Partners in Literacy: A Writing Center Model for Civic Engagement by Allen Brizee and Jaclyn M. Wells (review)

As most writing center practitioners can attest, their participation in community engagement is not new; plenty of writing centers regularly engage with community members on and off campus. However, the published conversations surrounding this engagement are few and far between. Thankfully, Allen Brizee and Jaclyn M. Wells's Partners in Literacy: A Writing Center Model for Civic Engagement—a resource that is sure to intrigue more than just writing center administrators—can now be added to the mix. In her 2014 book Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center, Tiffany Rousculp touches on the infrequent attention "seminal writing center scholarship" gives to "theories or pedagogies of empowerment, public writing, or community engagement" (46). Rousculp's purpose is to help educators interested in activist efforts understand the Salt Lake Community College Community Writing Center's (CWC) value (6). Two years after her book was published, beginning in August 2016, Jaquelyn Davis and Tereza Joy Kramer authored a four-part series on the state of service-learning in writing centers on the WCJ Blog Community, featured on The Writing Center Journal website. Davis and Kramer intended to "work toward a revision of service-learning in the writing center, one that better reflects the mutuality at the heart of writing center work." As they walk readers through this revision, they compare the "substantial" literature available on service-learning and composition to the mere handful of articles on writing center service-learning work printed in the WLN and WCJ in recent years. The reality that scholarship on writing center community engagement is scarce clearly fuels both Rousculp's and Davis and Kramer's separate yet similar intentions, thereby inspiring continued dialogue: cue Brizee and Wells.

In their preface, Brizee and Wells echo the shared observation regarding limited scholarship, acknowledging that while the number of both writing center books and community engagement books continues to increase, these resources are being published independently of each other. Consequently, Brizee and Wells's aim with Partners in Literacy is to "[blend] the two scholarly areas together" (xiv); this combined approach permeates the presentation of their content. Brizee and Wells mix reflection, methodology, findings, and discussion, alongside a research narrative of their three-year engagement project, beginning modestly from a graduate public rhetoric course assignment. While their project would eventually exceed the parameters of the semester, their positions in the Purdue University Writing Lab allowed them to continue partnering with the Lafayette Adult Resource Academy (LARA), a community literacy program for adults, and WorkOne, an organization offering workforce development and employment support (xi), to create and test online GED, ESL, and job document resources. Their initiative responded to a noticeable void on Purdue OWL: the website lacked writing resources for the community beyond the university. As a result, Community Writing and Education Station, or CWEST (pronounced "quest"), was formed.

Overall, Brizee and Wells's approach to exploring writing center community engagement is similar to Rousculp's: both offer an honest, reflective narrative of the authors' experiences with engagement, elucidating how each initiative responded to a specific community need and highlighting the importance of location and place as well as the authors' own respective relationships as transplants within a community. They also encourage readers to move beyond misguided perceptions of engagement. Throughout their project, Brizee and Wells maintained their mission not to merely be of service to community members but rather to engage with them (128). Rousculp argues that, while some felt as though the CWC wrote "with the Salt Lake community," in actuality, "the 'community wrote' with the CWC" (22–23, emphasis original). Yet it is Brizee and Wells's emergent methodology that provides readers with a replicable example of the recursive nature of writing center engagement that, although arguably present, is far less explicit in Rousculp's account of the CWC. Brizee and Wells rely on details of the CWEST project to illustrate the steps leading to engagement and reveal...