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Reviewed by:
  • Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning by Rachael W. Shah
  • Charisse S. Iglesias
Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning Rachael W. Shah University Press of Colorado, 2020, pp. 236

Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning Rachael W. Shah University Press of Colorado, 2020, pp. 236

As I read Rachael W. Shah's Rewriting Partnerships: Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning, I found myself asking key questions for my own community-university partnerships. What should I be doing to support marginalized voices? How can I best encourage my students to take a "participatory posture" with community partners? (85). Which high school students can help me assess their partnership with my college composition students? Shah's insights on community voices and the politics of knowledge inspire me to engage more fully with my community partnerships at every turn. Shah's fluency at breaking down the difficult issues in community engagement through graciously offering tangible solutions support me to be a better teacher. Shah posits the framework of critical community-based epistemology, which is deeply rooted in the thorny issues of community engagement and strengthens the architecture of community-engaged collaborations by filling a gap in the field's literature around questions of "how community members themselves view and experience community engagement" (5). Community voice is traditionally devalued in contrast to dominant ways of thinking and being associated with institutions of higher education. However, Shah argues that "community members, with experiential knowledge of university-community partnerships, have critical insight to offer to the conversation—and they become invaluable partners in understanding the nature of engaged pedagogies" (16). With narratives from her experiences coordinating Wildcat Writers at the University of Arizona to Husker Writers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Shah creates a welcoming space to be critical about how we construct knowledge with or create barriers for community members. Rewriting Partnerships leads the way for community-based researchers and practitioners who need concrete guidance on how to create space for community voices and to craft equitable community-university programs that recognize community partners as assets. [End Page 185]

Shah starts the first chapter recounting her interaction with a homeless woman who refused Shah's help by saying, "I won't be your service project"—teaching Shah that "community engagement is not always viewed the same way from different social locations" (3). This experience sparked a realization that community partnerships are viewed differently depending on who you ask. In response to that interaction, Rewriting Partnerships is Shah's journey of uncovering community partners' perspectives on community-university partnerships in hopes of making those partnerships more equitable, inclusive, and representative of both university and community needs and voices.

Shah's first chapter sets up critical community-based epistemologies as a framework to effectively incorporate community voices into community engaged pedagogies by weaving three strands: experience, participation, and assets. The experience strand draws from John Dewey's stance that "knowledge is created in experience" and Cornel West's "centering the experiences of those who are most vulnerable" (15–17). This strand suggests that community partners' experiences and perspectives are the most valuable to understanding community-university partnerships and improving program design. Shah asserts that knowledge is built from experience, and as community-engaged scholars, we must ask, whose experience matters and whose experience is not represented? The participation strand is inspired by Paulo Freire's understanding that people are subjects, rather than objects, suggesting that the dynamic between community and university partners is a two-way street—both contributing to knowledge production and exchange through dialogue and openness. The last strand, assets, speaks to the advantage that marginalized people have when "interpreting stories of power" (30). Due to their position in the margins, community partners have a wide gaze into dominant forms of power and knowledge production and see how that dominance negatively influences the center and those around it. Together, Shah's three strands of experience, participation, and assets weave critical community-based epistemologies into a framework that values the perspectives of marginalized groups to upend the destructive impact of dominant forms of power. The rest of the book highlights the stated strands of experience, participation, and...

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