Introduction: Community-Engagement Pedagogies in Practice

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For Reflections readers, the lines between “teaching,” “research,” and “service” have always been fluid. The community-engaged work that some consider “service” is central to the research identity and trajectory of many Reflections readers. In the same way, Reflections readers also understand that  “teaching,” and pedagogy more broadly, takes place in many areas beyond a single classroom. 

At a time when academic labor continues to be increasingly challenging, and challenged by institutions and politicians alike, I’m grateful to the authors of this issue in Reflections, all of whom demonstrate that the work we do in academia and in our communities is rigorous research with deep pedagogical value. The authors in this issue reflect on their teaching practices, on their identities as teachers and community-engaged practitioners, and on the successes and failures of the everyday work of academics. As readers engage with the articles in this issue, I hope you are inspired to submit your own reflections, teaching practices and studies, and lessons for other teacher/researcher/community activists. As these articles demonstrate, the work of community-engagement is deeply theoretical and worthy of discussion, even when the “product” of a community-engaged project is not what was initially intended. I’m grateful that Reflections continues to be a space where we can engage in discussions about teaching, research, and service collectively, and where we can be honest about successes, failures, and takeaways from our projects. The deeply honest and reflexive articles in this issue are a testament to the power of community–in our field, in our classrooms, and in our everyday interactions with one another.

This issue opens with “A Rhetoric of Accent Fear and the Experiences of Multilingual Teachers of Writing” by Eda Özyeşilpınar and Mohammed Sakip Iddrisu. While much scholarship on accent bias has focused on the role that linguistic discrimination plays in classrooms from the student perspective, Özyeşilpınar and Iddrisu articulate how international multilingual writing instructors navigate accent bias in their classrooms and departments. Through their narratives, the authors explain, “Our language performances in the English language deviate from the expected WME performance—how a white-American writing scholar and teacher is expected to sound like. This site of tension is where and when students tend to manifest accent-fear as a form of linguistic racism that translates into questioning and attacking our knowledge, expertise, and credibility as rhetoric and writing scholars and teachers.”  Özyeşilpınar and Iddrisu illustrate the importance of recognizing accent fear not only from the perspective of students, but also from the perspective of the many international professors and colleagues who experience this type of discrimination as they navigate their work in US-based classrooms. 

Next, Logan Middleton shares strategies for teaching a first-year writing class through the framework of mutual aid. In “Teaching Mutual Aid in First-Year Writing,” Middleton describes his course, “Rhetorics and Literacies of Mutual Aid,” in which he asked students to work “collaboratively as an entire class to engage a campus issue in their lives,” specifically through a Mini Solidarity Campaign Assignment. Detailing the challenges of teaching this course at a predominantly white institution, Middleton provides important takeaways and insights on how community-engaged pedagogy shifts and is influenced by the background and lived experiences of students. 

Continuing the theme of reflecting on community-engaged pedagogies, Keshia Mcclantoc and Ada Hubrig reflect on (and reposition) normative notions of failure in community literacy programs in their article “An Unglamorous, Queercrip Account of Failure in the Writing Lincoln Initiative.” In this article, Mcclantoc and Hubrig illustrate how instructor positionality also influences community-engaged pedagogy.  Mcclantoc and Hubrig’s personal accounts as “queer, disabled graduate students directing a student-founded, student-led community literacy program” provide important takeaways both for community-engaged practitioners developing programs and for those who supervise graduate students in taking on this extensive work. As decades of community-engaged research has shown, community-engaged projects are not separate from the identities and positionalities of teachers, students, and the institutions fueling much of this work. 

The final piece in this issue, “A Window Into Community-Engaged Writing: Three Student CEW Reflections” by Debra Diamond Young, Nathan Behrends, Jasmyne Harrison, and Avery Tiernan, further centralizes student perspectives on community-engaged pedagogies. The three students in the course make connections between community-engagement and their own identities and experiences, further illustrating how community-engaged practices are shaped by, and shape, the many stakeholders involved in each project. These student reflections demonstrate the impact and intersections between community-engaged research and pedagogies. 

As evidenced in all of the articles in this issue of Reflections, community-engaged practitioners do not have the privilege of working in silos. Community-engagement requires an attunement to identity and positionality, a recognition of institutional context and its influence on the community, and a synergy between research, service, and teaching. Please continue submitting your exciting and innovative community-engaged work to Reflections!