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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