Adding to the Conversation on Service-Learning in Composition: Taking a Closer Look

With the focus on service-learning that has arisen in the recent past in the area of composition/rhetoric, a book like this is a welcomed result to a need for more discussion in this area, and one that I am thankful to have had the opportunity to be a part of. But I did not want the book to be just a how-to, a collection of what people have done that has worked. That s certainly good information, but as someone who focuses on pedagogy, I also wanted the discussions to be framed by the whys. When teachers have used service-learning and it was successful, why was it successful? What is happening in these instances from a pedagogical perspective? I believe that unless we examine our pedagogical practices from a theoretical standpoint, we will not be able to understand what is really happening when things go well, or when they don t, so this book also contains some stories that illustrate learning from those instances when the teacher struggled with applications of service-learning in the composition classroom.