Amare and Grettano

Amare, Nicole, and Teresa Grettano. "Writing Outreach as Community Engagement." Writing Program Administration 30 (2007): 57-74.

Amare and Grettano describe a campus initiative called Writing Outreach, a free writing-center-type service for students, faculty, staff, as well as community members, framing the project as an alternative to service learning that isn't course-based and doesn't require significant time committments on the part of students. The project creates a space where various agents interact, not to mention write, with one another. They write, "Our goal is to continue to provide a space where this alternative to traditional service learning can occur, wher the faculty perform the service and the participants--students and community members alike--learn about writing and community engagement partially from us but mostly from each other" (63). They try to avoid problematic relationships between campus-community (e.g., university representative as savior of neighborhood) because all the agents mingle with one another in a more equitable, albeit campus, setting. Even moreso, they revise definition of "community" to include campus, instead of the troubling 'us and them' trope.