Writing and Community Action: A Service-Learning Rhetoric and Reader encourages inquiry into community and social action issues, supports community-based research, and shepherds students through a range of service-learning writing projects. Several chapters offer pragmatic advice for crafting personal, reflective, and analytical essays, while service-learning chapters present experience-tested strategies for doing collaborative writing projects at nonprofit agencies, conducting research on pressing social problems, writing proposals that respond to campus and community concerns, and composing oral histories. The assignments help students to see themselves as writers whose work really matters. Provocative readings spark critical reflection on community service and a range of social concerns (including economic justice, literacy, education, homelessness, race, and identity). Focusing on invention, audience analysis, and the social purposes of writing, Writing and Community Action encourages students to adopt a rhetorical frame of mind. Hopeful in tone, this book makes clear the ways that writing can serve as action in both academic and community contexts.

Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics, by Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, offers theory and pedagogy to introduce public writing as a complex political and creative action. To write public texts, we have to invent the public we wish to address. Such invention is a complex task, with many components to consider: exigency that brings people together; a sense of agency and capacity; a sense of how the world is and what it can become. All these components constantly compete against texts that put forward other public ideals_opposing ideas about who really has power and who really can create change. Teachers of public writing must adopt a generous response to those who venture into this arena. Some scholars believe that to prepare students for public life, university classes should partner with grassroots community organizations, rather than nonprofits that serve food or tutor students. They worry that a service-related focus will create more passive citizens who do not rally and resist or grab the attention of government leaders or corporations. With carefully contextualized study of an after-school arts program, an area soup kitchen, and parks organizations, among others, Ryder shows that many so-called 'service' organizations are not passive places at all, and she argues that the main challenge of public work is precisely that it has to take place among all of these compelling definitions of democracy. Ryder proposes teaching public writing by partnering with multiple community nonprofits. She develops a framework to help students analyze how their community partners inspire people to action, and offers a course design that support them as they convey those public ideals in community texts. But composing public texts is only part of the challenge. Traditional newspapers and magazines, through their business models and writing styles, reinforce a dominant role for citizens as thinking and reading, but not necessarily acting. This civic role is also professed in the university, where students are taught writing that extends inquiry. Phyllis Mentzell Ryder's Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics turns to the rhetorical practices of nondominant American communities and counterpublics, whose resistance to 'good' public speech and 'proper' public behavior reveals alternate modes of composing and acting in democracy.

Faber (technical communications, Clarkson U.) examines issues relating to the process of organizational change and the process of researching such change, including how people cope with, create, adapt to, and resist change; how people research and talk about it, and the links created and severed between theory and practice, the researcher and the researched, and the academic and the community. The text combines theoretical discussions of these issues--drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu--with Faber's firsthand experiences in the study and implementation of change. For academics, businesspeople, not-for-profit organizations, and community action groups interested in a sustained examination of change. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Why do most neighbourhoods in the United States continue to be racially divided? In this work, author Mara Sidney offers a fresh explanation for the persistent colour lines in America's cities by showing how weak national policy has silenced and splintered grassroots activists.

The authors outline an approach to the study of literacy that does not neglect the cognitive or individual aspects of literacy but rather sees them as largely shaped by the social forces of our political, economic, and educational systems.

"Composition scholars and activists have long documented the exploitative conditions of adjunct faculty. While documentation matters, continued data-collecting too often precludes movement towards equitable treatment. This collection highlights actions and describes efforts that have led toward improved adjunct working conditions in English departments"--Provided by publisher.

"Networked mobile technologies (laptops, phones, tablets) complicate environments where they are used. These devices' capacity for movement and exchange opens the door to new resources, social arrangements, and cognitive challenges for users. This book focuses on the impact of these devices on writing by exploring transient literacies, or writers' everyday practices of spatial analysis and positioning that locate mobile composing and integrate materials across screens and physical spaces. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, the book traces how 22 writers across an independent coffee shop and campus social commons navigate their social and spatial environments while writing texts that range from academic to personal to professional. The book argues that many mobile composers position places outside their homes and offices as a commons that provides access to materials. Composers in these spaces work in complicated atmospheres of ambient sociability, in which they navigate multiple social channels simultaneously. They also continually produce new models of attention as an outcome of interacting with people and technologies while writing. Based on this conception of writing as phenomenologically experienced in participation with materials, the book concludes by envisioning composing learning as a process of continually adjusting embodied practices based on new encounters with materials"--