Unsustainable: Re-Imagining Community Literacy, Public Writing, Service-Learning and the University ed. by Jessica Restaino and Laurie JC Cella (review)

In Unsustainable: Re-Imagining Community Literacy, Public Writing, Service-Learning and the University, the collection’s authors address community and university factors that contribute to unsustainable civic and service-learning projects. In light of the shortcomings outlined in these projects, the collection advocates for a more flexible way of defining and assessing sustainability, something Paula Mathieu calls for in Tactics of Hope, a community literacy text that is significantly referenced throughout Unsustainable. In Tactics of Hope, Mathieu states that all sustainable projects are unpredictable; therefore, service-learning leaders and practitioners must create alternative visions of projects as the needs and circumstances of these projects change, including nontraditional assessment methodologies. University-led civic and service-learning projects are traditionally assessed based on the sustainability of the project and the successful completion of university goals (17). Tactics of Hope encourages nontraditional assessment methodologies that focus on the collaborative processes and personal relationships formed between community and university, meaning projects can be “unsustainable” but still be successes because of the positive relationships formed. It is this concept of nontraditional assessment of sustainability that Unsustainable advocates for—finding successes in “unsustainable” civic and service-learning projects.

In Part I, “Short-Lived Projects, Long-Lived Value,” contributing authors discuss factors that caused their respective university-based service-learning projects to prematurely end, and, in some cases, how projects continued, in altered form, when university sponsorship ended. The section begins with Mathieu’s “After Tactics, What Comes Next?,” which picks up where Tactics of Hope leaves off. In Chapter 1, Mathieu updates readers that the three-way community partnership of Boston College, Sandra’s Lodge (a Boston-based homeless shelter), and Spare Change News (a Boston street newspaper written by the homeless and low-income) she discussed in Tactics of Hope was unsustainable after it lost significant funding and detached from the academic course to which it was initially linked. Although the project was unsustainable, Mathieu does not view the project a failure. She ends the chapter by emphasizing the necessity of an evolutionary ideology and methodology of civic and service-learning projects: “projects can end, sometimes abruptly; they can (and perhaps should) become institutionalized as ongoing university-community partnerships; they can change into other projects or other configurations of partnership, or they might end and perhaps begin again” (17). The three remaining chapters in Part I each describe a civic or service-learning project that would become unsustainable due to institutional/ community power differentials. The crux of the problem for faculty is “working with the system without becoming of the system” (36), as Paul Feigenbaum, Sharayna Douglas, and Maria Lovett explain in Chapter 2. The collapse of this dichotomy, in its various forms, hinders the sustainability of a project.

In Part II, “Community Literacy, Personal Contexts,” junior faculty discuss the dichotomous relationship of tenure and promotion assessment and the commitment to community engagement projects. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the contradictions of institutional mission statements of public service (intentions) and the low value public service projects are given in tenure and promotion assessment (actions). It is for this reason Donnelly recommends junior faculty not spearhead service-learning or civic engagement projects. Instead, Donnelly recommends junior faculty participate in an already existing project, letting senior faculty take the lead or waiting until after tenure and promotion to establish a service-learning or civic engagement project. However, not establishing or participating in sustainable projects is a lost opportunity for professional marketability. To deal with the lack of long-term sustainable projects, Karen Johnson, in Chapter 7, advocates for mobile sustainability, which is the consistency of a service, no matter the location or population. Like Deans and Donnelly, Johnson explains how her lack of power as an adjunct and the multiple institutional moves she made to accept better institutional offers limited her opportunities for long-term sustainable projects: “mobile sustainability for service initiatives was...