Facing (Up To)'The Stranger' in Community Service Learning

Community service learning in college-level composition has been widely proclaimed as a microrevolution in higher education. Advocates enthusiastically assert that "both faculty and student participants report radical transformations of their experiences and understanding of education and its relation to communities outside the campus" (Adler-Kassner et al. 1). This pedagogy, they argue, addresses writing as a situated, social act and "points us toward a curriculum of textual studies based on [rhetorical] inquiry into variation in discourse" (Bacon 53). Students write about the community in journals and rhetorical analyses of mission statements, or with the community in an urban