helps students connect prior knowledge and information to the task at hand and may help students planning international careers to remain involved in community service projects in the future. One way this was done in the main study reported here was to show students a video of a service-learning program at a neighboring community college, then initiate a discussion of similar e~periences they may have had in the past and the rationale for and

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challenges in undertaking service-learning projects in the future ("Commitment") ..

Dunlap suggests sharing previous students' anonymous journal entries and critical reflections as another useful method to help students prepare for service-learning projects. Such pre-service discussions, she notes, can provide "a vehicle for expressing concerns and for sharing experiences with the instructors" while also providing a model for future critical reflections students might be asked to engage in once they have begun their service-learning projects ("Methods" 208). Similarly, inviting campus service-learning coordinators and community partners to meet with students and describe what it is they do can also help students engaging in service-learning for the first time to make more informed decisions about where and how to volunteer; it can also help students overcome fear of the unknown by putting a friendly face on an unknown organization. Many campuses organize community service orientations or other events to promote various service initiatives and to help facilitate the information sharing and placement selection process. Activities such as these help NS and NNS students alike understand and prepare for service-learning projects.

Several community-based writing textbooks now available also provide useful strategies to help prepare students for service-learning projects (Berndt and Muse; Deans; Ross and Thomas). Ross and Thomas offer several chapters to help students understand and prepare for a service­learning assignment, including discussions on the nature of service, how to contact agency representatives and negotiate an effective service-learning contract. Deans includes readings appropriate for different stages and types of service-learning activities while also making the useful distinction between writing for, about, and with community. This is as helpful to NNS students as it is for others. Indeed, while neither of these books specifically mentions NNS students working as service providers, the activities and examples included in the texts target students who are unfamiliar with service-

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learning and community-service organizations, a group that typically includes NNS students.

To help NNS students overcome linguistic barriers to successfully completing their service-learning projects, instructors can supplement the above-mentioned resources by involving students in role-play activities to practice common interactional patterns and performance routines likely to occur at a service site. Some earlier works in experiential language learning can be particularly useful in this regard (see for example, Eyring; Jerald and Clark; Kohonen et al.; Legutke and Thomas), as can more standard ESL Composition textbooks such as the one by Ruth Spack that include sections on primary research techniques such as interviewing, conducting surveys, and taking field notes. Kirlin also offers a useful taxonomy of the underlying background knowledge and cognitive skills necessary to effective participation in civic discourse.

Classrooms and communities in America are becoming more and more diverse every day. In order to ensure that all students and citizens have equal access to, and opportunities for success in, service­learning courses and community service projects, educators and service providers need to become more aware of the unique resources and challenges linguistically and culturally diverse learners bring to service-learning. As the marked contrast in NNS students' response to, motivation in, and learning from service-learning activities in the pilot and main study shows, with adequate preparation and support, NNS students, like all others, can and will excel in thoughtfully designed and well-organized service-learning programs, and may in fact, become some of the most enthusiastic participants.

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Notes

1 I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this article and Barbara Roswell for their helpful and thought-provoking comments on an earlier version of this article.

2 The pilot study is described in more detail elsewhere (Wurr, "Pilot").

3 One student in C2 and C4 declined to participate in the study, hence the difference in the number of enrolled students and study participants.

4 Because of a low participation rate in the comparison section of English 107, an additional group ofNNS participants was added from a combined English 1011107 class, bringing the total number of comparison NNS participant to 19.

5 Percentages represent the total number of pre-activity comments in each category compared to the total number of all pre-activity comments written by students in each class.

6 NS participants said they had had "some" prior volunteer experience while NNS students indicated they had "little." The mean score for NS participants on this question was 3.2 compared to 2.1 for NNS participants.

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---, and Josef Hellebrandt, eds. Learning the Language a/Global Citizenship: Service-Learning in Applied Linguistics. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.

Zlotkowski, Edward. "Linking Service-Learning and the Academy: A New Voice at the TableT' Change 28.1 (1996): 20-27.

Zlotkowski, Edward. Forward. Learning the Language a/Global Citizenship: Service-Learning in Applied Linguistics. Eds. Adrian Wurr and Josef Hellebrandt. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.

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Review of Keith Gilyard, Composition and Cornel West: Notes Toward a Deep Democracy. So. Illinois Press. 2008

Linda Flower, Carnegie Mellon University, July 2, 2009

William James argued that for a difference to be a difference, it must make a difference. He would have liked Keith Gilyard's new book on the relevance of Cornel West to

composition. One strand of the book is a lucid theoretical guide to West's intellectually expansive yet deeply passionate call to public engagement. The other strand is an artfully perfonned guide to actually being an educator in the experimental, improvisational tradition of American pragmatism.

After opening with a 1998 airplane conversation over Pennsylvania with West, Gilyard overviews the theoretical terrain of Cornel West's prophetic pragmatism-his reworking of American pragmatism's progressive tradition (rooted in Emerson, James, and Dewey) into a more robust fonn of social engagement built on prophetic witness. West's grounding in Christianity, Marxism, and the African American struggle has allowed him to move the rational secular discourse of progressivism into a fonn of criticism grounded on faith in the capacity and agency of everyday people and on a vision of transfonnation that, in Wesfs hands, is unashamed of its foundational nonns of individuality and democracy, even as it subjects them to critical questioning.

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The book's central chapters explore three critical concepts that develop across West's work. The first, West's Socratic commitment, is "a relentless examination of received wisdom coupled with a willingness" to engage in fearless "confrontation with irresponsible power" (p.5). For Gilyard this means strategies for reading and writing that reveal social and political realities embedded not only in obvious choices of discourse style but also in nuances of conversation and language. The second organizing theme, prophetic witness, names a style of unflinching criticism which starts, in West's words, with "the causes of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery and highlights personal and institutional evil, including the evil of being indifferent to personal and institutional evil." However, it is a style that takes us beyond an objectivist progressive agenda into a passionate, though not naive, commitment to a trans formative vision and to the possibilities of individual fulfillment and democratic connectedness. Just as prophetic witness draws on West's roots in Christian spirituality (not to be confused with dogma), his notion of tragicomic hope captures West's own intellectual style. In George Yancy's terms, West speaks as an African American "blues man in the world of ideas ... affirming life in the midst of tragedy." In a gem of an essay in chapter 5, Gilyard parallels this intellectual style with his own evocative reading of how the soul and funk music of the 60's and 70's morph into current hip­hop. He shows us how to catch the artists' "double voiced rhetorical strategy" that combines critique, pain and popular appeal, with an assertive identity that "keeps on keepin' on."

Gilyard makes good on the promise of his title-Composition and Cornel West-by illuminating the powerful subtext running throughout West's work: the way discourse shapes our perceptions of and responses to the pressing issues of our time. Gilyard's Deweyan end­in-view is what he calls a rhetorical education in the strategic uses of language, which would recast composition as a "highly political term" as it draws students into a life of engagement (p.3). Although .Gilyard defines critical composition as an analysis of oppression, I am

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even more drawn to his own practice of reflective awareness of our own interpretive process. He invites us into a classroom discussion of a powerful but indirect short story portraying the (unexplained) cool reception given by one woman to another (a visitor with a Jewish name). As students are asking "what's the point?" this classroom dialogue gradually reveals how powerful currents of assumption, bias, and rejection are carried out and revealed in nuances oflanguage.

Not afraid to bring this questioning stance to topics where many would fear to tread, Gilyard's view of rhetorical education (like his own writing) invites students into dialogue about spiritual discourse, class division, and race matters. For example, what would it mean to bear "prophetic witness" (as a writer or teacher) when your goal is not winning an argument or promoting your position, but eliciting a reflective inquiry? Or what shape might deep democracy take in the "protopublic classroom" of rhetorical education?

Like the jazz men and women both writers valorize, Gilyard often performs his own rhetorical improvizations on philosophical arguments. Discussions of Foucault, or race or class segue into mini­dramas set in a classroom dialogue or in a revealing conversation with black graduate students. These vignettes form an on-going conversation with the reader that instantiates complex theoretical claims in the differently complex understandings of situated knowledge. They take us into a space where ideas and arguments are embodied and performative-able to express the rich webs of context, motive and consequences in which they are embedded. Such situated knowledge, in my own experience with community rhetoric, has the power to tum mere talk into intercultural inquiry and democratic dialogue. It lets Gilyard translate the notion of deep democracy into rhetorical practice.

The book's opening plane conversation comes full circle in a fascinating closing dialogue between these two jazzmen of ideas. Gilyard throws some hardballs (e.g., Plato's criticism of rhetoric and

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literacy) and West tosses back, "I have a very distinctive view of that line, 607b in book 10 of Plato's Republic ... " We soon find ourselves in a synesthetic world of poetics/rhetoric/philosophy with an African American beat: "West: You know Nietzche talks about a danceab1e education. Give me a Socrates who dances. A god who dances. A gay Socrates ... A singable paideia" (p. 103). Such conversation-in its effortless modulation from questioning social practice, to dissecting dualisms, to discussing spiritual striving-models both the intellectual life West argues for and the engaged rhetoric Gilyard invites us to teach toward.

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Kirk Branch. Eyes on the Ought to Be: What we Teach About When we Teach About Literacy. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007. 216 pages

David Stock, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The title and thesis of Branch's book-"eyes on the ought to be"-come from Myles Horton (1905-1990), an American educator and activist who established with fellow educator­

activist Don West the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. Highlander is one of three sites of nontraditional adult education Branch examines to illustrate ideological and material consequences of educational literacy practices. Writing from a perspective informed by New Literacy Studies and critical pedagogy, Branch analyzes educational discourses and literacy practices in three sites-a jail, a job training program, and the Highlander school-to demonstrate how teaching literacy "always involves a vision of the present inextricably tied to a vision of the future" (214). Whether explicit or veiled, this vision of the world as it "ought to be" shapes debates about adult educational practices and determines which conceptions of literacy will be valued and implemented in particular settings. A central aim of Branch's book is to identify and evaluate the ideal worlds that such discourses and practices invoke.

Branch's own "ought to be" is firmly rooted in social justice, and his book challenges all teachers of literacy to view education as a social

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project and to view themselves as activist citizen-teachers. Branch's activist orientation stems from Horton's philosophy of education, which closely resembles Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy, and from volunteer and work experience in community learning centers, a vocational institute, and a correctional educational program, which are briefly narrated in the book's introduction. Though intended for all scholars and teachers of literacy, readers with experience or interest in such sites of extracurricular education will find Branch's analysis especially relevant and compelling.

Branch covers much theoretical ground in his first chapter. Echoing Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton's critique of the New Literacy Studies as fostering a limiting view of literacy as local, Branch argues that understanding and evaluating the literate practices of the classroom requires attending both to the local conditions of literacy and to the kind of world such practices imagine for their students. By accounting for the "rhetorical construction" of the world that ought to be, Branch theorizes a model for analyzing educational literacy practices that serves as a corrective extension to the primarily local work of the New Literacy Studies. This methodological position, which is further informed by Basil Bernstein's work, allows Branch to counter strictly empirical or wholly objective treatments of educational literacy practices that yoke conceptions of literacy and literacy education to the world as is.

This tendency among literacy theorists to privilege the real rather than ideal world is illustrated in the second and third chapters, where Branch critiques dominant discourses of correctional and vocational education for perpetuating literacy myths. In correctional education discourse, basic literacy functions to remediate the social and cognitive defects of prisoners to prepare them to become upstanding, tax-paying citizens. Such assumptions reinforce the assumed causal link between illiteracy -and criminal behavior and obscure the role of institutions and social systems in shaping reductive notions of criminality and correctional

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education. In contrast, viewing correctional education as a social exercise in democratic participation radically reconfigures prisons as sites of rehabilitative education rather than as sites of punishment and remediation. Branch reviews strands of correctional education research that draw on cognitive-democratic theory to illustrate how creating alternative educational spaces within coercive institutions has enabled prisoners to engage in self-directed learning and genuinely democratic practices. Such spaces redefine not only the nature of prisons but also the role of all persons and systems connected to prisons-"prisoner­students," teachers, correctional officers, the criminal justice system, and public officials. In this instance, revised literacy practices revise the world of correctional education as it ought to be in a democracy.

In his chapter on vocational education discourse, Branch shows how the literacy of job training is understood in terms of discrete competencies and as a tool to serve economic needs. Such vocational literacy education is assumed to hinge on the neutral transfer of basic skills that can transform people into competent, autonomous, lifelong workers and learners. Competency in this discourse is understood as a skill rather than an inherent human capacity, and literacy is understood to be functional rather than critical. As with correctional education discourse, the consequence of framing literacy education in this way is an emphasis on individual deficiency in need for remediation

. through basic education, which in turn serves to reinforce not simply impoverished literacy education practices but also glaring economic disparity, perpetuating a world that clearly ought not to be.

Readers unfamiliar with Horton or the Highlander Folk School will find the fourth chapter particularly interesting. Branch elaborates on the school's history and philosophy, analyzes the literacy practices of its citizenship classes, and critiques the discursive practices of local critics and the FBI that led to the school's closing in 1961. Branch's analysis suggests that Highlander constitutes a rich site of inquiry for

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understanding how literacy education ought to function in a democracy by furthering social justice.

Branch addresses the tension between real and ideal worlds of educational literacy practices in his final chapter, acknowledging the dilemma activist teachers face when attempting to disrupt systems of domination while working within institutions that regulate instructional discourses and thwart critical pedagogy. Elaborating on Bernstein's model of the pedagogic devise, which describes the transformation of knowledge as it moves from specialized to instructional fields, Branch highlights vulnerable points in this process where teachers can resist dominant instructional discourses that too often limit literacy education. Branch turns to critic Lewis Hyde's synthesis of the trickster as a rhetorical trope to frame such resistance, suggesting that teachers adopt a "trickster consciousness" that will enable them to work within and against dominant pedagogic discourses and institutional practices.

In a field often preoccupied with academic literacies and pedagogies, Branch's thoughtful analysis of three discrete but related extracurricular educational sites compels literacy teachers to consider the worlds their teaching practices endorse. If twenty-first century composition studies continues its public tum, then Eyes on the Ought to Be can help us envision the kind of world that literacy instruction ought to create.

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