Our program design emphasizes a shift in pedagogical values from consumption to production more than it emphasizes any particular technology or aspect of composing with technologies. In "Coding Free Software, Coding Free States: Free Software Legislation and the Politics of Code in Peru,"  MIT's Anita Chan argues that it is the "recodability of political and civic bodies--rather than the recodability of technology and free software itself--that's most at stake in movements for free software legislation in Peru....Peruvian free software participants' strategic utilizations of technology to engage with national politics and suggested that it was the social context surrounding the technologies, and not merely the technologies themselves" that is most critical (Chan). In this same spirit of autonomy and leadership, our client-based writing classes apply a critical lens to the very tools of production used in service learning projects. Moving students-as-citizens out of dependency depends not just on learning what's possible with tools-qua-tools, but more importantly how to navigate the rhetorical, political, and social fabric of specific communities of knowledge and practice.  In order to participate in and help generate such a paradigm shift in the way universities participate in wider social, economic, and technological fields,  our students must be granted the opportunity to make these connections in the curriculum. An engaged curriculum creates a space for students to become conversant with emergent and social technologies, and their implementation, but more importantly, such a curriculum must articulate a place where "town meets gown," so students can directly reckon with the political and social forces shaping these technologies, their availability, and their civic applications. Examples: going through the process (a technical, social, and cultural process) of implementing a computer lab or an art studio, writing a grant for a client (Sistahs Supporting Sistahs Surviving Breast Cancer, Even Start Family Literacy Program, MZHS), and balancing experimentation (with new software, such as Scribus) with the demands of strict deadlines (delivering a newsletter + faq on the process for future newsletter editors)...ideating, writing, and editing such projects give students a chance to learn leadership skills relevant to the increasing imbrication of technology and community in the public sphere.  Emergent forms of community literacy, born out of necessity, challenge and renew our understanding of collaborative writing, especially when communities form digitally and by means of social technologies. Our writing program aims to take the mystery out of "collaborative writing" by coordinating university and community interests by and through writing. In an information society, networked or distributed writing becomes the primary rhetorical component of civic engagement; atomized literacy actions, such as posting to a community webforum, searching a community database, or simply learning a new interface, gain new rhetorical and pedagogical force when they become coordinated in a learning community, and such organized response-ability may be the most important form of literacy for tomorrow's leaders.

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