Assembling relational systems : a cultural rhetorics model for building, enacting, and sustaining service-learning partnerships
This paper describes a partnership between an academic service-learning course at Michigan State University and a public elementary school in East Lansing, Michigan. The course—Writing Center Theory and Practice—connects students with community partners to practice theories associated with writing center consultation. I will describe my experiences developing the partnership between Writing Center Theory and Practice and a local school, Glenhills Elementary. To build, enact, and sustain this partnership, I integrated perspectives associated with both service learning and Cultural Rhetorics.Cultural Rhetorics scholarship and the responses of my research participants moved me toward three central findings: (a) To establish this service-learning partnership, I practiced a methodology of listening grounded in feminist and rhetorical scholarship. This perspective encouraged me to listen to the teachers, staff, and administration in East Lansing Public Schools as they self-identified the assets, knowledge practices, and needs that circulate within their communities. Such a perspective works against civic engagement models that only configure community partners in terms of deficits. (b) Enacting this partnership centered on assembling relationships. I suggest that those of us who participated in the partnership cultivated not only interpersonal relationships, but also relationships that connected ideas, concepts, practices, and theories. (c) I conclude by arguing that these networks of relationships are structures that contributed to the partnership’s sustainability.
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- In Collections
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Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Copyright Status
- In Copyright
- Material Type
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Theses
- Authors
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Green, McKinley
- Thesis Advisors
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Smith, Trixie
- Committee Members
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Powell, Malea
Epps-Robertson, R. Candace
- Date
- 2016
- Subjects
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Composition (Language arts)--Study and teaching (Primary)
Rhetoric--Social aspects
Service learning
Rhetoric
Michigan--East Lansing
- Program of Study
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Critical Studies in Literacy and Pedagogy - Master of Arts
- Degree Level
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Masters
- Language
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English
- Pages
- v, 60 pages
- ISBN
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9781339704746
1339704749