College Composition & Communication - Volume 54, Issue 1, 2002

The role of the professor in community service writing courses factors into the teaching, research, and overall institutional viability of these initiatives, yet too little has been written about the role of the professor in service learning. Through an analysis of recent publications on service learning and data gathered during an outreach initiative at University of California, Berkeley, this article reveals a few of the obstacles that hinder the sustainability of community literacy programs. I find that professors in service learning courses can better sustain these initiatives when they view the community site as a place where their research, teaching, and service contribute to a community’s self-defined needs and students’ learning.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism and his irenic view of the cultural other inform this article that builds the multiple voice of the eloquent “I” as a dialectic self-construction where codes of meaning are inscribed. The eloquent “I” cultivates a deepened self-dialogue and offers students an epistemological and rhetorical discipline, bearing witness to their imaginative, meaningful interiority and their written, public articulation of it.

Plagiarism is difficult, if not impossible, to define. In this paper, I argue for a context sensitive understanding of plagiarism by analyzing a set of written institutional policies and suggesting ways that they might be revised. In closing, I offer examples of classroom practices to help teach a concept of plagiarism as situated in context.

Radical feminist textuality of the 1960s and today provides a suggestive example of networked and collectively literate action, action dependent on the constant and visible contextualization of self and writing within the discourses that shape us. In this essay, I argue that an articulation of radical feminist textuality can benefit both scholarship and classroom, in that it situates writers as rhetorical agents who can write, resist, and, finally act within a network of discourses and identifications.