Bridging the Gap: New Scholars, New Forms of ScholarshipCase Study: Michigan Technological University

Authors: Elizabeth A. Flynn, Michael Moore, Mariana Mueller
Michigan Technological University

If or when community service is addressed in professional development guides aimed at graduate students in the humanities, little is said about it, and it is usually seen as subordinate to the more important activities of research, teaching, and academic service. As Director of the Graduate Program in Rhetoric and Technical Communication at Michigan Tech, Elizabeth Flynn teaches a two-term, one credit proseminar in which she uses two such books, Cindy Moore and Hildy Miller’s A Guide to Professional Development for Graduate Students in English (NCTE, 2006) and Gregory Semenza’s Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities (Palgrave, 2005). Service in both books is defined primarily within the context of the academy, and its value, according to these authors, to the extent that it has value, is that it makes graduate students more employable.
Semenza’s chapter on “Service and Participation” begins with the remarkable statement, “Of the three most important activities performed by the majority of graduate students—service, teaching, and research—service is the least important” (224). He nevertheless acknowledges its importance and proceeds to develop what he calls a “Philosophy of Academic Service.” He prefers the word “participation” to “service” since he finds that the former emphasizes the agency of the individual, though for him service is primarily academic service—committee work within departments, universities, and professions. His discussion of community service is brief, though he does conclude his short paragraph on the subject by urging his readers to continue to participate in their communities and perhaps pursue work in an institution that values community service.
Moore and Miller take a more pragmatic approach, acknowledging that that “it is now very common for position announcements to highlight qualifications and abilities in areas outside of teaching and scholarship” (77). These abilities within a university context include chairing committees, ‘jump-starting’ a new major program, running a writing center, or editing a scholarly journal (77). Moore and Miller do acknowledge, however, that nonacademic employers may be interested in hiring people with administrative experience including “organizing community-service events, supervising a new project or initiative, or writing the company newsletter” (77). They find that abilities developed through extracurricular professional activities include being well organized and collegial (78). Although they do not have a separate discussion of service learning outside the academy, they do mention that nonprofit organizations often offer volunteers opportunities such as writing grants, newsletters, and public-service announcements (89).
In both books, service is primarily academic service, it is considered peripheral to research and teaching, and its value is that such work will look good on one’s curriculum vitae. Neither author recognizes that research, teaching and service are often inseparable within an academic context, and neither emphasizes that service outside the academy has educational value in and of itself and can enhance a graduate student’s knowledge base and awareness of social and economic inequities and injustices. Indeed, work outside the academy can change a graduate student’s career goals and life path. In this essay, we illustrate some possibilities for integration of research, teaching, and service by describing a graduate-level course taught by Elizabeth Flynn, “Literacies of Survival,” which Michael Moore took. Mariana Mueller suggests some additional possibilities for the integration of research, teaching, and service at the graduate level.

Literacies of Survival
The course, which Flynn taught in the fall of 2007, focused on the rhetorical and linguistic dimensions of poverty and oppression in cultures within the United States and elsewhere. Flynn describes the purpose of the course in the syllabus as follows:
We will investigate the literacy practices of oppressed groups (i.e., colonized, impoverished, marginalized). We will also investigate the ways in which literacy practices have been used against these groups to maintain the domination of colonial or postcolonial authority, the wealthy, or those who hold position of power within a particular society. Some questions we will consider will include: How have literacies been used as forms of resistance? What alternative literacies have emerged as a way of circumventing domination? How does attention to the situation of survival change our understandings of what literacies are and what kinds of literacies are possible? What might be some ethical literate practices that majorities could develop in order to mitigate the oppression of minorities?

Course texts included Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Women, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham’s edited collection, Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial, Ernest Stromberg’s edited collection, American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic, and Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol’s edited collection, Just Advocacy? Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminism, and the Politics of Representation. The Fanon and Memmi texts provided an historical context, the Algerian revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Trinh text introduced her experiences of an a Vietnamese-American filmmaker within the context of women’s struggles in Vietnam, the Olson and Worsham text is a collection of interviews with individuals who have theorized postcolonial struggles such as Homi Bhabha, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Stuart Hall. The Stromberg text introduced the context of Native Americans within the United States, and the Hesford and Kozol text provided discussions of human rights abuses in a variety of global contexts.
The course was structured much like a traditional academic graduate course with responses to readings and a research paper at the end. The research paper assignment, which followed a proposal (paper # 1) and a literature review (paper # 2) was to “Explain the literacy practices of a group of survivors or a survivor or of the representations of survivors or a survivor making use of material in assignments #1 and 2 but expanding on them and shaping them into a focused argument.”

From the Classroom to the Community
Courses such as the “Literacies of Survival” can, of course, expose new and advanced graduate students to materials that address and explore the lives and literacy practices of people not often studied in more conventional approaches to rhetoric and composition studies. As a practical matter, organizing the books, papers, and presentations fit within the conventional graduate-course format, but what about after the course is over? How can students—some of whom may already work in community or transnational contexts, or desire to—integrate these materials and ideas into their work? How can a productive atmosphere found in the seminar format transfer to programmatic, departmental, and institutional environments that will inform both individual and collective efforts in understanding and enacting service and service learning? What kind of graduate pedagogy and support is available for new teachers with their efforts to do service learning work?
In the sections below, we illustrate how members in our department try to address these issues. Flynn, who teaches the “Literacies of Survival” course, describes her own work with a community-based organization locally and in Guatemala; Mueller reflects as a first-year graduate student in Rhetoric and Technical Communication as she explores some of the opportunities and constraints in integrating service learning in the first-year writing course that she teaches; and Moore provides some context for his transnational literacy work in Nicaragua.
We welcome feedback, response, and dialogue on the questions we raise here, and collaboration on the projects that we describe.

Flynn: Rhetorical Witnessing: Recognizing Genocide in Guatemala
Flynn’s teaching of the course was also directly tied to her own research and community service. While the course was in progress, she was writing an essay solicited by the Community Literary Journal that drew upon her experiences in Guatemala and that also described the work of a local organization for which she is a board member, the Copper Country Guatemala Accompaniment Project (CCGAP). The essay, “Rhetorical Witnessing: Recognizing Genocide in Guatemala,” co-authored with Rudiger Escober Wolf, a Michigan Tech graduate student who had been a student at the University of San Carlos, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, described two kinds of rhetorical witnessing, the murals on the walls of the University of San Carlos in Quetzaltenango produced by student resisters to a repressive government that was responsible for the deaths of over 200,000 Guatemalans, and letters written by accompaniers from the U.S. whose six-month stays in Guatemala to prevent further violence and to support efforts to bring perpetrators of violent crimes to justice were sponsored by CCGAP. As a member of the board, Flynn had met most of the accompaniers whose letters she discussed and was very familiar with the issues they raised and the problems they encountered. Flynn discussed her essay with the class as it was evolving and shared drafts of it with them. In providing a theoretical context for the piece, she drew heavily upon course readings, especially Fanon, Memmi, Bhaba, and Laclau and Mouffe. Also, Sue Ellen Kingsley, director of CCGAP, attended the class and discussed her experiences as an accompanier, as director of CCGAP, as well as recent efforts to make those responsible for the massacres pay for their crimes. Rudiger Escobar Wolf also attended the class and provided valuable context for the murals.

Service and Citizenship On and Off Campus
Although Mueller is new to the campus of Michigan Technological University and to the city of Houghton, Michigan, she believes it is vital that she and students integrate themselves into the community that resides off campus. Mueller believes an effective teacher works to understand her students and herself as citizens within their communities. She also believes that to be an effective teacher and student, she must understand the role the institution plays as a local, regional force, and how being a part of that institution affects her personally.
Mueller teaches an institutional required course called revisions, a course in oral, written and visual communication, into which she has integrated service learning. She was warned in many ways about the students she would encounter as a teacher of a required, second year writing course. But the only warning that has appeared true is, in her experience with undergraduate students (being one for so long herself) that students like hands on experience and that composition is not solely an act of the mind—the body is also a large part of how we process information and meaning making in our environmental interactions. In order to address the student’s needs, Mueller gets students to do leg work—figuratively and literally.
Mueller fears for the people of her generation and for the fate of the generation her students are a part of. She worries that apathy will spread like wildfire. She and her students are encouraged through their educational careers to follow the rules and told that they are unique and special—her generation thrives on individuality. She fears her students take seriously the ideal that they can have anything they want. As a teacher and a student, she has witnessed privileged, rule hungry students who are on the verge of becoming apathetic. As author Saul D. Alinsky wrote, “the most unethical of all means is the nonuse of any means” (Rules, 26). Mueller hangs on Alinsky’s words and makes sure she integrates service learning into her teaching and research. Alinsky was an advocate for engagement, and his ideas have been vital to fostering a service-learning component within a required curriculum.
Service learning has changed and enriched Mueller’s view of education. It means that education is available for any curious, compassionate, aware, conscious individual. Not just those who are “book smart.” She has noticed that here at Michigan Tech, the book smart students have the hardest time being motivated to engage in the service learning components. In order to meet the objectives of the course, established by the university, Mueller has students produce written, visual, and oral compositions that foster community awareness. During the semester students are required:
 To give a public oral/visual presentation of a global issue that has the greatest effect on their generation.
 To investigate a local/regional issue and provide suggestions for creating positive social change.
 To interview and meet with local “experts” on a local/regional issue of their interest.
 To find out how they can post their social issue raising posters on campus.
 To write a press release and submit it to local radio stations to market their public speaking event.
 To create and foster online, interactive communities regarding a social issue.
 To create a campus-wide “zine” that shares with their peers the social issues they researched during the semester.
At this time Mueller is not completely satisfied with her curriculum and the caliber of service learning she wants to integrate into her sections of the required course. However, she anticipate that her knowledge about service learning as well as her ability to integrate service learning into her classes will only strengthen and increase the longer she is a resident of the area.
She understands that creating a curriculum enriched by service learning activities takes time: preliminary organization, planning, and networking by the teacher for the upcoming course. At this time, she is currently working to create the kind of relationships within the community that will be essential for implementing a mutual, collaborative exchange of services for the next semester’s course. As part of that process, Mueller poses these reflective questions:
 What kind of graduate pedagogy/support is available for new teachers with their efforts to integrate service-learning work?
 What ethical issues arise when service learning is part of a required course?
 How might large institutions develop productive and reciprocal relationships in their communities and create opportunities for positive social change?

Transnational Literacies and Collective Expertise
At a time when universities are increasingly pressured to function according to market models and principles of “best practices” and “efficiency,” the field of community literacy and allied calls for service have developed as research areas, as pedagogies of writing, design, and interaction, and as forms of institutional, collective expertise between academics, community members, and community literacy workers.
Two decades of scholarship in rhetoric and composition related to service learning and community literacy attest to the productive nature of community work and scholarship. Moore’s work has focused in a small community in southern Nicaragua: the Solentiname archipelago. Solentiname’s geographic location is important both within Nicaragua and as a research focus by North Americans. The area includes 36 islands, of which six are populated, on the southern point of Lake Nicaragua, 20 miles north of Costa Rica. The total population is about 800 people, most of whom live on the islands of Mancarrón, San Fernando, San Felipe, and La Venada. Mancarrón is the “main” island, and the most populated, with approximately 300 people and 73 families. The people there, individually, as families, and as a community, are the focus of his project. Their geographic location is important to consider because even within Nicaragua, the islands and the people are isolated—access is by boat, only—there are no roads, motorized vehicles, or electricity. Solentiname, although populated for 5,000 years, first by Miskito Indians, and for the last four generations by their descendants and Spanish-speaking natives, did not even appear on Nicaraguan national maps until 1966. Because of their isolated location even within their own country, people on the islands often have an ambivalent attitude toward Nicaraguan governments and toward any sense of national identity. One of the first of several ironies of this situation is that Solentiname is often recognized as the birthplace of the Sandinista revolution and the cultural ideas that occupied the members of the Solentiname community formed "much of the foundation for Sandinista cultural policy" that emerged after the revolution of 1979 (Whisnant).
In terms of “survival,” then, it is possible to sketch out immediately some real, genuine, identifiable struggles that have faced Solentiname historically: food for survival comes from fishing and sustenance farming, the latter in hard, rocky, volcanic soil; cultural attitudes are shaped as much by their proximity to Costa Rica as their distance from the capital of Managua; and their role in a long, violent revolutionary struggle that resulted in the bombing and total destruction of the islands’ buildings and meager infrastructure in 1977, and the torture and killing of people by their own government’s air force and army. That is all local context; to the north, of course, is the U.S., whose influence is strong due to over a hundred years of political and military “interventions,” and its role in Nicaraguan politics via the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and more recently, “sustainable development” funding for projects that directly impact indigenous and cultural aspects of life on Solentiname.
Neither Mancarrón nor any of the surrounding smaller islands can afford, of course, full-time teachers. Moore’s reciprocal relationship with the community, then, is an agreement for him to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) and poetry workshops, in return for his being able to conduct ethnographic and participatory literacy research. Initial inquiries into the values that young people and adults in the community attribute to literacy reveal rich and complicated stories about the power associated with education and being able to make one’s own decisions and to act on one’s individual, community, and collective aspirations.
Moore’s work in Nicaragua takes place at a time, of course, when scholars such as Gayatri Spivak argue for the “charting of a practitioner’s progress from colonial discourse studies to transnational cultural studies” (ix-x). Spivak’s work recently also includes a community literacy project. A recent profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that,
Not long after she started a rural literacy project in one of West Bengal's poorest regions, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — leading postcolonial critic, translator of Derrida, high priestess of literary theory — asked the schoolchildren she was working with to do something very simple: write a little about themselves, on their own. […] even she was surprised by what happened next. "I hadn't realized there was no 'on their own,'" Spivak recalls. "They would write exactly what they did the day before, and when that was all used up, because their lives are the same as far as they're concerned, then they would write, 'A cow has two ears, two eyes, four legs, one tail.'" They were repeating something they had memorized.

I could not imagine heads that had been jammed shut,” she says. "It's a killing of the imagination” (McMillen, B16).

The work also takes place at a time when Nicaragua is revisiting its National Literacy Campaign of 1980, and reinstituting programs in rural areas to promote reading and writing. “Service” in these contexts reveal its role as more meaningful than when tied up in academic, institutional, forms of service, but in fact invites its reevaluation as a driving force behind teaching and research, rather than in its more tradition role as the “least important” aspect of academic life.


Works Cited
Alinsky, Saul D. Rules for Radicals. New York: Vintage Books, 1971.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Flynn, Elizabeth and Rudiger Escobar Wolf. “Rhetorical Witnessing: Recognizing Genocide in Guatemala.” Community Literacy Journal 2.2 (Spring 2008): 23-44.
Trinh, Minh-ha T. Woman/Native/Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
Olson, Gary A. and Lynn Worsham, eds. Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial. Albany: SUNY P, 1999.
McMillen, Liz. “The Education of Gayatri Spivak.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 54(2007): B-16.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon P, 1965.
Moore, Cindy, and Hildy Miller. A Guide to Professional Development: For Graduate Students in English., Urbana: NCTE, 2006.
Hesford, Wendy and Wendy Kozol. Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2005.
Semenza, Gregory Colón. Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1999.
Stromberg, Ernest, ed. American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2006.
Whisnant, David E. Rascally Signs in Sacred Places: The Politics of Culture in Nicaragua. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

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A Charter for Civic Engagement and Holistic Academic Process

Author: Winona Wynn

Rejecting the conventional academic wisdom that tells us to "put community-based programs and partnerships on hold or on the side until we achieve tenure," I resolve this day to hold my multiple subjectivities together by remaining holistic, committed, concerned, connected, and compassionate, but most importantly, centered in the constellation of my community. I will not be (re)moved. I will not be situated in an Academic Siberia – cold, isolated, alone, without connection, without story, without experiential memory. Upon traversing the borderlands of the Academy, I cling to my bundle – the intricacies and nuances of my personal landscape, my contested identity, and the artifacts of that contestation, recognizing that validation and reward lies in the confluence of Civic Engagement and Holistic Academic Practice—the meta-language of significant contribution.

Contemporary paradigms of civic engagement sanction a one-way storytelling trajectory, which disrupts a potentially holistic mosaic of academic experience. Through institutional mandate, researchers and scholars become expert interpreters touting the value of hierarchical constructs, imposing and validating various versions of the binary: us and them. Progressive paradigms of civic engagement translate community-based programs and partnerships into rich landscapes of potential data to be mined and then integrated into our academic experiences and those of our learning communities. Researchers and scholars who accept the Charter for Civic Engagement and Holistic Academic Practice and subsequently, a post-progressive paradigm of Civic Engagement will avoid the affirmation or denial of any experience or knowledge, but will instead embrace a collective space of disequilibrium understanding that “…we will arrive at every encounter shaped by our pasts and betrayed by our assumptions” (Bateson, 2000).

Challenging contemporary paradigms of civic engagement involves negating ourselves as the experts. Redefining progressive paradigms of civic engagement means infusing our process with reciprocal storytelling – negotiating vulnerability, blurring the boundary between us and them. Embracing the confluence of civic engagement and a holistic academic process involves recognizing that our rapidly changing world requires an ever-changing script, one that demands improvisation and grace, one that reveals both the full range of our human potential and the interconnectedness of our experiences.

My history as a single mother, a renegade daughter, a sister, a believer estranged from the common language of sacred protocol, a vagabond on a journey that rarely leads home… my history is inextricably linked to my yearning for civic engagement and holistic academic process. I cannot separate myself from the bloodlines of my family story, the bones of my present day experiences and the sinew of my future connections. They are alternately relinquished, broken, and unraveled by my dynamic and contested identities. My Lakota name, “Winona,” (which translates as First Born Daughter) along with an identifying surname to track both bloodline and blood quantum, is listed, as it has been for generations, on the official government rolls of the Ft. Peck Assiniboine/Sioux Tribe, a group currently hailing from Poplar Montana, but formerly associated with the entire landscape of the Great Plains of the North American Continent. My family connections embody the ongoing travails and triumphs of First Contact and Manifest Destiny. This is my legacy. I bring to the Academy and to my civic engagement experiences, an intellectual tradition steeped in the drama of human story (Behar, 1996).

In the interest of exploration and connection, incorporating “field trips” into my freshman composition classes, during my graduate fellowship teaching years, quickly became a critical process of community-based work that sustained my scholarly process. For two years (four semesters), students in my English 101 classes participated in two very specific, yet related field trips during which they pondered and applied the same research queries to both spheres: What constitutes a history? How are collective and/or individual histories preserved? Through what means are these specific histories preserved? In preparation for these field trips, students participated in small reading groups in which they discussed texts that would familiarize them with the context of our excursions. At both The Nez Perce Interpretive Center and The House of Charity (a homeless shelter for men), my students were challenged to be listeners, processors of story. I asked them to be prepared to share their own experiences, to share previously held beliefs if asked, to take risks, to offer up as a sacrifice to community, their version of the human experience. These opportunities for Civic Engagement were not framed as typical service learning activities. We did not go to serve the populations into whose communities we were invited. Instead, we went to participate and to silently consider and witness the inevitable clashing of cultural spheres:

We were going to eat lunch with these people. I entered the serving line and realized I needed to be humble. This was not difficult; I didn't hold myself in a higher regard than any of the people there. I was more afraid of hurting someone's pride, of infringing on their privacy. This was their life, not mine. What right did I have to ask questions and eat with them? I was going to go home to school, a job, and a soft warm bed after this. They were not...A middle-aged man approached my table. I listened attentively and he watched me eat. He told me that he owned a pair of old football pads which he wore to feel good. He told me he was lonely.

Field Trip to The House of Charity--- Student Reflection, 2006

Although, dialogical interactions with community may contradict validated and/or academically represented histories, particularly those emerging from a “no-contact” theoretical position, they may support a presence respectfully negotiated in the first person: the primary research experience—the story of us and them.

Finally, a university culture that acknowledges, accommodates, and encourages civic engagement will defy the constraints of space and time, will encourage and embrace an erasure of boundary, will strive to be known as a “community university” not as a “university community,” will respond to the crescendo of diverse voices, will be known for its innovative commitment to a holistic academic process…

Works Cited
Bateson, Mary. Full Circles, Overlapping Lives: Culture and Generation in Transition. New York: Random House, 2001.
Behar, Ruth. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

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Collaboration, Administration, and Community Engagement: One Grad Student’s Reflections

Author: Jaclyn M. Wells, Purdue University

In spring 2007, I began working with a fellow graduate student in Purdue’s Rhet/Comp program on a community engagement project that would become the basis for both our dissertations. Allen and I agreed to work together because of our mutual interests in community engagement and public rhetorics, as well as our complementary interests in professional writing and usability (what we would call “his things”), and writing program administration and adult basic education (“my things”). Early in our collaboration, we agreed upon a few fundamental issues:

1. community engagement projects should be sustainable;
2. community engagement should involve collaboration between community and university partners;
3. engagement work, communication among participants, and empirical research should happen continuously and in connection throughout projects.
   

After much discussion, the project Allen and I came up with is an ongoing collaboration between our community’s adult basic literacy organization and Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL). The main result or “product” of this collaboration is an autonomous section of the OWL that is devoted to adult basic literacy, the Community Writing and Education Station (CWEST). Specifically, the section includes resources about GED test preparation, workplace literacy, and English as a Second Language.

Allen and I have spent the past year enlisting the support of our professors and peers, communicating with the community organization’s administrators, writing grants and proposals, and drafting CWEST materials. We have thought and re-thought ways to make the CWEST what we envision, which is a sustainable online resource for students and teachers of adult basic literacy created collaboratively with our community’s primary adult literacy organization. Finally, we have planned two separate empirical research projects that will study the CWEST’s usefulness. These projects use different research methodologies and will be reported in two distinct dissertations, but we hope to connect our research and findings.

The CWEST has given me a unique perspective on community-based work. More specifically, the project involves cooperation between university and community participants, as well as between Allen and me in working on our uniquely collaborative-but-separate dissertations. The project has pushed me to consider the challenges of collaboration, including the university’s traditional biases against collaborative scholarship and the logistics of working with a community organization. Additionally, because the project has required me to take on numerous administrative duties like budgeting and communicating with participants, it has given me a unique perspective on the addition of administration to the traditional academic paradigm of teaching, research, and service. This essay offers a reflection on these issues and draws parallels between the collaborative and administrative aspects of community-based work.

Collaboration in Community-Based Work
As a high school student, I was often surprised when my expectations for community volunteer work were not realized. Specifically, I assumed organizations would be grateful for any help they could get from a willing volunteer like me, and I failed to consider their needs, how I could best serve them, or if I was even qualified to help. Though administrators, teachers, and graduate students who plan community engagement projects are generally not as naïve as I was at 15 (we would hope, at least), many of them do have similar expectations when becoming involved with community service projects. In return, they are often met with wary attitudes from community partners, just as I often was as a high school volunteer. Nowhere is this attitude more strongly felt than at a university like my own, where the physical and economic borders between the university and community and the sense that the university has “taken over” the community already lead to tension between community and university members.

Allen and I began the CWEST project aware of these issues because of our past experiences in community projects and our reading about others’ similar experiences. We were concerned at the project’s outset that community members might be wary of working with us. For our part, we were also nervous that our intentions to collaborate with community members might turn into an effort to “save” them or, as we began calling it, to “swoop” in and rescue them. It was easy to decide between ourselves that the project would have a No Swooping policy (when discussing the project and writing documents, we would often keep one another on track by calling out the other’s “swoopiness”), but creating the collaborative, mutually beneficial relationship that we desire with the community partner is a major challenge.

A second challenge we face is a more practical one: collaborating with a community partner can be difficult logistically because community organizations typically work within the constraints of tight budgets, overworked administrators, and part-time employees and volunteers. Though our community’s adult literacy organization has been an ideal partner for this project, concerns still arise. Allen and I are always aware that any time we schedule something with the organization, whether it is a meeting with an administrator or a presentation of our project during a staff meeting, we are adding to the already overburdened schedules of their administrators and teachers. We struggle to maintain the collaborative quality of our project without creating more work for our community partner. This will inevitably become even more of a concern as we move into the research phase of the project, in which more time will be required of voluntary participants.

A final concern about collaboration that the CWEST project has raised for me is the field’s perception of collaborative scholarship. The CWEST is a large project that, put simply, I could not do on my own. Not only does the workload itself require collaboration among multiple people, but the intellectual collaboration between Allen and me has added interesting dimensions to the project that working alone would not have produced. Despite the benefits of collaboration, I have met many surprised faces when I explain that my dissertation is the result of a collaborative project. One of the biggest hurdles in planning my dissertation has been finding ways to show that my work is separate from Allen’s (and therefore valued as “mine”) while still maintaining the benefits of collaboration. Because community-based work often requires such cooperation, enduring biases against collaborative scholarship at the graduate level might discourage some graduate students from basing their scholarship—particularly high-stakes scholarship like theses and dissertations—on their community work.

Administration in Community-Based Work
The CWEST project has shown me that administrative work is a fundamental part of community engagement. Specifically, the project has required me to learn about and perform budgeting, writing grants and proposals, developing relationships and communicating with university and community participants, and recruiting and supervising other graduate students to work on areas of the project. I have often felt overwhelmed by the administrative work required by the CWEST project. Moreover, my fears about focusing on community-based work early in my career have been compounded by fears about taking on too much administrative responsibility.

Despite these feelings, these administrative experiences have been beneficial to my graduate education. Many, if not most, Rhetoric and Composition faculty will perform administrative work during their careers, whether acting as director of first-year composition or the writing center, mentoring new teaching assistants, or serving on planning committees. Even though many faculty members will have administrative responsibilities, grad school often does not prepare students for administrative work. Encouraging graduate students to take on administrative responsibilities—in community engagement projects or other work—can help prepare students for the administrative work they’ll likely encounter in future faculty positions. Moreover, fostering the perception of administrative work as a valid area of study during graduate education can result in better prepared writing program administrators and also positively shape our field’s perception of administration.

Fostering Community Engagement in Graduate School
Parallel tensions exist for graduate students interested in community engagement, collaboration, and administration. The field’s current interest in community engagement is encouraging, but conventional academic wisdom that community-based work should be put on hold until later in one’s academic career is still present. Graduate students receive similarly mixed messages when they are encouraged to collaborate but experience both the logistical problems that arise in collaboration and negative perceptions toward collaborative scholarship. Finally, graduate students are often told that teaching, research, and service are the three legs of their future profession while observing that many professors work in a fourth leg, administration. In community engagement projects, these tensions are not only parallel, but also connected.

A program that accommodates graduate students’ interest in community-based work can address these tensions by valuing engagement, collaboration, and administration as important areas of study. Being encouraged to perform engagement, collaboration, and administration is a good first step to accommodating graduate students’ interest in such work. Additionally, though, students should be encouraged to study these areas in coursework and to reflect on these experiences and investigate them with empirical research. It is this reflection and research, perhaps, that will most foster sustainable, thoughtful interest in community-based work at the graduate level and explore the ways that such work entails collaboration and administration.

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Courage, Commitment and a Little Humility: The Path to Civic Engagement

Author: Jennifer J. Kidd, Old Dominion University

A few years ago I served as a graduate assistant in an experimental course for freshmen at Old Dominion University (ODU) in Norfolk, Virginia. New Portals to Appreciating our Global Environment (NewPAGE) united faculty and graduate students across disciplines to tackle instruction on pressing global issues such as climate change, health, sustainable development, and environmental resources. The issues were timely: Hurricane Katrina struck in the first few months of the course, and the content, including a five-hour community service component, had potential to spark social and civic responsibility among the 1800 students enrolled. There was just one problem: students hated it.

Expecting to have a choice of electives, students resented being told what to take. NewPAGE wasn’t related to their major, wasn’t something they were interested in, was too early in the morning, wasn’t going to be recognized if they wanted to transfer. There were a host of reasons, but by and large, students were set against the course before it even started. Perhaps due to this initial distaste, students found the course of little benefit (Morrow 17), ineffective in changing their beliefs or habits about the environment (Morrow 9) and less relevant to their careers. They also expressed lower interest in the content of the course as compared to other general education courses (Morrow 18).

Adding salt to the wound was the community service assignment. According to the NewPAGE syllabus, students were encouraged to select activities that “contributed to the health of the local environment” (3). They were given the option of choosing a pre-set activity such as stenciling “drains to bay” next to storm drains or researching an opportunity related to their major. However, many students expressed resentment at being forced to serve. “I am already paying for this course and the books, and now u are asking me to do free labor on top on that” (Morrow 220). “That is not the job of the university to obligate someone to serve the community,” another said (Morrow 220). Roughly equal numbers of students made positive comments as made negative ones, but the negative comments prompted action. After the first semester and an unfavorable evaluation overall, the community service component was canceled and NewPAGE was scheduled to be phased out in two years.

Adding to students’ perceptions of injustice, a group of vocal students labeled the course liberal and attempting to promote an activist agenda. Students claimed the faculty and guest speakers represented only one perspective, citing the current administration’s refutation of global warming as evidence. Some found the text, which was compiled by the instructors, to be biased and alarmist: “There is an incredible amount of biasism in the book, specifically with the statistics. I’m not exactly sure why this is, but it is possible this is a scaring tactic i.e. trying to scare us with inflated statistics so that we pay attention,” one student explained (Morrow 151). It is true, the text focused more on problems than solutions, perhaps inspiring disillusionment rather than motivation for change. Some NewPAGE instructors were quick to deny the activist charges and recruited conservative speakers to provide a more “balanced” perspective. I also found it easy to drop my investment in the course. “You have to be here, so let’s make the best of it” was an easier sell than “this is likely to be the most important course you’ll take.”

Why were we defensive and why was I so quick to shirk my own responsibility? Shouldn’t we affirm the students’ charge proudly? Yes, we are promoting activism; we want you to make the world a better place. The students’ sharp criticisms made me doubtful. Was it really “not our job” to lead students to serve?

From an institutional perspective, I understood. Today’s students have many options for how they’ll earn a degree. Institutions struggle to meet the demands of these “consumer” students, nearly 25% of whom leave their chosen institutions after only one year (ACT). It is risky for colleges and universities to emphasize students’ contributions to, rather than extractions from, society.

But, why did I feel the need to tiptoe around the activist agenda? Certainly I embraced the cause. In practice though, I had no experience. How could I tell students they needed to get involved, when I wasn’t involved myself? Prior to NewPAGE, I hadn’t done any community service. I doubted my own credibility. Reflecting on my own education, I realized that no one had ever tried to convince me that I had a duty to my community. I couldn’t help but wonder: if I had taken a course like NewPAGE, would I be a different person today?

NewPAGE was dropped from ODU’s requirements, but the concept clearly had merit. Where did we go wrong? To be successful, we needed student buy-in. Mandating environmental stewardship clearly was not the answer. If students are to see civic involvement as their responsibility, we must convince them of this, through both our rhetoric and our actions. Initiating a university-wide campaign promoting environmentally responsible behavior at all levels would be a start. And to its credit, ODU is taking many steps toward becoming a “green” university, but the effort and message need to be pervasive. Students, faculty and staff need to be shown how to do their part—and held accountable.

Novices like me shouldn’t hide our inexperience, but should exercise humility and commit to learning alongside students to act as responsible citizens. Students are likely to be more responsive to a course of joint discovery than to mandates.

Finally, we need the courage to stand our ground. If we are going to promote responsibility and activism, we can’t back down when it gets unpopular or shrug it off as someone else’s agenda. The path to civic engagement and social responsibility, our own and own students’, is a rocky one, bringing repercussions before rewards. But, inspiring commitment and responsibility requires commitment and responsibility. It’s no easy task, but it’s our job.

Works Cited
ACT. “National collegiate retention and persistence to degree rates.” www.act.org. 16 Oct. 2005
Morrow, Jennifer et al. “Evaluation of the New Portals to Appreciating our Global Environment course (NewPAGE: Gen 101) at Old Dominion University.” Norfolk, VA: Old Dominion University, 2005.
NewPAGE Syllabus. “GEN 101 – NewPAGE: New Portals for Appreciating our Global Environment Course Syllabus – Spring 2005.” Norfolk, VA: Old Dominion University, 2005.

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Does the Academy Need an “Extreme Makeover”?

Author: Allison Gross, University of Washington

In the spring of 2007 I helped organize a research cluster with three other graduate students at the University of Washington that focused on the question of public scholarship for academics. We formed the group Students Writing in Public (SWIP), and, taking it as given that public scholarship is of value because it extends the readership of our work beyond the academy and therefore the impact that it might have, committed ourselves to pursuing (via weekly writing meetings/workshops and quarterly guest speakers) how to go about doing this thing called “public writing.” At the time, we conceived of public writing as a translation of our academic work into non-jargon-laden prose, largely as articles and editorials for popular magazines and newspapers. We saw SWIP as an opportunity to try out different kinds of writing so as to engage with an audience less familiar with the “conversations” in which we regularly take part.

SWIP helped me, specifically, see the possibility of putting my writing skills to very different use than the academy traditionally calls for. As a volunteer tutor in an underfunded Seattle Public School and a teacher of composition, I worked with students to write on behalf of community organizations when we pursued external funding for a project to benefit a school where we volunteered. In editorials and letters to politicians, we wrote to educate people outside the academy about the problems facing schools. I felt that my volunteering and these “public” projects were commensurate with my pedagogical goals and scholarly interests and that they enriched my understanding of what I was trying to accomplish in my participation in SWIP. Unfortunately, two quarters in, SWIP’s energy flagged. Participation fell to the four of us that started the group and one or two other people at each meeting. While public practice by graduate student scholars may be on the upswing, my experience with SWIP points to problems that we still have to face. At the same time, it helps me to imagine where we need to go from here.

One major problem we face as graduate students is both the reality and the perception of any kind of civic engagement as “extra work.” Where does one find time to engage in public service and writing when academic writing and teaching responsibilities seem to absorb the entirety of one’s professional commitment? This is one of the problems SWIP faced. Although we began with a strong desire to pursue avenues for publication outside the academy, in the midst of teaching, taking classes, reading for exams, and writing our dissertations, writing new work for a different audience was a daunting task, and we found ourselves lacking both the time and energy needed to complete this work. Clearly, a major problem is that it was “tacked on” to what we were already doing and not an integral part of that work.
Yet, the problem, as we know, goes deeper than that. Most of us have to contend regularly with the disparagement of public engagement that leads us to approach it as “extra work,” as secondary in value to our scholarly commitments. SWIP asked a tenured faculty member at our university to host a workshop on public scholarship—a faculty member who is, in fact, known for his public scholarship. We were faced with the advice not to actively pursue public scholarship until tenure, and not to expect our academic commitments to be any less if we do pursue engagement with the public. In other words, expect to do more work and for that work not to be recognized by your colleagues. What do we do with this information? Where does the change in perspective need to come from? My feeling, and I don’t know if I’m right about this, is that it needs to come from graduate students.

We need not to give up on our public commitments, despite the challenges we’re facing. Although others might not recognize the relationship between my volunteer work and my academic interests, this is a rich intellectual intersection for me. It gives my academic writing stakes that it wouldn’t have otherwise, because serious, detailed research into the complex reasons for the re-segregation of public schools, for example, is needed in order to address this social issue and the severe lack of resources facing schools. I see my pursuit of writing outside the academy as keeping the work I do in the academy accountable, relevant, and dynamic; at the same time, my service reminds me that there are situations in which writing does not suffice to accomplish my academic goals—I must act. Only by insisting on the relevance of this work despite objections to the contrary can we graduate students begin to change the face of what “counts” when it comes time to apply for jobs.

Those of us who pursue public service and public writing must be vocal about the merit of doing so to our colleagues who do not; we must communicate the value of this work to other graduate students in our disciplines. We need to work to establish larger forums for discussions of this kind (cross-disciplinary talks and workshops, for example), and to open up more dialogue with our current tenured professors and mentors. Within my department, graduate students are given important voice when it comes to hiring new faculty—we need to take opportunities such as these to inquire into candidates’ public commitments and their perspective of such work. Such actions could help create a different university culture in that we future faculty might begin to reconsider what is of value when we sit down to decide who to hire in our future departments, rather than defaulting to a privileging of work that maintains the status quo.

For me, being “publicly active” means much more than civic engagement. Being publicly active means being attentive to who my audience is and what the stakes are for my research; it means an insistence on greater transparency about my work. We graduate students specifically need to voice our concerns about the de-valuing of “public contributions”—if we really want to build a different university culture that supports opportunities for our scholarship to do real, tangible work in the world.

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Expanding Community-Based Work While Maintaining the Edge

Author: Cara L. Kozma, Wayne State University

Although conventional academic wisdom discourages young scholars from becoming involved in community-based work, the growing interest in service-learning and community literacy reflected in contemporary scholarship in composition and within the larger academy suggests that these are now viable paths to pursue throughout the trajectory of a scholarly career. Ellen Cushman maintains that by using service-learning and activist research methods to bridge the gap between university-based knowledge and community-based knowledge, “faculty members can have readily apparent accountability, and their intellectual work can have highly visible impact” (“Public Intellectual” 335). The growing visibility of community-based scholarship and practice has allowed emerging scholars to set an agenda that our scholarly work must become legitimized and that the climate of resistance to conducting community-based work early in our professional careers must change. I suggest that we work toward mainstream acceptance of the scholarly value of community-based work to support young scholars’ careers while maintaining the edginess of this type of work by addressing key critiques.

When considering why graduate students often seem hesitant to participate in community-based work, my thoughts return to the introductory course in “teaching writing” required of all new teaching assistants in our department—the course that often provides graduate students their first exposure to the profession and shapes their ideas about scholarship and teaching. In the class, the entire syllabus was on theoretical texts with no focus on the actual practice of teaching, and it was made clear that theory was the currency of value in our new profession. Although the hierarchical privileging of theory over practice is a common discussion within composition studies, I suggest that these tensions are felt among graduate students from the beginning of their coursework. Until recently, for example, as I have begun receiving awards for my servicelearning teaching and research, I had internalized the notion that I would be unable to obtain the level of scholarly success of my classmates doing theoretical projects. These recognitions have allowed me a new perspective; despite the disciplinary tensions within the field and within English departments, innovative service-learning work, in general, has the potential to, as Cushman says, “have highly visible impact” (“Public Intellectual” 335).
Recently, I attended the special interest group meeting for service-learning and community literacy at the CCCC conference in New Orleans. Within the discussion, the “old-timers” raised the point that doing community-based work within composition was no longer “edgy.” They suggested that this progression into the mainstream arena was due to the public relations attention service-learning brings to institutions. While I agree with their point, as an emerging scholar using service-learning to stake my claim in the profession, I looked at the issue from a different perspective. I view the growing institutional acceptance of service-learning as a tool to fight pervasive disciplinary and departmental tensions and resistance. Therefore, I suggest that we find ways to tap into this positive view of service-learning in order to create legitimacy for our scholarship and teaching, and to allow space for young scholars to conduct community-based work as their scholarly focus.

On the one hand, I propose that emerging scholars find strategies to leverage the mainstream acceptance of community-based work at the higher administrative levels of the university to legitimize our public practice. One the other hand, however, I also raise caution that we choose these strategies carefully in order to further our progressive, edgy work and to promote critical (and self-critical) scholarship and pedagogical practices. For instance, numerous critiques of service-learning have been outlined within recent scholarship. Scholars maintain that servicelearning courses often lack collaboration between students and partners and privilege student/university knowledge over local/community partner knowledge (Cushman,“Public
Intellectual”; Flower). They also suggest that traditional models of service-learning courses privilege activism (which becomes conflated with ideologies of service or volunteerism) over reflection, which can perpetuate problematic stereotypes and us/them binaries and that many programs are not designed to support sustainability.1
For example, Linda Flower argues that for service-learning to succeed it must be viewed as “intercultural inquiry” instead of outreach. She describes the ideal model of service-learning as one that allows for multiple voices and negotiated meanings to occur in practice through collaborative inquiry between students and community partners that develops alternative readings of cultural issues and challenges attitudes about others. Margaret Himley maintains that “regardless of a student’s actual economic status or social identity, the dominant version of the rhetoric of community service may position each and every community service student in a privileged way—as the one who provides the service, as the one who serves down, as the one who writes up” (430). She examines the complex dynamics that develop in service-learning activities causing students and/or community partners to project the role of “other” or “stranger” onto one another, and argues that service-learning projects must find ways to create open dialogues between students and participants, allowing them to engage with the multiple subjectivities of others.

I argue that it is now the agenda of emerging scholars in community-based work to consider scholarly critiques and develop revised approaches. Flower’s work on intercultural inquiry and Himley’s discussion of the potential othering in service-learning, for example, emphasize that a key challenge is developing programs that involve genuine collaboration between community and university partners. Therefore, more research must emerge that explores collaborative approaches, such as courses that involve community partners in curriculum design and encourage the collaborative production of texts. Peck, Flower, and Higgins, for example, describe a successful community literacy project in which urban teens collaborated with college mentors to develop a “hybrid policy discourse” blending rap and explanatory commentary on the issue of public school suspension (212). We must build upon existing models such as this to expand the scholarship in the field and address key critiques without allowing the increasingly mainstream nature of service-learning to devalue the quality of the edgy work being done.

Notes:
1 See also Herzberg, Himley, Green, Schutz, and Gere, and Cushman, “Sustainable.”

Works Cited
Cushman, Ellen. “The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, and Activist Research.” College
English 61.3 (1999): 328-36.
---. “Sustainable Service Learning Programs.” College Composition and Communication 54.1
(2002): 40-65.
Flower, Linda. “Intercultural Inquiry and the Transformation of Service.” College English 65.2
(2002): 181-201.
Green, Ann E. “Difficult Stories: Service-Learning, Race, Class, and Whiteness.” College
Composition and Communication 55.2 (2003): 276-301.
Herzberg, Bruce. “Community Service and Critical Teaching.” Adler-Kassner, Linda, Robert
Crooks, and Ann Waters. Writing the Community: Concepts and Models for Service
Learning in Composition. Urbana: NCTE/AAHE, 1997.
Himley, Margaret. “Facing (Up to) ‘The Stranger’ in Community Service Learning.” College
Composition and Communication 55.3 (2004): 416-38.
Peck, Wayne, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins. “Community Literacy.” College
Communication and Composition 46.2 (1995): 199-222.
Schutz, Aaron, and Anne Ruggles Gere. “Service Learning and English Studies: Rethinking
‘Public’ Service.” College English 60.2 (1998): 129-149.

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Service Education as (Auto?)-Ethnographic Encounter

Author: Jim Henry, Director of Composition and Rhetoric, University of Hawai'i at Mänoa

If service education is to avoid the many cultural pitfalls that have been signaled to date in the literature, it seems crucial that town-gown articulations be nurtured as organic, reciprocating, knowledge-producing endeavors that position the ethnographic encounter at their epistemological center. For these articulations to be organic, they must grow from encounters between graduate students and community organizations that begin very early in students' scholarly careers—perhaps even as undergraduates in the same locale. This organic relationship should be grounded in writing with the organization or for the organization. My decades of embedding service learning in an undergraduate course in technical communication and in many internships I have directed have shown me that writing with and/or for the organization is a key step in the ethnographic encounter that community-based education involves. Students come to know the local culture first as one of its discursive agents, the better to discern if they want to pursue this agency in further scholarship.

This initial ethnographic encounter enables members of the organizational culture, too, to determine the directions that further collaboration might offer, most likely prompting questions frequently asked when cultures are represented in writing: What issues and elements of the culture are to be probed and publicly represented? Who will review the work? What are likely scenarios of reception? What does the organization stand to gain and/or lose? What does the scholar stand to gain and/or lose? How can this foray into knowledge production, possibly culminating in a dissertation or even a book, benefit the organization? The student? The sponsoring university? Etc. Above and beyond the kinds of questions that students will need to ask as they work through the IRB applications, questions of representation and collaborative agency should figure at the center of this scholarship. Errors in either of these domains can have lasting reverberations in the community, long after the service learner/ethnographer might have moved on to other locales. This challenge gives me pause.

What gives me hope is that I see students applying to our graduate programs who already have previous experience as writers for community organizations. Our challenge is to help them re-frame their work in the community as part of their scholarly agendas, to make this scholarship an auto-ethnographic encounter that generates knowledge in many different ways and that assures the reciprocity necessary for this venture to succeed. Institutions will need to accommodate this new dimension in graduate programs by highly prioritizing such previous writing experience in student admissions criteria, and by prioritizing faculty hiring so that students can be assured of mentors with experience in ethnography and auto-ethnography--which is not often a top priority, at least in English department staffing. But it should be, if we are to make service education as powerful as its potential.

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The Life of A Poem: Audre Lorde's "Litany for Survival" in Post-Lacrosse Durham

Author: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Duke University

"The Life of A Poem" is a poetic and critical reflection on the relationship between the University and institutionalized economic, physical and sexual violence by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a PhD candidate at Duke University, and a founding member of UBUNTU, an artistic and organizing community that emerged in Durham, NC during the Duke Lacrosse Scandal. In this article, Audre Lorde's "Litany for Survival" becomes a text of healing and a means through which to critically reframe community building and engaged scholarship.

Preface
Black lesbian poet, warrior, mother, scholar, activist, designer Audre Lorde published one of her most remembered poems, “A Litany for Survival” in her most remembered collection, The Black Unicorn, in 1978. A year later, Lorde found herself writing “Need: A Chorale for Black Women’s Voices” a poetic account of black women who did not survive, in response to the 12 murders of black women in Boston in the first three months of 1979. Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and other members of the black lesbian socialist feminist Combahee River Collective used poetry in addition street art, marches and pamphlets to articulate a black feminist position that responded to the racist and sexist violence that black women in the United States experience.

Almost 30 years later in Durham, North Carolina, members of UBUNTU, a women-of-color, survivor-led coalition committed to ending gendered violence, drew upon both “Litany” and “Need” as healing texts amidst a media maelstrom of ideological violence against black women, sex workers, and survivors of sexual assault, triggered by the behavior of the Duke University Lacrosse team. Underneath the mainstream media and blog representations covering over and nearly smothering “post-lacrosse” Durham, these two texts by Lorde provided insurgent ground and healing for a collective of survivors committed to building a community that could replace the normalized violent relationship epitomized by Duke University’s support of renewed and continuing violence against women of color, sex workers, and survivors of sexual assault.

As a graduate student in the Duke University Department of English preparing for my qualifying exams at the moment that the silence about sexual violence in Durham broke, I had already committed myself to an academic focus on the poetry of Audre Lorde and that of her comrades and students as texts crucial to theorizing literary responses to violence. As a young black woman who had silently survived sexual assault on an elite university campus, I was in need of words that would allow me to speak before the wakening of my own voice. As a community organizer and artist committed to the life of Durham, North Carolina, I was part of a process of using these two texts (among others by Ntozake Shange, asha bandele and June Jordan) to perform healing and transform silence into interactive visioning in Durham, North Carolina.

This essay charts the life of the poem “A Litany for Survival” through the creative work of UBUNTU to respond to violent words and actions at Duke University. Reflecting on the underlying violence of the relationship between the university economy and the surrounding community through the more visible harm of sexual violence against oppressed people in this community, I offer that “survival” operates through an embodied and untimely poetics in tension with multiple forms of death.

·I·
(here)

For those of us who live at the shoreline...

We make our homes on the edges of campus relevance living in the bellies of libraries, charting out territory along the wall in the grooves made by century pressed stones against the grass that would grow here otherwise. We hover like mosquitoes alongside vultures. Tenuous, even though it is our labor that anchors this floating dream of thought.

Standing upon the constant edges of decision...
crucial and alone...

I never considered putting that blue four letter sticker on the car my stipend tried to pay for here. For an undergraduate student this place may feel like a resort, an asylum, a refuge from the pain of knowing. But for me, paid and imaginary, tokenized and flattered, the university remains a pile of stones, grounding a city that tries to breathe anyway.

for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice

Here, we trace the outlines of plantations, the daily tread of a silence bred by the fact that the University is the largest employer, the supplier of markets, the hulking power with all the money. Duke owns Durham, tax free. Buildings are heavy in our throats reminding us that the walls built on our wrists and ankles are the only way we survive.

who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns

I looked for my people on the shoreline, weathering the tide of summers, the whims of institutional vision. The single mother working at an overpriced organic grocery store who also runs a non-profit arts-based community organization inspired by the Black Panthers for Self-Defense. The elementary school teacher, painting murals at dawn. The part-time caterer making shrines to yemaya in the dark. The librarian making a zine while her daughter naps. The university typesetter practicing the guitar. The waitress charting revolutionary blueprints on the internet right now.

looking inward and outward
at once before and after

As a hybrid employee alien on the margins of the big house with the books inside I could not settle for, sleep with, thrive on the ghosts and bricks of institutional belonging. My mouth, my hands, my waking hours moved towards these other interlopers edging through, getting by, frantically thinking of some other way to be.

seeking a now
that can breed
futures

Only those of us out here on the shoreline can see how the endless tutoring programs and giving projects buy them a forgetfulness. As long as private research universities are exempt from property taxes and public schools are funded by property taxes there will a surplus of feel-good tutoring gigs to go around.

like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect

Those of us who make our families here write grants in the langauge of subtle guilt, bright and fragile as tobacco leaves. Haunted by plantation replay in the giving hands of the administratively endowed, this city tries to breathe anyway. It is a threatened and threatening balance. Daring to dream futures, stooping to believe that the university is as good as the words it invents, here we are competitive, entreprenuerial, trying to find a creative way to relate to occupation.

the death of ours.

·II·
(then)

For those of us who were imprinted with fear...

So maybe we should have been ready. A single mother, a worker, a dancer, a student, a black woman in a city made up mostly of black women, wakes up dead. For those of us who know survival as a slow death, and know that there are infinite parts of us that an institution can kill one by one, death doesn’t mean it is over.

like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk

Death means the way a group of people can use your body as if it is dirt, a chew toy, a sporting good, garbage to be recycled into adrenaline and forgetting. Something inside you gets mutilated and the people you ask for help, the media, the court, the landlord (which is) the university reminds you that you were never really alive or human. People send death threats to you and your family day in and day out, saying how dare you say “ouch,” how dare you make any sound here, how dare you remind us that you are alive.

for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found

Those of us who had been silent about the assaults against our own opening waiting lives were vindicated. We ate the cruelty of being right. See. I was right to be silent; they never would have believed me. Look how they would have crucified me for any utterance. Look how they would have ravaged my family, opened my past. Look how they would have hammered me against the crossroads, built a shrine to their own innocence out of all my blood.

the heavy-footed hoped to silence us

A mother, a worker, a dancer, a student, an all-at-once person, we knew this woman was one of us. We woke up to how dead we were next to her and we dropped our pens, our paintbrushes, we didn’t know what to type or to say, how to eat or use the phone. We were shocked by our own dead bodies, surviving anyway, under stones of institutional innocence. We realized what we had been breathing was water all along, and we were chained to the stones of this reborn plantation. We couldn’t tell what time it was, what year, what screams we heard walking by thick proud trees. We didn’t know they were ours.

·III·
For all of us

Something broke in the stones upon our throats, because this woman, who should have been dead, dared to speak. Something broken in our hearts, opened passages in writing and indecipherable moaning. Something broke beside(s) that story over “spring break” in 2006. And after an unbearable moment, of not wanting to think about it, wanting it all to just go away, after time spent in closets and under beds hiding from what this meant about all of us, all of us—the writers, servers, teachers, students, clerks, receptionists, organizers, artists, parents, granddaughters, elders and kids—came out in the open where we could see each other and broke the silence. We admitted that we were brave enough to love and brave enough to be hurt. We admitted to strangers and long-time comrades secrets that we had been hiding like wounds in our hands. We have all been deeply hurt by sexual violence. We are hurt by it now. We are brave enough to stop it.

So UBUNTU, a women-of-color/survivor-led coalition committed to ending gendered violence emerged in a living room full of markers next to a potluck filled kitchen blocks away from the scene of the violence of the Duke Lacrosse team. And we moved into action, we who had already been leaders, but it was different than the leading we had done before. Personally, as someone who has been a vocal and active community organizer since I was 15 years old, I know that I had never learned to lead from the place of my greatest fear, deepest self-hatred, most wounded and scarred and intimate lining. I had never learned to lead, teach, organize, not even to walk and to breathe as a survivor of sexual violence.

A sustainability committee convened to create founding principles for the group, which named itself UBUNTU after the Swahili concept meaning “I am because we are.” We agreed that our group was not about capturing and punishing rapists. We understood that violence was cyclical; we understood that perpetrators were often survivors of sexual violence as well. We committed to the task of creating a community that could model and exemplify a different set of relations that could replace and erase the economic, spatial, racial, and gendered violence that made sexual violence likely, and disproportionately likely for oppressed people.

An education committee convened to create political education for the group. Starting with a session on the politics of sex work led by former sex workers, followed by a session on transpolitics led by trans members of the coalition, we met monthly for sessions on white supremacy, the defining of sexual assault, black feminist histories, ethics based on Sarah Hoagland’s text Lesbian Ethics, and non-violence. This committee also raised awareness about sexual violence in our community by screening Aishah Simmons’ film NO!: Black Women and Rape for specific communities. There was a screening just for women of color in Durham, a screening specifically for queer and trans-folks gathered from all over the SouthEast, a screening for the local black nationalist community, a screening for rape crisis service providers, etc. Simmons expressed full solidarity with our work and traveled to Durham for well-attended screenings at UNC-Chapel Hill and Bennett College for Women in Greensboro.

It was becoming more and more apparent that the relationship between sexual violence and the university was not just part of this contemporary media frenzy and my own personal pain. That semester I had the blessing to be an apprentice teacher with Charlotte Pierce-Baker, author of the breakthrough book Surviving the Silence: Black Women’s Stories of Rape in her course “Trauma, Violence and Women’s Writing.” I chose (really begged) to work with Dr. Pierce-Baker because she seemed to be accomplishing the impossible. How can one get up in front of a classroom of students and talk about all of the most difficult things you could ever talk about, all the most painful violences that affect us at once? How do you do that without scaring the students away or fainting from the sheer effort of it? Dr. Pierce-Baker was teaching about oppression, trauma and sexual violence with more grace than I had seen in any classroom. When the story of the Duke Lacrosse team’s violent behavior surfaced we were already mid-way through a semester long conversation about race, gender, sexuality and trauma, and what it had to do with women’s writing. Many of our students had experienced violence on Duke’s campus, and witnessed violence on and off campus. They bravely used the course as an opportunity to express and transform their own relationships to trauma. This was an especially brave act on a campus that was violently attacking a woman who had spoken out about rape and on which students were rallying around the idea that violence could never have been proven to happen, and even that violence against oppressed people did not matter as much as the eternal innocence of the privileged.

Early in the course I presented “A Litany for Survival” to the students and slowly but surely they began writing their own poems, testifying to and hoping for their own survival in the face of violence. I realized that teaching on a campus that condoned and ignored sexual violence enacted upon and by its students made the act of standing to lead a lecture or sitting to lead a seminar discussion even more scary than my fear of public speaking provided for. And though Audre Lorde’s poetry and essays are often read in isolation (like the rest of literature in the academy) as brilliant products of a brilliant mind, it changed everything for me when I realized that while Audre Lorde was writing the poems that I needed about violence and difference and survival and fear she was a teacher. And she wasn’t teaching just anyone. Audre Lorde was the first black teacher in the English department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the City University of New York from 1970-1979. This meant she was teaching police officers in full uniform including loaded guns during the most visible period of racist police violence in the history of New York City. No wonder she was an expert in the permutations of fear. Reading Audre Lorde and teaching about trauma at Duke University during the lacrosse “scandal” taught me that teaching, being accountable to a volatile and vulnerable audience of students changes everything. Honesty in that setting requires a poetic act of faith every single time.

UBUNTU focused a large amount of energy on nurturing the stories of women and especially women of color at the colleges in our areas. After all, this entire movement was sparked by the bravery of a black college student who was brave enough to speak out against the violence she had experienced. At the same time, it was very clear to us, that while college classrooms and programming could make a difference in the lives of individual women, the college campus was not a non-violent space nor was it conducive to sustained healing.

The site of healing would have to be created in our daily lives on and off campus. In our homes, in our relationships, and in our actions. UBUNTU held monthly healing sessions where we used writing, singing, dancing, touch, food and everything else we could think of to express and release our own experiences of violence and the ways they continued to live in our bodies. We created websites and publications about how to support survivors of sexual violence. We made a journal of healing, we made worksheets for our children. We took care of each other’s children, cooked for each other, ate together and danced and celebrated together to exemplify the community we needed. We emailed each other fifty times a day. With a broad coalition of organizations committed to economic justice, anti-racism, sex-worker rights, ending rape, and building community resources we organized a National Day of Truthtelling for April 28th 2007. We thought we were brand new.

this instant and this triumph

We didn’t remember, hadn’t been told, that almost 30 years earlier on April 28th a coalition of people led by women of color committed to ending gendered violence had gathered in Boston with signs and spirit. We knew and we didn’t know that on exactly that morning when the women in the Combahee River Collective and the other organizations that they mobilized gathered with signs reading “We Cannot Live Without Our Lives”1 and signs reading “8 Women Why Did They Die?”2 We certainly did not know until some later archival research that I conducted in the Sallie Bingham Collection at Duke that on the morning of their April 28th march the ninth murdered woman’s body was found. They had to change all the signs, they had to remember how to walk anyway. I went into the vaults looking for leads on autonomous black feminist publications and found that the same year that Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel edited the groundbreaking Conditions 5: The Black Women’s Issue which became Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology which led to the founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, these same feminists were grappling with institutionally sanctioned violence in their community. Slowly pieced together from coverage in Off Our Backs, published journal entries from Barbara Smith and anthologies on violence against women, I found our legacy.3

We knew, and we didn’t know that our movement, our intentions, our beautiful declarations were necessary because they spoke to a continuing violence. The statement “Stop the Killing” proved not to be prophetic. A black woman was being killed even as they painted those signs. Bodies were turning up faster than they could change the typesetting on their pamphlet to protest it. Someone is experiencing sexual violence even as I write this. What we say is political, but our language is bereft, slapped down in the face of the persistence of violence. And for this reason our survival is not only political, it is poetic, creating languages we don’t have, pushing time to new relationships, holding the untimely truth that we are somehow here.

Today when I teach undergraduates that the black feminist publishing movement was an intentional response that the same black women who organized in response to the Boston killings invented because they didn’t expect to survive, and were determined to pass on their hard-earned lessons without succumbing to capitalist imperatives of the mainstream publishing industry, I am speaking a litany to survival. Every time I say, “In the first three months of 1979, 12 black women were killed in Boston,” I am railing against the deaths counted and uncounted that line our silence. I am telling my students that when they remember to speak out against the violence that they witness and experience on this campus, they will not be the first.4 Poetry may be the first language of their response.

we were never meant to survive.

·IV·
And when we speak....

Survival is not a gift. Survival is a struggle. A sharp and tense relationship, requisite in a system that does not affirm life. Or maybe survival is the way that life becomes more than our bodies. Maybe survival is the stains of that struggle left like pathmarks to hope behind us and ahead. Maybe survival is a kind of art. If so, it is even more crucial that amidst all the other committees that emerged in the work of UBUNTU an artistic response committee that focused on transformative healing through interactive poetic performances emerged as well.

And when the sun rises

And the creation of a coordinated and sustained artistic response to violence meant that instead of waking up early in the morning and literally sitting in a closet to transform my rage into sentences and theories, I could look forward to days of expression and invention. I could read the poems that were most important to me, and poems I had never heard aloud with a group of people equally unlikely to raise their voices in this place.

Practice is a particular type of poetic theorization. I can sit in the closet interrogating the rhythm structure, looking for the references, justifying the diction, but the question, how does this feel in my throat, how does this phrase coat her eyes, where does my pulse move between stanzas, what conversation does this poem make possible today and tomorrow can only come from the practical use of poetry to save our lives.

we are afraid
it might not remain
And when the sun sets

Ebony Golden, the initial co-pointperson of UBUNTU Artistic Response alongside me, called our meeting structure or lack thereof, a jazz approach. When she meant that she was invoking the jazz poems of Ntozake Shange and Jayne Cortez, each of whom use poetic improvisation to make the moment of the poem dynamically possible in conversation with a bassline or an idea they are riffing on.5 Our meetings jumped around and made their own agendas. We couldn’t remember who said what. Our voices overlapped in the refrain. Every piece of our lives needed to be recreated, held and tasted differently in the space our faith made. Everything was urgent and multiple, and this was not only reflected in the sound and length and food and frequency of our meetings, but also in the way we began to make the poetry audible. We started with intended harmonies and then learned to live like echoes in the space made by each other’s voices. We repeated each other’s sound into truth and recognition.

we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty
we are afraid
we may never eat again

And at the same time we had to nurture each other’s bodies, our everyday struggles, not only our sounds. We had to invent ways to honor the anniversaries of our babies who had died too soon. We had to shelter each other from homelessness. We had to feed each other. We had to send each other on journeys across countries and continents. We had to inhabit each other’s classrooms. We had to train each other to quilt, blog, sew, paint and wait. We had to nurture each other while nurturing a faith that poetry can do all that.

when we are loved

And most importantly we had to support our words in living outside the cocoon of our own understanding. So when Nayo Barbara Watkins (1939-2008), a leader in Alternate Roots and the founder of the Meykye Center for children with learning differences, asked us to “perform” at the main branch of the Durham Public Library, we pulled the song one of us had learned in Haitian dance class, the poem one of us had written for a great aunt Elsie, the poem one of us had written for Assata Shakur, the poem one of us had written for little sister Alex and made harmony and faith out of the meeting point of all of that....which was the poem “A Litany for Survival.”

And when the SouthEast Social Forum came to Durham North Carolina and filled the Hayti Heritage Center and North Carolina Central University with another possible world, our voices rang off the stained glass tribute to a scary looking so-called benefactor named William Duke and into the hearts of farmworkers, Appalachian environmentalists, immigrants, youth, elders, workers for black justice, artists, lovers and whoever else was gathered there. Audre Lorde’s words were the way to collectivize our very personal, very intimate movement. “For all of us,” she wrote “this instant and this triumph.”

And throughout that year we enacted interactive poetry performances where participants made and transformed poems in a way that allowed them to express their survival and act on their healing in university classrooms, auditoriums, living rooms, historical sites, parks, chapels, and sidewalks in North Carolina. We made altars that visually poeticized places that were important to us: like the house that the Lacrosse team used to live in, and the abandoned gas station across from the new gentrifying lofts downtown and our own porches, notebooks and bodies.

Meanwhile as teaching assistant/cheerleader for the Women’s Studies honors thesis candidates, I used the same media, t-shirts, food, sidewalk art, and music to guide three brilliant young women through a process of what it meant to speak their truths on the terms of academia.

we are afraid

But it took UBUNTU a full year, right up to the U.S. Social Forum for us to internalize the bravery we had been reaching towards and teaching about all along. We had proposed to once again invoke Audre Lorde’s words with our bodies and faith and suddenly we realized it wasn’t enough. We realized that we had tried to stop moving through our transition and it was at the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia that we moved beyond tribute through poem, and poems of tribute to sharing and ritualizing our own stories of survival and healing in sound. We were out there, shaking and unready, meaning to do what had never been meant.

love will vanish

And our brave (un)readiness was necessary because the world and the law were wolves and reminders that we should not survive. That we should not pretend to be alive. On blogs, in newspapers, in marches, on t-shirts were memos to us to remember that we were dead. Or that we should be. And in this climate, which insisted that survivors should not trouble the world with the good and horrible news of our survival, all charges were dropped against the specific members of the lacrosse team who had been indicted. Survivors everywhere were reminded that to speak our truth was to be called “liar” and that to remember our names was to be called out of them.

when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return

And in that moment of recognition (because we always knew that the violence of the law would not be effective in ending violence against us) and that moment of disbelief (because reminders of our own expendability are still shocking, assertions that we don’t exist are still jarring) we sent each other poems, essays, flyers and statements, without coordinating it in advance. And each of our statements were survivals of June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights” which we soon compiled into an interactive anthology called “Wrong is Not My Name” with space for newspaper collages, and resources for survivors, which we distributed by hand across the country and which is available for free download even now.

And when we speak

Because the presence of these statements in print and the act of writing through our call and response was crucial and in every workshop participants made their own poems, and we made collective poems, and our every utterance was food for someone somewhere, was medicine for someone somewhere (to paraphrase the writer Zelda Lockhart).

we are afraid
our words will not be heard nor welcomed
But when we are silent
we are still afraid.
So it is better to speak

And women of color in Texas wrote us to tell us how our work had inspired them to create writing circles for survivors of sexual violence, and a pregnant woman on the West Bank told us how she was going to use the model spread through the internet by BrokenBeautiful Press to lead zine-making workshops for Isreali and Palestinian women interested in peace, and a student in South Africa told us how she was going to use our worksheets to help out in a school in an abandoned building created by black South African mothers during the general strike and just last month the Shakti Center in Chennai, India decided they would make publications together as a way to think newly about gender and sexuality. Those words are the way that we know it is worth it.

·V·
Remembering...

Sylvia Wynter says that the poetic is the way we create a desired world, by naming our position and relationship within this one. In this sense, there is no better way to theorize a poem than by poeticizing the movements it enables. A theorization of Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” requires an examination of what it means to speak into the impossible, into death threats and silences and into an institutional context (the plantation/university) that makes theory both valuable and dangerous. The theoretical call of the poem is a lived process, a pedagogical process. In this case, I learned, we learned that the poetic means we exist.

Working with UBUNTU, holding old poems in my mouth with new participatory audiences, immersed me in the spiritual practice that has sustained me through most of my dissertation tentatively titled “Never Meant to Survive.” The testing ground of my own life, in community and collaboration, taught me that black feminists used poetry to create new languages out of death sentences. I believe that poems are packets of medicine sent through generations when books don’t stay in print and poets die young because they can’t afford healthcare. In UBUNTU both the ideas and the practices of the radical black feminist writers and publishers that I study in my dissertation survive. Their approaches to radical mothering, teaching, and independent publishing inform our ongoing work.

Additionally, this past fall semester I taught a course at Bennett College, a historically black college for women in Greensboro, NC entitled “Letters to Audre” and this summer I am facilitating a community study group called “Summer of Our Lorde” both of which are designed to allow students and community members to engage Audre Lorde’s words in the face of the present atmosphere in which violence against women of color is reported (or not reported) again and again on the news. Poetry teaches us that truth is reflexive and always still in the making.
There is no better way to say it than to say it:

We were never meant to survive.

Notes:
1 A statement by Barbara Deming, later invoked by Audre Lorde as the last words in “Need.”
2 Also the title of the publication that the Combahee River Collective Published “6 Women Why Did They Die?” They had to adjust the title as more and more women were killed in this short period.
3 See for example Margo Culley, ed. A Day at A Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present. New York: The Feminist Press, 1985 and Jill Radford and Diane Russell eds. Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne, 1992.
4 And I am sad to say that the vast majority of the students I have taught here have experienced or witnessed racist, gendered and sexualized violence on this campus.
5 See for example Ntozake Shange. A Daughter’s Geography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983 and Jayne Cortez. Mouth on Paper. New York: Bola Press, 1977.

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The Push and Pull of Being Publicly Active in Graduate School

Author: Paul Feigenbaum, University of Michigan

Becoming “publicly active” as a Ph.D. student in English and Education at the University of Michigan was a slow and at times bewildering process, with periods of frustration punctuated by moments of exhilaration. Consistently I encountered exciting opportunities for public scholarship and then saw these efforts dismissed or ignored. On one hand, I was fortunate to collaborate with scholars such as Buzz Alexander, whose Prison Creative Arts Project facilitates theater and writing workshops in prisons throughout Michigan and puts on a stunning exhibition of artwork by Michigan prisoners every spring. At the other extreme, multiple professors admonished me to pursue social justice in other forums—in other words, they believe the academy simply is not geared for such work. In short, graduate school gave me both the desire for public engagement and considerable anxiety about whether to pursue it within academia.

Regarding the development of a sense of civic responsibility, my graduate education was enormously beneficial. Many seminars in both the English Department and the School of Education engaged issues of inequality and oppression, and we spent much time discussing how these forces operate ideologically, particularly in relation to race, class, and gender. However, as my interests in civic engagement intensified, I learned that my program lacked systemic means for encouraging such work. I also found that many professors who speak eloquently about these issues neither pursue public agendas nor consider such efforts to be “serious” intellectual work. I was left to follow an oftentimes wearisome trial-and-error path toward public scholarship, and as a result my initial attempts at public engagement occurred independently from my progress toward a degree.

This desire for civic action, standing uneasily alongside my still poorly defined vision of, and lack of confidence in, pursuing such work led me to temporarily leave graduate school and teach English in the Peace Corps. Upon returning two years later, I found that the institutional pattern of both encouraging and discouraging public engagement remained; what had changed was my level of self-assurance and commitment. For example, in the fall of 2006 the University began a yearlong examination of citizenship in the 21st century and called for curriculum development around the issue. Having previously faced departmental resistance to teaching writing with a civic focus, I tied my courses to the theme in order to obtain approval. I felt further validated by the English Department upon receiving a teaching award that year, which enabled me to teach the following year in the Michigan Community Scholars Program, a living-learning community that promotes public action among undergraduates. I learned that once one finds institutional sanction for civic engagement, opportunities beget further opportunities.

Also in 2006 several graduate students and I formed a partnership with teachers at an underserved Detroit high school to promote college access for its students. Several professors attended our initial meetings and pledged support, while administrators expressed interest in funding us. However, the funding never came, and several other professors counseled us not to bother; they were concerned, perhaps even convinced, that we would screw things up—that we would recreate the “academic horror stories” described by Paula Mathieu in her book Tactics of Hope. Ironically, however, this skepticism served a positive purpose, strengthening our commitment and keeping us humble. The project was co-conceived and co-designed in a way that reflected a hybridization of everyone’s interests, and all participating students went on to college, with several receiving prestigious scholarships.

These experiences taught me that wonderful possibilities exist for graduate students to practice public scholarship. In fact, although they lack the same institutional authority or access to funding, in some ways graduate students have more options than professors, especially junior faculty. In the college access project, for example, our relative lack of institutional demands enabled us to nurture a community partnership without having a clear research plan, which might have been impossible for most assistant professors. That is, I am skeptical that our primary goal of helping underprivileged students go to college would fit into the plans of a new professor facing significant publishing requirements to obtain tenure.

Yet, it is difficult to envision a university culture that genuinely fosters civic engagement at the graduate level. Although such opportunities exist, they are rarely systemically located within departments. My own fledgling desire to merge scholarship with community engagement was almost scuttled before taking hold, and I had to leave my program in order to re-envision myself as a publicly active scholar. “Coming up” in a more supportive environment would have helped, but I doubt that civic engagement can be built up from the graduate level into the disciplinary mainstream. Must it not run in the other direction, or at least occur simultaneously?

Encouraging students to practice public scholarship without likewise changing departments to encourage the professoriate as well would mean continuing to send the mixed signals I received throughout graduate school. We must push toward a future in which students inspired to public action do not subsequently feel compelled to refrain from such work upon entering a faculty’s junior ranks.

Certainly I believe that students should have greater awareness of civic opportunities early in their graduate careers, and there must be greater mentorship for civically minded students. Still more importantly, but less pragmatically, is that more professors at all levels who engage issues of structural inequality through academic discourse must participate in, and find institutional support for active efforts to redress these social ills; they must lead by example to serve as templates for their students. To do otherwise is to spread the dangerous idea that a scholar’s role in addressing inequality is mostly conceptual, and that scholars can contemplate and “complicate” activism but cannot realistically put this thinking into practice. Yet institutional change is slow to come, and as Richard Miller has argued, generally occurs at the margins of academic life. In the meantime, publicly active scholarship will continue to be the work of a few committed individuals, and much uncertainty will remain about the purpose, practicality, and scholarly value of civic engagement.

Works Cited
Mathieu, Paula. Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., 2005.
Miller, Richard. As if Learning Mattered. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

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