Building on our discipline's history of writing-intensive client-based composition courses, our program design emphasizes writing as a means of knowledge production and a means for students to connect  their understanding experience of service and leadership to course content. 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 students  in real-world rhetorical (writing) situations, where they can write to explore issues, solve problems, and design deliverables according to community needs and 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. We meet this challenge directly in by offering students opportunity to write and work with technologies of writing in real-world situations, where cognitive and affective vectors combine to underscore and impart a vivid sense of civic responsibility. In our program design, students will learn about the relationship between technologies of writing and the specific literacy practices of  local communities. In the Feb 2007 CCC, W. Michelle Simmons and Jeffrey T. Grabill evaluate community informatics websites and describe today's spaces of "public deliberation" as "institutionally, technologically, and scientifically complex," and argue that a "civic rhetoric would also address helping users understand complex information technologies, both in terms of creating and using them" (423, 431). We agree. Structured participation in complicated contexts, in scenarios that demand both expansive thinking and structured response, cultivates a multivalent sense of responsibility: students correlate service with difficult and challenging ill-structured learning domains (Rand Spiro's Cognitive Flexibility Theory) where their actions matter and can make a difference; and, at the same time, students are encouraged to serve with community partners, and recognize opportunities for listening and responding to community partners, and in this way experience first-hand the way knowledge grows in communities.

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