Re-Framing the Argument: Critical Service- Learning and Community-Centered Food Literacy

Abstract

As a WPA and a service-learning director and practitioner, author suggests connections between food studies, rhetoric and composition studies, and service-learning theory that involve mobilizing students to join in or help lead community efforts surrounding local, organic food movement, food justice, and food literacy. The study is framed by questions of how composition instructors can create courses around issues related to global food crisis to embed students in community-centered food literacy initiatives, and, more generally, how practitioners and WPAs can effectively promote and explain community-engaged pedagogies to higher-level administrators who question value of practice. I recently had a conversation with a dean at University of Colorado Boulder about why Program for Writing and Rhetoric made a curricular commitment to service- learning and civic engagement throughout its lower- and upper-division courses. More specifically, he wanted to understand benefits of service-learning for students. He was not interested in assessment data about personal growth and civic learning. That students become more engaged and critical citizens for a participatory democracy (Berlin 97), as has been shown in numerous large and small-scale assessment studies (Ash, Clayton, and Atkinson; Astin and Sax; Eyler and Giles; Eyler, Giles, Stenson, and Gray), did not particularly impress him. Yes, he said, but is there something about service-learning that teaches students more effectively how to think and write? As some within Rhetoric and Composition Studies argue to move beyond Paula Mathieu's public to a 1 —one that would focus more deliberately on political issues than social turn of 1990s—practitioners, scholars, and WPAs once again face a host of questions that get at heart of why we teach and what higher education's purposes are and should be. This is nothing new. These conversations have persisted through last century from John Dewey to Paulo Freire to Ernest Boyer. In Rhetoric and Composition specifically, binary viewpoints about how to teach and purposes for rhetoric and composition classes incite emotional and compelling arguments. In one camp, for example, are literacy scholars such as Henry Giroux and Ira Shor, who argue that pedagogy is an emancipatory project of transformative intellectuals (Giroux 174-175). Critical pedagogue James Berlin declares, the objectives of English Studies are many. The most significant of these is developing a measure of facility in reading and writing practices so as to prepare