Broadening the Community

In the past few years, many English departments have welcomed the burgeoning area of service-learning into their curriculums, a development which Adler-Kassner, Cooks and Watters consider a “microrevolution” in the area of college-level composition (1). While compositionists have become increasingly thoughtful about different models for community-based writing – in Tom Deans’ schema, writing for, about or with the community – the literature has yet to explore the definition of “community” integral to each of these approaches. As Joseph Harris pointed out in his article “The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing” a decade ago, the idea of community has “extraordinary rhetorical power” yet the word “community” has no negative term; in fact, the term “community” is not even found in a college-level thesaurus. What and where is the ubiquitous “community” talked about in the service-learning literature? Is one community the same as the other? Are we all talking about one generic community or does the term vary from writing to writing? By uncovering the over-reliance on this term, we may begin to see why those who write on this subject do little to define the meaning of community.