Community-Based and Service-Learning Writing Initiatives: A Survey of Scholarship and Agenda for Research

*Note: Please scroll down the page to see the full report as well as the original research proposal*

Nora Bacon, University of Nebraska-Omaha
Thomas Deans, Haverford College, Pennsylvania
James Dubinsky, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg
Barbara Roswell, Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland
Adrian Wurr, University of North Carolina-Greensboro

Project Overview
University-community partnerships, based upon a pedagogical strategy variously called service-learning, community- or client-based writing, or community literacy, have emerged as a significant presence in both the scholarship and teaching of writing at all levels. Courses taught with and programs built upon this strategy come in many forms, but all share a commitment to combining academic study with civic action. Many teachers and scholars within (and outside) our field are excited about it; but many remain uncertain about the utility and effectiveness of integrating academic work with community outreach. Our project involves a review of the literature on service-learning in writing and community-based literacy, an analysis organized by key themes in the literature, a critical examination of research methodology in the field, a synthesis of findings, and an articulation of questions to guide future research.

Anticipated Outcomes
The primary outcome of the meta-analysis will be an authoritative and accessible report that both serves composition scholars and provokes awareness of our work in the wider higher education community. Some ancillary outcomes include:

Publication of an extensive online annotated bibliography of service-learning and community literacy scholarship (draft now available at )
Publication of full report online and in Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning and Community Literacy, and abbreviated versions in other media outlets in higher education.
A clearly articulated agenda for future research, and suggested model for specific studies. These would serve as tools for composition researchers, graduate students in rhetoric & composition, and those seeking grants to support further research on community/ university writing partnerships.

Progress to Date
Our group is pleased to report significant progress. Thanks to the support provided by the research initiative grant, in addition to regular correspondence by email, our group has been able to get together twice for full-day working sessions (once in Indianapolis, and once in San Francisco at the AACU annual meeting). At these working sessions (and thanks in part to feedback we received from other grantees at the initial research initiative workshop in Indianapolis) we have 1) compiled an extensive bibliography and clarified the scope of the meta-analysis, which will address both composition and professional writing, 2) divided the literature into categories and created “assignments” for each group member, and, most significant, 3) refined and put into use the tool we have developed to track, categorize, analyze and present entries for the annotated bibliography we are preparing. This tool lets us record, for each study we consider:

Full Bibliographic Citation
Abstract (200 words)
Keywords
Theoretical Perspective informing the study
Methodology of the study
Implications for teaching
Institutional context of course/program featured in the study
Kind of course/program featured in the study
Community-based paradigm for course or program (writing about/ for/ with)
Partnerships within the course featured in the study
Central social issues or themes addressed (eg. literacy, sustainability, homelessness)
Genres students write in the course
Critique of research quality

We have annotated a few dozen studies to date, and by Four Cs we will have all annotated entries posted online. At the conference, we will share this work with other Four Cs members and invite other stakeholders both to contribute to the bibliography and to annotate sources.

The research initiative grant also enabled our group to travel to San Francisco to present a panel at the AACU annual meeting: “Writing and Service-Learning in the New Academy: What We Know, What We Need to Know.” The session was well attended by an interested group of faculty and administrators. Participation in this panel served several key purposes: it prompted us to articulate preliminary findings, it gave our work critical visibility and helped us identify the unique contributions composition scholars make to a national conversation, and it highlighted for us the kinds of questions our project will need to answer to be most useful to the larger higher education community.

Preliminary Findings
Our findings are, indeed, very preliminary. Probably of most significance is our belief that we have identified an emerging consensus about best practices in community-university writing projects. Even across institutions, levels and theoretical orientations, we believe that we can identify what Lee Shulman would call “signature pedagogies” and key guidelines that emerge, simultaneously, from critical reflections on practice as well as from studies with a more traditional empirical design. This growing consensus about best practices has immediate implications, for example, for the CCCC position statement on Service-Learning in Composition. Additional findings include the salience of activity theory and genre theory as theoretical orientations with important explanatory power for community-based work, the need for more attention to the perspectives of community partners and the outcomes of our work on communities, the need for more systematic analysis of student writing in community-based courses, and specific conclusions about the prevalence and relative advantages of certain genres (brochures, grant proposals, websites) frequently produced in upper-level community-based writing courses.

Timetable and Contact Information
At this time, we are “on schedule” with the timetable in our original proposal. The Url for the bibliography will be available at Four Cs this year. We expect to do significant work over the summer and to be able to share our final report in various forms in Fall 05 and Spring 06. For more information, please contact Barbara Roswell, Goucher College; Adrian Wurr, University of North Carolina-Greensboro; or Tom Deans, Haverford College.