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.