Ehrlich and Fu’s main goal in co-authoring Civic Work Civic Lessons is to encourage young people to become more civically engaged, particularly in politics and public policy (in terms of genre, the book is a type of ‘how-to’ or ‘lessons-learned’ text, intended for a general, mainstream audience. It would be most useful to assign to students as an introduction to civic work or service-learning, alongside similar texts such as Peter Levine’s We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For and Stephen Preskill and Stephen D. Brookfield’s Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice). The authors also maintain that their book contains lessons for any reader interested in civic work or interested in mentoring young people to engage civically.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric