Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement (review)

Reciprocity is a complicated and necessary component of academic institutions' engagement with other communities, and approaches to reciprocity often can be summarized in the form of a single question: "What is the community getting out of this?" This question emphasizes how important it is for participants from higher education institutions to check again and again, in each divergent engagement activity they are involved in, that they are not exploiting or negating the needs of their communities. However, responsible practitioners also need to verify that the academic partner is gaining something from the relationship. Without this "give-and-take," as Cushman puts it, engagement runs the risk of being simply charity work (16). Instead, academic partners must also gain something in a reciprocal engagement relationship. If that's the case, then Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement asks and provides answers to another equally meaningful question for engagement: "What is the academic institution getting out of this?" Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser have compiled a collection of diverse answers to this question, answers that each point to a single, exciting conclusion: engagement can transform writing programs.

Rose and Weiser situate this volume in the context of reciprocity, explaining in their introduction that there are "expectations that both sides of the engagement partnership—the university or college and the community agency or entity—will not only contribute expertise and other resources but also will garner new knowledge and develop new resources." And they demonstrate that what writing programs stand to gain opens more possibilities for the work of teaching writing, researching writing, and transforming how writing is viewed by society. The chapters that follow offer a range of insights into the academic side of learning as a result of public engagement, "from how we understand the writing program's role in the institution and community to learning from specific literacy communities, to understanding an institutional culture, to maintaining the core functions of our programs while finding ways to extend our reach, to viewing engagement as both a way of teaching and a way of conducting research" (7). To that end, the authors of the various chapters describe changes to program ethos, curricula, students' perceptions of writing, and program goals as a result of engagement, and they outline the potential for more.

A number of the chapters in this collection address the meta-level changes that occur in the ethos of writing programs during and as a result of community engagement. Jeff Grabill, in "Infrastructure Outreach and the Engaged Writing Program," explains how working with communities can help redefine the trope of "service" in the triad of "research, teaching, and service" so that community engagement can be seen as intellectual work that traverses these constructs. In the same way, in "Centering Community Literacy: The Art of Location within Institutions and Neighborhoods," Michael H. Norton and Eli Goldblatt show how, by engaging in the community, writing programs' sense of what literacy is, who it's for, and how we go about teaching it can be disrupted. Instead of focusing solely on academic literacy, community engagement can make room for more inclusive and flexible approaches. Indeed, this inclusiveness translates to all aspects of writing program administration, since "community literacy can help both universities and non-profit community organizations articulate their shared goals through lending perspective to each other in the context of shared work" (48). Even within programs, community engagement can offer lessons for inter-faculty and administrator relationships, as Jessie L. Moore and Michael Strickland show in "Wearing Multiple Hats: How Campus WPA Roles Can Inform Program-Specific Writing Designs."

On the curricular level, David A. Jolliffe discusses how community engagement can lead to shifts in expectations of what higher education writing programs should do. In "The Arkansas Delta Oral History Project: A Hands-On, Experiential Course on School-College Articulation," Jolliffe shows how working with the Arkansas Delta Oral History Project instigated major changes in college approaches to teaching...