Bacon

Bacon, Nora. "Community Service Writing: Problems, Challenges, Questions." Writing the Community: Concepts and Models for Service Learning in Composition. Ed. Linda Adler-Kassner et al. Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education, 1997. 39-55.

Bacon discusses the work of the Community Service Writing (CSW) program at Stanford and San Fran State U, finding that students were largely enthusiastic and engaged and at times deepened and changed their political beliefs about given issues. Bacon finds that students "were functioning not as students but as writers" (42), thanks to ASL providing a real rhetorical situation (no longer writing just for the teaacher). She expresses concern that writing for agencies can sometimes foster authenticity or voice--since now students are writing for the agency instead of themselves. One way to deal in part with this problematic is to provide students with choice in what agency they serve (45). Bacon is also concerned about evaluating the genres that stem from ASL partnerships but advocates inviting site supervisors to assess; she worries, though, that this potentially can compromise the teacher's authority.

Many of the assumptions and ideas here (the emphasis on students and institutions) are critiqued in much of the later ASL scholarship (Matthieu, Grabill, much of Ellen Cushman's work). Bacon doesn't deal with the problematic of burdening sites with more work and she certainly doesn't foreground preferential option.