Here, ShareRiff solicits feedback, comments, suggestions on this working draft of the spring syllabus. I need help with the idea of sentence #2: I am trying to enchant/open at the beginning, so that the students can really jam before we have to lock in and create a narrow rfp. Also, 6421 scholarly paper (last sentence, first paragraph) needs a different framework, what I have here is place-holder. Click edit and shred it...

In this client-based course, undergraduates enrolled in ENC 4260 and directed studies will join graduate students enrolled in ENC 6421 to form a student philanthropy board. At the beginning of the semester, this collective of differing student spokes will generate a wheel of open and robust student-driven dialogue, investigation, and evaluation of the most important and most challenging problems and potentials taken up by nonprofit agencies in the greater Tampa Bay area, ranging from accelerating change in the technology sector/green computing, to risk-prevention and youth-outreach in low-SES communities, and environmental issues. Students will then translate these conversations and research into a meaningful and timely notice of funding availability (NOFA), create a rubric for evaluating proposals/applications received in response to the NOFA, and, at the end of the semester, award the grant. Along the way, students will experiment and collaborate with technologies of writing, and acquire a real-world professional writing training as they document and narrate this process for the client (the Lead, Learn, and Serve grant committee) by means of letters of intent, pre-proposals, proposals and budgets, resumes, and other commonplace modes/formats of technical and professional writing. At the completion of our course, in addition to sharing finalized NOFA-related documents with the LLS committee (who will broadcast to the local nonprofit community), students will produce an additional reflective/experimental/capstone technical document (4260), a research project based on issues that emerged in the process of creating the NOFA (directed study), or a scholarly paper that examines the process of creating a relationship, and overcoming potential obstacles that arise, between the nonprofit sector and educational systems (6421).

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Building on rhetoric&composition's history of writing-intensive client-based composition courses, this course emphasizes writing as a means of knowledge production and a means for students to connect their understanding--and experience--of service and leadership to their academic goals. Our foray into today's nonprofit sector--a multidimensional and increasingly technologically complex space of public deliberation--is designed to provide a practical and applied training in 21^st century civic rhetoric.

Structured participation in complicated contexts, in scenarios that demand both expansive thinking and precise, timely response, makes possible a multivalent sense of “response-ability”: our service will involve direct inquiry into difficult and challenging ill-structured ethical domains (Rand Spiro's "Cognitive Flexibility Theory"), where simple, well-designed communicative actions matter and can make a difference. When we engage complexity and render simplicity in this way, we take our cue from the Stanford Model of service learning, which emphasizes public writing but also values expressive and academic genres, and defines pubic writing itself as a robust and multiply-engaging form of service. This script places us in real-world rhetorical (writing) situations, where we will write to explore issues, solve problems, and design deliverables according to personal, community, and client needs, according to the standards of diverse genres and media of composing.

Increasingly, civic rhetorical performances arise to meet problems exacerbated by, and sometimes even born out of, increasingly complex bureaucratic and technological terms and interfaces. This course directly meets this challenge directly by offering students the opportunity to tinker with technology, deliberate and dissipate together (in writing) on tough issues, and then apply our collective research and deliberation to very specific modes of technical communication. In the process of researching and creating a NOFA, we will learn about the relationship between technologies of writing and the specific literacy and problem-solving practices of local communities. Hopefully, our process of writing and working together with technologies of writing in real-world situations will allow cognitive and affective vectors to commingle in ways that underscore and impart a vivid sense of civic responsibility.

The students will drive this process, from the creation of a direct appeal to a specific area of today's nonprofit sector, to the design of an evaluation rubric for assessing and ranking received proposals, all the way to the granting of monetary resources to the nonprofit agency most poised to enact a practicable response to an exigent need for innovation.