Writing and Community Action: A Service-Learning Rhetoric with Readings, 1st edition

Writing and Community Action: A Service-Learning Rhetoric and Reader encourages inquiry into community and social action issues, supports community-based research, and shepherds students through a range of service-learning writing projects.

Several chapters offer pragmatic advice for crafting personal, reflective, and analytical essays, while service-learning chapters present experience-tested strategies for doing collaborative writing projects at nonprofit agencies, conducting research on pressing social problems, writing proposals that respond to campus and community concerns, and composing oral histories. The assignments help students to see themselves as writers whose work really matters. Provocative readings spark critical reflection on community service and a range of social concerns (including economic justice, literacy, education, homelessness, race, and identity). Focusing on invention, audience analysis, and the social purposes of writing, Writing and Community Action encourages students to adopt a rhetorical frame of mind.

Hopeful in tone, this book makes clear the ways that writing can serve as action in both academic and community contexts.

• Covers a variety of academic genres—the personal essay, analytical essay, research essay, definition essay, reflective essay, empirical report—as well as several kinds of service-learning projects—writing for non-profit agencies, reflecting on outreach experiences, and starting grass—roots projects.

• The book strikes a balance between provocative readings and pragmatic support for writing. Reading selections are deeply integrated with corresponding writing activities. Activities guide critical reading and flesh out the key rhetorical features of a particular genre.

• Each chapter features activities to help generate ideas and options for each assignment, followed by emphasis on a writing process that involves discussion, drafting, peer workshops, collaboration, revision, and editing.

• Community—based research assignments offer strategies for integrating interviews and observations with traditional academic research methods.

• Most chapters include at least one sample composed by a student.

• Compelling readings in each chapter address pressing social and civic issues such as economic justice, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, noblesse oblige, oppression, education, religious perspectives on service, the nature of community, and so on.

• Includes a Special Section on Literacy, which can prove particularly useful for students doing service—learning projects that involve tutoring.

• Maintains a focus on ethics and reflection. Because all writing involves ethical decisions, and because service—learning raises particularly complicated questions of reciprocity and social justice, many readings, activities and assignments spur reflection on ethical concerns.