Long

Long, Sarah E. "The New Student Politics: The Wingspread Statement on Civic Engagement." Second Edition. Providence, Rhode Island: Campus Compact, 2002.

The official statement-cum-manifesto of the 2001 Wingspread Summit on Student Civic Engagement, which gathered 33 undergraduate activists and volunteers to discuss civic engagement.

I: Democracy and Education
Long et al argue that statisticians have got it wrong when they only use markers like voting to measure engagement, which they feel has "multiple manifestations" including the arts (alt papers, poetry slams) and involvement with the local or the global instead of the national level. They find "conventional politics...inaccessible" and state that "service is a viable and preferable (if not superior) alternative" (1). Countering binary thinking of much of the literature, they argue that service is an "alternative politics" where they: build relationships, learn organizing skills, increase awareness, and strategize for problem solving and social change. In other words, it's a step toward more traditional politics (2). They get involved for a variety of reasons (many overlooked or not well understood) including faith-inspired reasons and special interests rooted in identity markers. Service has more potential than traditional politics of bringing voiceless into the process of decision-making. "Democracy is defined less in terms of civic obligation than of the social responsibility of the individual" (5)...Long et al want to reclaim the rhetoric of the individual and frame engagement as personal and rooted in individual and/or sub-cultural identity. But they want context too: "The realization that individual choices have larger public repercussions is an integral piece of one's moral, social, intellectual, and civic development" (6). They see service as an incremental, developmental step toward traditional politics.

They suggest that ASL programs 1) avoid making agencies or community partners feel like they're being studied or objectified, 2) orient students into the community and the work they'll be doing, 3) emphasize quality of experience over minimum numbers of hours, 4) transcend the administrative imperative to use service as good p.r. for the university, 5) "teach us the community-building/organizing skills that we need" (8), foreground reciprocity, 6) devote material resources, 7) involve students in program development and leadership, giving them a real voice in the process, 8) avoid the too-common model of higher ed where "we are encouraged to be primarily consumers of knowledge and democracy--not active producers" (12).

II: Service and Politics
Long et al develop a model of the modes of civic engagement: conventional politics, community service, and "service politics." They reject the notion that service and volunteerism is necessarily apolitical, instead seeing the service-to-politics process as a developmental one.

They define conventional politics as electoral politics and/or working with institutions like political parties and special interest groups. Community service on the other hand is no less engaged with social issues or critical understandings of social context. The latter is more desirable for many young people who "dislike the institutional focus" and have an "anti-institutional bias." They use the analogy of formal religion and say the service is imperative is like having an individual spirituality that one follows. The third mode, "service politics," "becomes the means through which students can move from community service to political engagement. Those who develop connections to larger systemic issues building on their roots in community service adopt a framework through which service politics leads to greater social change" (18). They "find contemporary political life distasteful and unresponsive to their efforts" (19). Service politics can look at root causes of social problems: "Service politics is a form of civic engagement that looks at systems, while service is typicallty geared toward symptoms" (19). Activism can be a natural outgrowth of service politics.

Some thoughts: my work with SPHB can follow this service politics model. They do the work, study context, do project-based learning, and then their research papers can be the moment of political praxis. I don't impose an agenda, but give them resources and opportunities for political awareness and consciousness and contextual understanding of social problems. Then, allow them, through their own term papers, to involve themselves in material change.

Students may be drawn to service work for affective reasons. The feel-good nature of volunteerism which avoids the agonism of activism. But perhaps faculty are drawn to activism for affective reasons--a bodily and passionate attraction-cum-romance for activism (with a twinge of nostalgia)?

Brooke and McIntosh

Brooke, Robert, and Jason McIntosh. "Deep Maps: Teaching Rhetorical Engagement through Place-Based Education." The Locations of Composition. Ed. Christopher J. Keller and Christian R. Weisser. Albany: State U of New York P, 2007. 131-149.

Brooke and McIntosh suggest that having students draw deep maps is useful as a pre-writing/brainstorming activity, especially in terms of getting students to engage in place-based writing and address civic matters in real writing projects. They write, "Initially, writers need to become accustomed to seeing themselves in a place, that is, they need to become aware of the various ways location (literal and mental) creates their understanding of landscape, culture, class, race, and gender, and surrounds them with local issues and local possibilities" (132). Writing about place is a starting point, they say, toward project-based civic writing. The student becomes personally invested in place. Similar to what I've been calling a pedagogy of person-in-place. Mapping is "an exploratory moment that supported a personal context for place-conscious writing" (140). Place is part of rhetoric: "where to locate one's argument" (147). "Once that link is made, then a whole new energy for writing becomes possible--and a whole new energy for shaping the state of the places we will live, and the kinds of places we can help those locations become" (147).

Bickford and Reynolds

Bickford, Donna M., and Nedra Reynolds. "Activism and Service Learning: Reframing Volunteerism as Acts of Dissent." Pedagogy 2 (2002): 229-252.

Bickford and Reynolds notice that their service learning students often express enthusiasm for volunteering but a negative, resistant attitude toward activism. They wonder what the causes and implications of this trend might be. They critique the ASL literature as well as practices for not emphasizing two specific kinds of context: history and geography: "too often infused with the volunteer ethos...that ignores the structural reasons to help others" (230).

They mean to theorize activism as a complementary pedagogy/practice to ASL. In ASL "relationships are clearly based on difference" (237)--us and them, university and agency, but move toward a difference-erasing community-unity. "Activism argues for relationships based on connection" (237): grassroots organizing where various agents agitate for an issue, "a shared goal of creating social change" (237), but acknowledges that difference matters.

Change student anti-activism perception by teaching the history of consciousness-raising (eg, feminism) and organizing (Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, everyday struggles). Get students engaged critically with the politics of space and place via critical methodologies like mapping neighborhoods and even just the campus. They want to "...keep the emphasis of their work on the structural formations of communities rather on their individual members" (243). Give students choice in determining projects--even if they choose acts of dissent in support of causes we despise.

Some thoughts: At what point does place-based pedagogy become de-humanized? I wonder this about Reynolds other work too--while I'm drawn to the materiality of place, I want to revise this into a person-in-place pedagogy. Kind of like a text-in-context pedagogy. That person-in-place model (Loeb is useful here) seems to be the most material rhetoric of all. Does volunteering have an affective component ("happy talk") that activism lacks? After all, activism has an agonistic component (working class) that's at odds with middle-class decorum of higher ed.

Mutnick

Mutnick, Deborah. "Inscribing the World: Lessons from an Oral History Project in Brooklyn." College Composition and Communication 58 (2007): 626-647.

Mutnick describes an outreach initiative--"Our Legacies: Who We Are, Where We're From"--that gathered oral histories and visual celebrations (photo-essays and the like) of her child's school building, which was celebrating its centennial. She's interested in rhetorical work/pedagogy that engages and revitalizes a public sphere, pointing to Habermas's notion that the march of capitalism essentially destroyed/privatized the public sphere. Mutnick sees the existence of "counterpublics" (various voices, including those of dissent) as hopeful, and argues that civic places are constructed by the interplay of these voices and material reality.

The oral histories and story circles comprise a material rhetoric in that they reveal material realities, conflict, and a "bottom up" narrative/s. Individual stories run the risk of fostering status quo liberalism, but projects like this contextualize with social history and allow for competing/dissenting voices. In this way, the project transcends liberalism and becomes a person-in-place, individual-in-context pedagogy. Civic engagement, in Mutnick's project, means "inquiry into meaningfulness of place, infused always with the identities of those who pass through" (643).