Monday, August 6, 2007

Flower

Flower, Linda. "Intercultural Inquiry and the Transformation of Service." College English 65 (2002): 181-201.

Flower says ASL students need to INQUIRE instead of coming in ready to ACT. The renewed interest in civic engagement in the 90s brought with it a desire to critique (183) that sometimes sacrificed the agency of community members due to "the political certainty of critique or of feet-first activism" (184). Instead, built mutual, collaborative understandings of problems--even if our own assumptions are challenged or called into question. Process is messy but helps us move from a 'service' or 'critique' model into one that's genuinely collaborative. She writes, "My argument is this: the conflicts and contradictions of community outreach call for an intercultural inquiry that not only seeks more diverse rival readings, but constructs multivoiced negotiated meanings in practice" (182).

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