Community Action: A Framework for Egalitarian, Reciprocal CommunityEngagement in the Field of Rhetoric and Composition.

Community Action;Rhetoric and Composition;Hybrid Literacies;Service Learning;New Literacy Studies;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English & Education

Feigenbaum, Paul T.Mathieu, Paula ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Community Action;    Rhetoric and Composition;    Hybrid Literacies;    Service Learning;    New Literacy Studies;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English & Education;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/60844/pfeigenb_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation’s central aim is to articulate a framework for scholars of rhetoric and composition to engage in egalitarian literacy-based community engagement while producing intellectually rigorous academic work.In order to constitute ethically responsible outreach, it is imperative that collaborations between institutions of higher education and local communities produce mutual benefits.However, too often the academy’s institutional framework subsumes the goals of enacting egalitarianism and reciprocity, which results in service that clearly benefits the academy while marginalizing the community’s gain.Rather, engagement should allow all partners to serve and receive service, experience meaningful learning, and produce concrete action that improves their lives and communities in substantive ways.To that end, I conceptualize a paradigm of engagement called community action, which subverts the traditional dichotomies found in service learning by pursuing egalitarianism and reciprocity as its principal focus.Community action establishes its theoretical framework from merging two recently developed praxes of engagement within rhetoric and composition: ;;hybrid literacies” and ;;tactical” collaboration.I draw from Ellen Cushman and Linda Flower, who advocate service-learning partnerships defined by ;;hybrid literacy” practices that are mutually accessible by all participants, and from Paula Mathieu, who promotes flexible, ;;tactical” engagement that positions the community relationship, rather than an academic service program, at the center of the engagement process.Through this conjoined framework I articulate a model of literacy-based engagement that engenders projects designed mutually by, and producing shared benefits for, academic and community partners.Data has been collected from published accounts of partnerships between scholars in the field and community representatives from a variety of contexts. Community action, in its egalitarian vision of how universities and communities can develop and carry out collaborative projects, complicates our understanding of how literacy practices influence the teaching of writing.Community action can begin to reshape writing instruction by helping people perceive how their individual and community narratives intertwine, and how writing can be a practical means to enhance both.In this respect, the field can respond actively and pragmatically to economic and demographic shifts that, in coming decades, will increasingly impact both where and how writing is taught.