We locate the work of this volume in the context of three conversations: 1) the recent public engagement movement in higher education, particularly as this movement serves to address and respond to calls for colleges and universities to be more accountable to the broader public; 2) recent interest in exploring perspectives on public discourse/civic rhetoric among scholars of rhetorical history and contemporary rhetorical theory; and 3) the service-learning movement in higher education, in particular the ways in which college and university writing programs have contributed to this movement.

The 1990 report authored by Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the...

This chapter is about writing programs, infrastructure, and the forms of work that can be supported by them. In particular, this chapter is about “engagement” as a form of intellectual work that writing programs are well-suited to support but that will, in turn, change the writing program that becomes engaged.

I argue here that a writing program constitutes a type of infrastructure that supports work. By “work,” I am trying to name a category of activity that is broader than the commonplace activity of a writing program—teaching, learning, and administration. I mean that activity plus a range of activities...

When university-based composition/rhetoric people engage in community-based projects, our tidy house goes up in flames. You remember the “tidy house”—the one David Bartholomae conjured up in 1993 when the field was becoming more comfortable with “basic writing” as a regular category in American postsecondary education. He warned us against what he called the “quintessential liberal reflex,” the desire to embrace and act on the view that “beneath the surface we are all the same person” but also to control the “master text” that determines the definition of that sameness (323). As one who invented and supports a widely accepted...

I am not now a writing program administrator. I have, however, spent a substantial portion of my career as a director of composition, director of a writing center, and director of a writing-in-the-disciplines program. So I have a clear sense of how the work I’m currently engaged in as holder of the Brown Chair in English Literacy at the University of Arkansas, developing a high school-university literacy articulation program in Arkansas, could support the efforts of a WPA to shape programs that productively build on the literacy experiences of incoming students and that especially open the institution’s doors to populations...

To teach at an Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) is to work and live in a place that is both defined and ambiguous. By definition, an HSI “serves” a student population that is at least 25% Hispanic, and to be eligible for federal Title V funding, at least 50% or more of that group has to be low income (Hispanic Association 1999-2005). That’s where the clarity ends. Unlike Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs), HSIs do not share a common mission (Kirklighter, Murphy, and Cárdenas 2007; Santiago 2006), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some common (mis) conceptions about work at...

This chapter describes how community-university collaboration is created by the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program (CCLCP), an undergraduate program offered at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). In CCLCP, partners from community-based, not-for-profit organizations mentor first-and second-year students who complete writing and research projects that their partner organizations need. In effect, then, CCLCP’s community partners function as co-teachers, collaborating with university instructors to direct, monitor, and evaluate student work; this teaching relationship builds on a deeper and more interesting collaboration: the bilateral development of students’ community-based projects.

Bilateral project planning engages community partners and classroom instructors in hybrid roles....

When I joined the faculty at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (TAMU-CC) in 2001, I quickly learned that the culture was infused with the values of giving back, community service, enabling and mentoring students, and equity in educational access, going back to the lawsuit that forced Texas to build the campus in the first place. As Bringle, Games and Malloy (1999, 202) explain, “The engaged campus will promote a culture of service.” For any engagement or service learning initiative to work, a campus has to have a culture that welcomes it. At TAMU-CC, this culture is both “official” and also “underground.”...

As Professional Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) concentration co-coordinators, we have drawn on other concurrent WPA experiences (Michael as Writing Across the Curriculum Director and Jessie as First-year Writing Coordinator) to take PWR student writing public. Our WPA roles, which are further defined by our participation on the Elon Writing Program Administrators (eWPA) committee, have prepared us for the challenges and rewards of extending student writing beyond the classroom to promote students’ participation as citizen rhetors, to publicize the PWR concentration’s programmatic goals, and to help students (re) construct their professional identities. Further, we believe that our negotiations of both our...

Despite several cycles of reforms spanning the last fifteen years, we three composition colleagues were unable to achieve widespread student engagement in our required one-semester writing course. At California State University, Chico, the WPA oversees faculty development and program assessment for a first-year writing program that serves 2700 students each year with over 100 sections of first-year writing. Several different WPAs experienced fatigue as they undertook challenging and often unproductive work: resisting an outdated California State policy on the aims and goals for General Education, including what constitutes appropriate aims for writing courses; revising notions of student writing that are...

In this chapter I will discuss how writing centers can be important sites for engagement with larger academic and civic communities and with other institutions seeking to work with the university. One of the reasons that writing centers become sites of engagement is that people looking for various kinds of help, knowledge, and interaction with projects related to writing and literacy often contact effective and visible writing centers. They may not know who else in the English Department or the university to contact. Moreover, writing center administrators may sometimes be more able than other WPAs to respond to such contacts...

From our perspective, public writing is exciting and timely for our discipline. It empowers students to engage with communities beyond the classroom around the issues they—and we—care about, issues of social justice, the environment, peace and more, and it connects our discipline’s oldest roots in the rhetorical tradition with its most recent directions of writing in the streets and cultural awareness. As enthusiastic as we are about public writing courses, we also recognize that such courses raise difficult issues for WPAs, as suggested by our opening scenario: issues of definition, intra and inter-departmental friction, and institutional concern. In...

Ideally, scholarship can serve both academic and civic interests; yet in an American culture of persistent anti-intellectualism, going public is no easy task for those of us in academe—as predicted by John Dewey and as eerily fulfilled by the public sentiment expressed in Wikipedia exactly a century later. Writing programs that seek to invest students in the public goals of writing cannot help but be wary of the double bind we face: When we concern ourselves only with “academic” matters, we are seen as disconnected from other publics—as “anachronistic,” “esoteric,” “useless,” and “elitist.” But when we refuse to...

WPAs are often forced to make choices among an array of not particularly appealing options. Ann Feldman describes one such dilemma in the writing program she directs: Facing pressure to enact cuts that would, in part, preserve the 2-2 load taught by faculty (including Feldman), Feldman had to decide what case to pitch. Bigger classes? Large lectures with recitations? Cutting the second-semester research writing course? Ultimately, the program chose to “lower the ACT score that would allow more students to waive … the first required course. This could reduce the number of students taking first-year writing courses,” which meant that...

A perusal of major composition journals from recent years reveals that community engagement is an increasingly common subject in the field’s literature. Community engagement, as described in composition scholarship, comes in many forms, including course-based service learning, extension of university services to community members, and partnerships between community literacy organizations and university writing programs. Numerous articles and books debate the merits of writing-based community engagement projects, consider how different areas of the writing program can facilitate community-university cooperation, and examine specific examples of writing programs’ community-based work.¹

Even though administrative concerns reverberate throughout composition’s community engagement literature, little of that...