Writing and Community Action: A Service-Learning Rhetoric with Readings

Abstract

and Community Action: A Service-Learning Rhetoric with Readings Thomas Deans New York: Longman, 2003 One of the most formidable challenges of teaching a service-learning composition course is the choice of textbooks. A wide selection of general readers deal with such issues as community, literacy, political action, etc., and there are new readers that offer students essays and articles on service-learning specifically (e.g., Community Matters by Marjorie Ford and Elizabeth Schave). As helpful and instructive as such readers are, they simply cannot serve as core textbooks for service-learning courses. More often than not, the foundation for service-learning courses must be laid by combining a generic rhetoric, relevant reader (or our own collection of readings related to community service), writer's handbook, and, most importantly, our own weaving of writing strategies and knowledge of service-learning practices. Quite evidently, Thomas Deans, author of and Community Action: A Service-Learning Rhetoric with Readings, has been doing just this kind of weaving for several years. His textbook offers composition instructors a comprehensive, tightly focused, and highly practical packaging of Deans' experience with teaching composition through service-learning. Beyond being useful as a service-learning textbook, and Community Action is among the very best rhetoric I have read. As all of us who teach composition know, awareness is a key to composing well focused, goal-oriented writing. The strength of and Community Action is the fact that its audience is so specific and therefore needs very specific guidance. This book does not read like a one-size-fits-all text that can accommodate any number of approaches to teaching composition. Deans, instead, brings together a carefully designed collection of writing strategies, journaling activities, readings, student writing samples, and review questions/prompts that help guide the student toward fulfilling well developed and effective writing assignments. And while this kind of bold specificity (so uncommon for rhetoric out there today) could be interpreted as limiting to some, I believe this textbook allows Deans--whose breakthrough study, Partnerships: Service-learning in Composition, has established his as a major voice in the field--to share a rich set of teaching experiences with both students and instructors. In this book, Deans presents an outstanding model for designing a composition service-learning course--one that can pave a secure path for the first time service-learning instructor, or reinforce already established practices for veteran service-learning practitioners. Instructors on either end of the spectrum will find Deans' pragmatic advice to students useful and ethically sound. Moreover, Deans is aware that his audience is comprised of generally above-average, self-placed writing students who are as invested academically as they are socially; he is therefore not shy about including challenging readings and assignments in his book. He seems by no means interested in getting students to write papers that merely supplement their work in the community with generalized reflections on vague notions of and Community Action demands instead that students do first-rate academic research and generate documents adhering to high academic standards. On examining a copy of and Community Action (and I strongly recommend that anyone who teaches composition should do so), the instructor will find that whether covering standard writing issues/assignments (e.g., chapter 2: Writing Your Life), or ones unique to the service-learning course (e.g., chapter 6: Preparing for Outreach: Respect and Reciprocity), Deans' focus is clear: making academic writing immediately relevant and useful to the student's local community. This blending of the traditional and service-learning approaches to teaching composition is first delineated in chapter 1: Writing and Social Action. …