My research explores the dynamics of university-community partnerships, public rhetorics, professional writing, and teacher education. My work has been published or is forthcoming in College Composition and Communication, Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Community Literacy Journal, Technical Communication Quarterly, and Reflections, along with edited collections and textbooks. Inspired by community action research methodologies, my research often takes me out of the library and into high school cafeterias, taquerias, and non-profits as I talk and write with research participants.
Book Project
Community Perspectives of Community-Engaged Teaching
Community Perspectives of Community-Engaged Teaching centers on the insights gleaned from over 45 interviews with community members to answer questions about what community members can teach us about how to teach in community contexts, especially how to teach writing, and how particular approaches to making knowledge can facilitate healthier partnerships. The first study to present a deep analysis of community resident experiences of community engagement pedagogies, this book responds to the expanding momentum in higher education for community-based learning, including the “public turn” in rhetoric and composition, and the oft-stated concern that what’s missing in research on community-based learning is the community itself (Cruz and Giles; Kimme Hea). The book introduces Critical Community Epistemologies, a theory of knowledge construction about community engagement that privileges the voices of community members because of the particular insight that comes from viewing the partnership from the margins. The insights of community members throughout the book contribute to theories of writing and community engagement as well as concrete implications for the ways community partnerships are run, from how the partnership is introduced to community residents, to the way graduate students are trained, to how programs are structured. But perhaps most provocatively, these insights challenge common assumptions about who can create knowledge about community-based learning.
Peer Reviewed Articles
“The Courage of Community Members: Community Perspectives of Engaged Pedagogies." Forthcoming in CCC.
The emotional dynamics for community members involved in university-community partnerships remain untheorized and often unrecognized. This article explores the fear minoritized high school students expressed about working with college composition students, offering suggestions for how composition teachers can use the strategies of personalismo, affirmation, rigor, and role fluidity to create more responsive community partnerships. Grounded in insights from community partners, the study suggests that knowledge-making might change in community-based pedagogies if dominant epistemologies can shift to understand community members as producers of knowledge.
"Positionality and Possibility: Tactics and Strategies for Graduate Student Community Engagement.” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning vol. 24, no. 1, 2017. (Co-author with UNL graduate students Katie McWain, Marcus Meade, & Adam Hubrig).
Drawing on the authors’ experiences initiating and directing a community partnership program, this article illustrates how graduate students who lead engagement programs can be caught between forces that pull them toward tactical partnerships unaffiliated with the university and strategic partnerships incorporated into departments. Conceived as distinct models by philosopher de Certeau (1984) and extended in Mathieu’s Tactics of Hope (2005), tactics and strategies theorize the impact of integrating with powerful institutions or remaining independent. Using narrative illustrations from their own graduate-founded engagement program, the authors argue that the dichotomous framework of tactics and strategies does not provide the complexity necessary to successfully maneuver within institutional and community dynamics. Instead, tactics and strategies is reconceptualized as the basis of a decision-facilitating heuristic for graduate-student led community initiatives to increase students’ agency to navigate institutional forces.
“Reciprocity and Power Dynamics: Community Members Grading Students." Reflections vol 17, no 2, 2017, pp. 5-42(Co-author with Jessica Shumake).
This article explores the dynamic practice of inviting community members to grade college students on their work in community-engaged partnerships. The authors articulate theories of writing assessment with theories of reciprocity to argue that community-based student evaluations can be a valid and ethical form of assessment, and discuss a case study in which loca youth graded college students to offer eight best practices for implementing community-based assessment. As reciprocity is often underemphasized in practice, community evaluations provide a strategy for shifting power toward community members, potentially reinvigorating applications of reciprocity to make them more substantial and meaningful.
“Silent Partners: Developing a Critical Understanding of Community Partners in Technical Communication Service-Learning Pedagogies.” Technical Communication Quarterly. vol. 25, no. 1, 2016, pp. 48-66. (Co-author with Amy Kimme Hea)
Although many technical communication teachers and programs integrate some form of service-learning pedagogy, there is a dearth of technical communication research on the silent partners of these projects: the community partners. Drawing upon research data from 14 former community partners of professional writing service-learning courses, the authors suggest that understanding community partners’ own self-defined stakes in service-learning projects can challenge hyperpragmatist representations of community partners and aid us in the continued creation, management, and critical evaluation of service-learning pedagogies and curricula.
“Socializing Democracy: The Community Literacy Pedagogy of Jane Addams.” Community Literacy Journal. vol. 8, no. 4, Spring 2014, pp. 1-16.
This article reclaims Jane Addams as a community literacy pedagogue, explicating her pedagogical theory through an analysis of her social thought. Addams’ goal of “socializing democracy” through education led her to both encourage immigrant students to associate across difference and to assimilate into dominant literacies—tensions present in today’s community literacy contexts. The article includes suggestions for rhetorically redeploying Addams’ pedagogy in contemporary writing instruction.
“Human ‘Subjects’ Protection: A Source for Ethical Service-Learning Practice.” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning. vol. 18, no. 2, 2012, pp. 29-39.
Human subjects research ethics were developed to ensure responsible conduct when university researchers learn by interacting with community members. As service-learning students also learn by interacting with community members,a similar set of principles may strengthen the ethical practice of service-learning. This article identifies ethical concerns ainvolved with service-learning students enter communities and draws on the Belmont Report and three research methodologies invested in responsible university interaction with underserved populations--decolonial, feminist, and participatory--to offer a set of guidelines for practicing ethical service-learning.
Book Chapters
“It was Sort of Hard to Understand Them at Times: Community Perspectives on ELL Students in Service-Learning
Partnerships.” Learning the Language of Global Citizenship: Strengthening Service-Learning in TESOL. Ed. James Perren
and Adrian Wurr. Common Ground Publishers, 2015, pp. 169-193.
Scholars are increasingly exploring service-learning as an approach to TESOL pedagogy, but little scholarship exists on the experiences of the community members who work with ELL students. This chapter draws on interviews with a high school English teacher and three of her students who were "served" by a mentoring program with a college composition class of international students. Interviewees revealed the complex ways that their service-learning experiences were impacted by the college students' processes of language and culture acquisition. In particular, the community members offered insights into how traditional service-learning power dynamics between server and served can be disrupted in TESOL collaborations when community partners are more proficient in English than the service-learning students, shifting notions of who the "expert" is in the relationship. The chapter concludes with recommendations for service-learning practitioners and researchers on how to create stronger TESOL service-learning collaborations with community partners, including suggestions for partnership framing, curriculum design, localized formative program assessment, and future research.
“An Architecture of Participation: Working with Web 2.0 Technologies and High School Student Researchers to Improve a Service-Learning Partnership.” Higher Education, Emerging Technologies, and Community Partnerships: Concepts, Models, and Applications. Ed. Melody A. Bowdon and Russell Carpenter. IGI Global, 2011, pp. 1-14.
This case study, collaboratively authored by a university researcher and five high school students, presents a model for assessing community partnerships that employs Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate participatory programs and evaluations. A research team of high school students undertook an evaluation of a service-learning partnership titled Wildcat Writers that sponsors online writing exchanges between high school and college English courses. The evaluation project used a participatory action research (PAR) approach, which involves (1) including community members as equal co-researchers, (2) respecting experiential knowledge, and (3) working toward mutually-conceived positive change. This case study demonstrates how Web 2.0 tools provide an architecture of participation that supports a PAR approach to assessing and improving community partnerships.
Partnerships.” Learning the Language of Global Citizenship: Strengthening Service-Learning in TESOL. Ed. James Perren
and Adrian Wurr. Common Ground Publishers, 2015, pp. 169-193.
Scholars are increasingly exploring service-learning as an approach to TESOL pedagogy, but little scholarship exists on the experiences of the community members who work with ELL students. This chapter draws on interviews with a high school English teacher and three of her students who were "served" by a mentoring program with a college composition class of international students. Interviewees revealed the complex ways that their service-learning experiences were impacted by the college students' processes of language and culture acquisition. In particular, the community members offered insights into how traditional service-learning power dynamics between server and served can be disrupted in TESOL collaborations when community partners are more proficient in English than the service-learning students, shifting notions of who the "expert" is in the relationship. The chapter concludes with recommendations for service-learning practitioners and researchers on how to create stronger TESOL service-learning collaborations with community partners, including suggestions for partnership framing, curriculum design, localized formative program assessment, and future research.
“An Architecture of Participation: Working with Web 2.0 Technologies and High School Student Researchers to Improve a Service-Learning Partnership.” Higher Education, Emerging Technologies, and Community Partnerships: Concepts, Models, and Applications. Ed. Melody A. Bowdon and Russell Carpenter. IGI Global, 2011, pp. 1-14.
This case study, collaboratively authored by a university researcher and five high school students, presents a model for assessing community partnerships that employs Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate participatory programs and evaluations. A research team of high school students undertook an evaluation of a service-learning partnership titled Wildcat Writers that sponsors online writing exchanges between high school and college English courses. The evaluation project used a participatory action research (PAR) approach, which involves (1) including community members as equal co-researchers, (2) respecting experiential knowledge, and (3) working toward mutually-conceived positive change. This case study demonstrates how Web 2.0 tools provide an architecture of participation that supports a PAR approach to assessing and improving community partnerships.
Reviews
"Review of Paul Feigenbaum's Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism Through Literacy Education." Community Literacy Journal, 2017, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 104-109.
“Review Phyllis Ryder’s Rhetorics for Community Action.” Rhetoric Review 31.2 (2012): 188-202. Print. (Co-author with John Warnock).
“Review Phyllis Ryder’s Rhetorics for Community Action.” Rhetoric Review 31.2 (2012): 188-202. Print. (Co-author with John Warnock).