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Heather Lettner-Rust
Lecturer, Longwood University, and doctoral student, Old Dominion University
Editors Note: Heather Lettner-Rust has written a commentary on David Coogan's article "Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhetoric," which appeared in the June 2006 issue of CCC David Coogan responds to Heather Lettner-Rust's commentary. The full text of the original article is available at http://inventio.us/ccc.
I was delighted to read David Coogan's framing of service learning practices within a more explicitly rhetorical paradigm. His service-learning course aims for students to "discover the arguments that already exist in the communities we wish to serve; analyze the effectiveness of those arguments; collaboratively produce viable alternatives with community partners; and assess the impact of our interventions" (668). Furthermore, Coogan's article takes rhetoric one step further by articulating a useful frame for knowledge making and knowledge sharing. I think Coogan would agree with Bruce Herzberg's assertion in "Civic Literacy and Service Learning" that "rhetoric s function [is] to make the knowledge supplied by the other disciplines [and service learning] useful in the public sphere." Coogan presents not only a careful and complete look at service learning s curriculum for the academy but also a clear step for writing pedagogy.
It is with great interest that I read of Coogans promise of a unique "approach ... that [shows] us a path from rhetorical discovery to practical outcomes [of service learning]" (668). After all, many of us designing service learning are after the same pedagogical objectives Coogan states: Our courses are "not just a case for rhetorical activism in service learning but a case for rhetorical scholarship in the public sphere: a challenge to test the limits of rhetorical theory in the laboratory of community-based writing projects in order to generate new questions for rhetorical theory, rhetorical practice, and rhetorical education" (670).
Writing toward Social Change
Coogan's course and many other service learning courses place students within an agency selected by the instructor as a conflation of both course objectives and the rhetorical needs of the agency or community-based organizations (CBO). While I can see that this direct placement allows for immediate engagement of the students in the CBOs, I wonder what they lose.
When we place students in CBOs or choose the public issue that...