This article discusses the successes and vulnerabilities associated with combining the pedagogical methods of Theater, Composition, and Community Literacy in the Composition classroom. It examines how the ideas of Augusto Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed" and Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" can be combined to support…

This is a snapshot of a service learning course founded on narrative medicine, a clinical practice designed to replace impersonal care with empathic listening. By utilizing poetry therapy techniques among nursing home populations, a program called "HPU LifeLines" promotes a community literacy of illness and provides psychological and…

From our perspectives at the University of Louisville, we address the need to provide structures for graduate student participation in community-engaged scholarship. Architectures of participation such as the ones we describe in this piece--the Community Engagement Academy and the Digital Media Academy--offer graduate students the opportunity to…

Partnerships between writing across the curriculum (WAC) and civic engagement (CE) programs are not given much attention but these partnerships improve each program significantly. CE programs can borrow models from WAC for professional development and obtain support for specific kinds of writing assignments; WAC programs can find among CE…

This essay presents perspectives on the range of potential reciprocity in literacy research and service learning, focusing attention on opportunities for individualized and institutional reciprocation, as observed by Takayoshi and Powell (2003). Researchers and students involved in community-based research or service programs have several…

Prompted by Cushman and Grabill's call to "ask and answer the difficult questions" about service learning ("Reflections" 2009), this article addresses the difficult question of "what happens when service learning goes wrong." Authors engaged in family history writing and service learning with a local historical group. When the project was unable…

Why, if service learning has "come a long way," has it not had the impact on the university or on the community that proponents expected? This article details interviews with eight teachers at Virginia Tech who use service learning in their classrooms, with particular attention to the convergence of literacies that occurs when teachers,…

Hidalgo County, Texas, is one of the poorest in the country. The population in the Lower Rio Grande Valley is 85% Mexican-American. Underprepared for college and juggling full time jobs, their own children, and sometimes dysfunctional extended families, students often do not expect to succeed. I recently taught a Creative Writing course which…

This essay describes service learning as a space for civic dialogue. In the project-oriented course discussed below--an oral history of a south-side African-American neighborhood in Chicago--civic dialogue took shape when middle class students from a range of backgrounds at the Illinois Institute of Technology interviewed residents of different…

This article outlines one potential model for a graduate-level course in community literacy studies. Ellen Cushman and Jeffery Grabill taught this course for the first time at Michigan State University in the spring of 2007. In this article our colleagues with varying disciplinary backgrounds reflect on the course, its readings, and their…