WRITING for REAL:
Rhetorics of the Service-Learning Contact Zone

Assignments Calendar of Assignment Due Dates Conference Schedule Current Students' Work Students' Past Work Instructor and Office Hours Online Resources Syllabus

WRITING for REAL is offered through the Program in Writing & Rhetoric at Stanford University. The course is taught by Carolyn Ross. The primary text is Writing for Real: A Handbook for Writers in Community Service by Carolyn Ross and Ardel Thomas (Longman, 2003). In this community-based class, we explore the dynamic between research and communication in academic settings and in public ones. The class provides students with opportunities to engage in purposeful research, writing, and speaking in a variety of rhetorical situations, employing a variety of media. At the intersections of visual, spoken, and written rhetorics, three class projects, two written and one spoken, will directly benefit the work of local nonprofit agencies, accounting for approximately one-half of students' course work. Academic projects (also involving multiple media) will relate directly and indirectly to students' community work. Mary Louise Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone" and the writing of other rhetoricians and analysts of culture, community, and education (including June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Richard Rodriguez) will help contextualize the exchanges of skills, knowledge, and ways of communicating in the service-learning "contact zone." These readings serve as points of reference as students, in the Leap-of-Faith Essay, examine their personal experiences as travelers in the contact zone. In the Community Writing Project, students produce documents for the use of community nonprofit agencies, adapting both research and writing to practical purposes and tailoring them to the specific needs and values of their readers. In the Community Speaking Project, students address community audiences on behalf of their agencies-- for example, in the form of presentations to agencies' boards of directors or as lessons presented to local elementary school children. In the Academic Research Paper, students articulate complex arguments based on research into topics of interest, related to their community work. Finally, students have the opportunity to write a Grant Application for $1,000 -- which has been made available to this class -- to fund a specific project at one of the community agencies working with the class.