Rhetorics for Community Action
Public Writing and Writing Publics
By (author) Phyllis Mentzell Ryder
Publication date:
29 December 2010Length of book:
325 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
239x164mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780739137666
Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics, by Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, offers theory and pedagogy to introduce public writing as a complex political and creative action. To write public texts, we have to invent the public we wish to address. Such invention is a complex task, with many components to consider: exigency that brings people together; a sense of agency and capacity; a sense of how the world is and what it can become. All these components constantly compete against texts that put forward other public ideals—opposing ideas about who really has power and who really can create change. Teachers of public writing must adopt a generous response to those who venture into this arena.
Some scholars believe that to prepare students for public life, university classes should partner with grassroots community organizations, rather than nonprofits that serve food or tutor students. They worry that a service-related focus will create more passive citizens who do not rally and resist or grab the attention of government leaders or corporations. With carefully contextualized study of an after-school arts program, an area soup kitchen, and parks organizations, among others, Ryder shows that many so-called "service" organizations are not passive places at all, and she argues that the main challenge of public work is precisely that it has to take place among all of these compelling definitions of democracy.
Ryder proposes teaching public writing by partnering with multiple community nonprofits. She develops a framework to help students analyze how their community partners inspire people to action, and offers a course design that support them as they convey those public ideals in community texts.
But composing public texts is only part of the challenge. Traditional newspapers and magazines, through their business models and writing styles, reinforce a dominant role for citizens as thinking and reading, but not necessarily acting. This civic role is also professed
Some scholars believe that to prepare students for public life, university classes should partner with grassroots community organizations, rather than nonprofits that serve food or tutor students. They worry that a service-related focus will create more passive citizens who do not rally and resist or grab the attention of government leaders or corporations. With carefully contextualized study of an after-school arts program, an area soup kitchen, and parks organizations, among others, Ryder shows that many so-called "service" organizations are not passive places at all, and she argues that the main challenge of public work is precisely that it has to take place among all of these compelling definitions of democracy.
Ryder proposes teaching public writing by partnering with multiple community nonprofits. She develops a framework to help students analyze how their community partners inspire people to action, and offers a course design that support them as they convey those public ideals in community texts.
But composing public texts is only part of the challenge. Traditional newspapers and magazines, through their business models and writing styles, reinforce a dominant role for citizens as thinking and reading, but not necessarily acting. This civic role is also professed
Rhetorics for Community Action is uniquely positioned in the untapped intellectual space between public-writing theory and service learning pedagogy. It is the only book I know of that offers such a cogent and detailed analysis of nonprofit community organizations—and their acts of public writing—as sites of rhetorical and ideological struggle. The many connections between community and classroom in this book are seamless and utterly essential. Rhetorics for Community Action keeps at its core a desire to make the many 'publics' in which Phyllis Mentzell Ryder and her students work better places. It is that clear but quiet sense of justice—along with its theoretical sharpness—that makes this book vital for anyone involved in public rhetoric, public writing or service learning. I think anyone contemplating a service-learning connection in a writing course should be required to read it.