Ellen Cushman

Rhetoricians can work to bridge the divide between academia and the community by encoraging community activism to become agents of social change. Being an agent of social change seeks to move beyond activism solely as a means to create a liberatory clasroom environment by empowering people in the community, establishing networks of reciprocity among citizens and creating solidarity with them (7).

If academia’s function is to “ensure [...] civic participation by well-rounded individuals,” then the academy has failed to do this under the guise of so-called objectivity, which distances the university from the community. Composition teachers and students can use their literacy cache and status to help empower people by helping them achieve goals, perform language/literacy actions and appropriate power and status of the activist (14). The community reciprocates by advancing the aims of the activists: improving their literacy status and community standing and accessing the community for research and study.

Working for social change helps to blur the dividing line between teacher and student via communication by moving the student-teacher/teacher-student relationship out of the classroom, which can be a limiting, politicized space.