Jessica Lauer and Janine Tobeck

Introduction

At the heart of our program’s pedagogy, in tune with contemporary writing pedagogy, is a dual imperative to foster both intellectual risk-taking and productive failure (Combs et al.; Commer et al.; Inoue; Teagarden et al.; West-Puckett and Moeggenberg; Weaver). These goals are mutually reinforcing but also feel at odds with one another; nevertheless, both aim to move students beyond rote compliance with academic and genre norms and toward deeper rhetorical engagement, adaptability, and reflective learning.

Intellectual risk-taking invites students to engage with rhetorical complexity, experiment with unfamiliar genres, and challenge familiar perspectives. Risk-taking is typically forward-looking, while failure typically registers retrospectively (for example, when risk does not lead to the expected or desired outcome, but instead becomes a site of reflection and growth). While both concepts are desirable within a learning environment that values rhetorical adaptability, they can compete in practice: students may avoid meaningful risks to protect themselves from failure, and educators may design courses that emphasize safety and success at the expense of authentic experimentation.

Further, while failure can be pedagogically productive, especially in “safe-to-fail” environments (Cornwall; West-Puckett and Moeggenberg), it can also provoke anxiety, disengagement, or perfectionism if not adequately supported. Thus, the tension lies in balancing these aims: how do we cultivate authentic risk without invoking paralyzing fear of failure? And how can we help students experience failure in communication situations as something that is inevitable and can be meaningful rather than personally diminishing? Navigating these dualities is central to building rhetorically agile writers prepared for the unpredictability of real-world communication.

These are the questions that this article will attempt to navigate, using reflective responses from our own students in officially designated Community Based Learning (CBL) courses, other project-based courses involving clients, and exit e-portfolios within our program as our primary site of inquiry.

Program Introduction

We are two of three faculty members in a Professional Writing and Publishing (PWP) major at a Midwestern comprehensive university. Our program launched in 2009 as an English emphasis and was expected to serve a niche population of English students who aspired to literary editorial and publishing careers. It was therefore designed as a blend of literature, creative writing, and a small core of grammar and desktop publishing courses. It also inherited the department’s existing technical writing service course, which fulfilled a dedicated upper-level writing requirement across campus. Within three years, an unexpected influx of students intrigued by professional writing more broadly led us to restructure our curriculum: we built the program around an editorial core—to center on what remains about half of our incoming majors’ specific interest in the publishing field—and deepened our elective offerings to introduce students to a broader range of writing careers. Between 2012 and 2020, we consistently served over 50 majors, and with mounting evidence of success in alumni placement, we proposed and re-launched PWP as a BA/BS degree-granting program in 2022.

We currently share with many programs the challenges of declining enrollments and cultural doubt about the practical value of higher education. Anxious questions about AI making the field obsolete are also on the rise. But the fact, for us, is that we have never had a large pool of students who enter highly aware of the contours of the field. Almost all of the students who declare our major at the outset do so because they found “publishing” in the title, while we pick up others as transfers or as they cross paths with one of our courses that serves their initial majors. Further, approximately one third of our university’s student body is first-generation, and familiarity with our less-conventional major is sparse. As our major count has declined, we have increasingly relied on interdisciplinary course design to attract and serve non-major students, highlighting how audience-focused, rhetorical awareness contributes to skillful practice in multiple fields. In almost every course, then, we face a shifting range of preparation, interest in the chosen material, and commitment to an exclusive disciplinary approach. Indeed, in any given run of a class, our program majors and minors might be in the minority, though we maintain a small set of core courses to foster cohort-building and the cohesion of our learning outcomes.

These contours help explain why our program has leaned into the client-based, project-driven courses that are our focus in this study. At base, these help us navigate the constraints noted above. For example, in our grant/proposal writing course, social science majors are willing to commit to our rhetoric-based approach because the genre is recognized as one that can give them a practical advantage in nonprofit careers. Our PWP majors and minors, meanwhile, see this course more as a test of their readiness to synthesize their prior training, but they similarly appreciate the obvious practical goal. More deeply, though, we see project-based learning as a way to address (and challenge) risk-aversion in students, as well as discourage templated thinking. This melds with another guiding principle for the program: treating genre as social action (Miller). We recognize our responsibility to teach our students genre and language conventions sufficiently well for them to participate in professional communities. We also, however, hope to help them judge when a situation calls for them to subvert standard structures or “rules” and to assume responsibility for the influence they exert through any communication design. As instructors, we believe one of the most authentic ways to guide students away from a deeply trained focus on mastery toward productive risk-taking is through project-based learning with outside stakeholders, and this has influenced how we design course experiences from our gateway to our capstones.

Theoretical Framework

Genre as Social Action

One of the guiding philosophies for shaping our undergraduate program is Carolyn R. Miller’s seminal article, “Genre as Social Action,” where Miller redefines genre not as a fixed formal structure but as a mutable and contextual response to varying social situations. This perspective positions genre not as a static form, but rather as dynamic and socially constructed, which means it is always emerging from and shaped by context, audience, and purpose. Miller’s framework supports both rhetorical adaptability and innovation, making it especially relevant for pedagogies that emphasize community-based learning (CBL) and for writing programs more broadly that are designed to serve a wide range of student interests and institutional goals.

For instance, in CBL settings, students often write for public audiences in unpredictable rhetorical contexts, where traditional academic or broader genres no longer suffice. Miller’s theory helps frame such moments not as misalignments, but as opportunities for rhetorical growth. Rather than simply fulfilling templates, students are called to read context, negotiate stakeholder expectations, and adapt genres accordingly. This interpretive work lies at the heart of what Miller describes as “social action.” In addition to this, Miller’s emphasis on the dual nature of genre as both stabilizing and evolving provides a rationale for encouraging intellectual risk. Students must learn not only to meet genre conventions but also to modify them in response to unique demands/stakeholder feedback, and realize that genres function in unpredictable ways when put into real-world contexts. We firmly believe this flexibility is essential in professional writing programs where responsiveness and audience awareness are core competencies.

In short, genre-as-social-action is not only a theory of writing but a pedagogical strategy that legitimizes complexity and supports course designs like our own that prioritize rhetorical flexibility over rule-based mastery. For both instructors and students, this framework helps articulate why intellectual struggle, navigating ambiguity, and rhetorical negotiation are not pedagogical detours—but the work itself.

Rhetorical and Intellectual Risk

Building on Miller’s view of genre as situative and adaptive, Commer et al. define rhetorical risk as moments where writers are called to move beyond compliance with known conventions and instead engage inventively with genres to respond to evolving social contexts. Like Miller, they present genre as not a fixed structure but as a negotiated and strategic action.

Teagarden et al. expand on this definition by conceptualizing intellectual risk as the willingness to move toward rhetorical complexity and away from perceived safety in student writing. They argue that by emphasizing public discourse and community engagement, students experience risk not only when challenging genre norms, but also when expressing socially embedded perspectives. Risk, in this sense, is both cognitive and affective.

These perspectives suggest that rhetorical risk is a necessary precondition for deep learning in public and professional writing. It arises most vividly at the intersection of genre performance and civic engagement, where writers must continually recalibrate their strategies in response to unpredictable audiences, fluid conventions, and the ethical demands of social and professional discourse.

Failure as Pedagogical Tool

In contemporary writing pedagogy, failure is increasingly recognized not as a deficiency but as a generative component of learning. The concept of “failing forward,” as articulated by West-Puckett and Moeggenberg, reframes failure as a necessary and even desirable element in processes of invention, reflection, and iteration. Drawing from principles of design thinking and rhetorical theory, they position failure not as an endpoint but as a methodological tool and a prompt for writers to recalibrate strategies, reimagine genres, and reflect on the social and material stakes of their writing.

While “failing forward” offers valuable pedagogical possibilities, some scholars caution that it can inadvertently privilege institutional perspectives and overlook the structural and social inequities that shape who can afford to fail and under what conditions. For example, Inoue argues that failure is often shaped by racist, classist, and ableist structures that disproportionately punish students from marginalized communities, thereby reinforcing systemic inequities rather than challenging them. Failure is not experienced uniformly; for students from marginalized backgrounds, failure may carry higher personal, academic, or professional risks. In addition, scholars have called for greater attention to the site of affect—the emotional, embodied experiences of both students and community members—which is often under-theorized in writing studies scholarship. They argue that affective dimensions, such as discomfort, empathy, and emotional labor, are not peripheral but central to the ethical and rhetorical work of CBL and must be more explicitly accounted for in both pedagogy and assessment.

Community-Based Learning (CBL)

Community-based learning (CBL) in writing programs has been widely recognized as a pedagogical approach that offers students authentic rhetorical experiences, but it also introduces significant complexities that must be thoughtfully addressed in program development. Bacon (1997, 2000) underscores that while CBL can foster meaningful engagement and public writing competencies, it inherently presents challenges related to power dynamics, student preparedness, and the ethical responsibility of representing community voices. Bacon also emphasizes the importance of incorporating sustained, critical reflection into CBL courses, noting that reflection is essential for helping students process their experiences, make sense of rhetorical complexity, and develop ethical awareness in relation to their community partners.

While each PWP instructor has incorporated client-based projects throughout our program, we built our Grant/Proposal Writing course in 2015 to emphasize processes for managing communication between multiple stakeholders. In 2019, we sought Community Based Learning (CBL) designation for the course, which now serves as an elective in six additional campus majors. Our university sponsors a CBL program, recognizing it as a high-impact learning practice that enhances student engagement and learning outcomes and dedicating administrative and professional development funds to its success. In the 2025–26 academic year, 35 designated CBL courses were offered, with those courses enrolling 320 students. In order to earn CBL designation for a course at our institution, an instructor must go through a rigorous design and approval process that includes incorporating CBL learning objectives into the course syllabus, collaborating with a community partner to ensure learning outcomes are aligned with community needs/expectations, and designing evaluation and assessment measures for the CBL projects. Reflective writing assignments are required for CBL designation.

It is because the grant proposal requires advanced generic and stylistic control, engaged negotiation of multiple stakeholders’ needs, and contextual awareness to shape a unifying story that we chose it for our singled-out genre course. For the class, we rely on Richard Johnson-Sheehan’s book Writing Proposals (now in its third edition as Writing Proposals and Grants), which offers a rhetorical rather than generic approach. This helps us situate the course in the overall PWP experience for our majors and engage our non-majors—many of whom have not taken a writing-based course since First-Year English—in ways that help bridge an academic-to-public and professional writing gap. Johnson-Sheehan and Hunter also importantly emphasize a crucial ethical dimension of community-based projects: that proposals—and the projects they support—should be developed with the populations served, rather than for or about them. They stress the importance of collaborative, participatory approaches where community members have a meaningful voice in shaping the project’s goals, strategies, and outcomes, framing proposal writing as a form of social negotiation that requires understanding the community’s needs from its own perspectives, not simply through the lens of the organization or writer. This aligns with broader conversations in community-based learning and service learning that caution against paternalistic or charity-driven models (Bacon; Cushman) and instead advocate for partnerships built on mutual respect, reciprocity, and shared authority.

Because CBL goals closely align with both grant writing principles and our broader program goals, we also sought CBL designation for our portfolio-development capstone, ensuring that PWP majors will have at least one CBL experience before graduation. Additionally, by including client-based projects across several other non-CBL program courses in the program, we aim to scaffold students away from reliance on form and toward practices that emphasize situational awareness and contextual considerations. Having multiple project-based experiences throughout the curriculum also provides students with sustained opportunities to develop rhetorical adaptability, navigate the complexities of working with real stakeholders, and experience the iterative, often unpredictable nature of public and professional writing. The hope is that this repeated exposure allows students to build confidence, refine their collaborative skills, and develop the resilience necessary to manage risk, respond to failure productively, and make context-sensitive rhetorical decisions over time.

Methodological Approach

This study originated as one way to evaluate the PWP program at our university. Data were drawn for this article’s secondary purpose from three key sources within our undergraduate PWP program:

• Student reflections submitted as part of officially designated community-based learning (CBL) and client-based project courses.
• Project-based course reflections from students working with real-world clients and community partners in non-CBL PWP courses.
• Exit e-portfolio reflections on included artifacts chosen from these courses by graduating PWP majors and minors.

Reflections were collected from multiple semesters across several course sections taught by two different instructors, which allowed for variation in community contexts, rhetorical tasks, client partnerships, and stage and purpose of the reflection among course activities. All student reflections were written as part of routine course activities, and none were assessed beyond credit for completion. The reflection exercises were explicitly characterized as tools for project and/or program evaluation that are also useful practice for students in articulating their formative learning achievements. All student data was de-identified to protect confidentiality. In total, we analyzed 56 reflections.

Our focus on student reflections aligns with the field’s growing use of reflective writing as a means of assessing student learning, rhetorical decision-making, and affective responses (Bower; Taczak and Robertson; Yancy, Reflection; Yancey, Rhetoric). Tazack and Robertson frame reflection as an interactive process, where one not only looks backward, but forward; both inward and outward. Reflective artifacts are particularly well-suited for studying risk and failure, as they capture students’ own interpretations of their learning processes and perceived successes or setbacks.

We employed an applied phenomenological approach to conduct a thematic analysis (Guest et al.) to explore how students experience intellectual risk and failure in community-based learning (CBL) contexts. Our analysis specifically focused on the rhetorical dimensions of student learning—namely, how students described negotiating audience expectations, composing within situated social contexts, and reflecting on genre conventions. Phenomenology, as a qualitative approach, is particularly suited to uncovering the lived experiences and meaning-making processes of individuals as they navigate complex rhetorical environments (Creswell and Poth). Given the emphasis in writing studies on writing as a socially situated and contextually bound practice, thematic analysis provided a methodologically appropriate framework to surface the ways students rhetorically navigated their CBL experiences.

Applied thematic analysis, as articulated by Guest, MacQueen, and Namey, also provided a flexible and systematic method for identifying, analyzing, and interpreting patterns within qualitative data. This approach is especially appropriate for applied research in writing studies that focuses on CBL, where practical implications and real-world contexts are foregrounded. The use of applied thematic analysis allowed for a rigorous yet adaptable coding process that accounted for both anticipated and emergent themes within student reflection.

Consistent with Saldaña’s emphasis on coding as an iterative and cyclical process, we conducted multiple rounds of coding to deepen our engagement with the data and enhance the reliability of our findings. Following Guest et al., the data analysis followed the key steps of applied thematic analysis: familiarization with the data, code development, coding, and theme construction. The analysis began with an initial read-through of all student reflections to develop a sense of the overall dataset and to identify early patterns and significant rhetorical moments related to risk, failure, and community engagement.

During the initial round of coding, both researchers independently engaged with reflections from their respective courses, applying descriptive coding to capture emerging topical themes. Following this, the researchers exchanged datasets and independently coded the reflections authored by their colleague. Inter-coder reliability was assessed using the consensual coding approach outlined by Guest et al., where discrepancies were discussed and resolved through collaborative dialogue to refine the codebook and ensure shared understanding of thematic boundaries. After completing the first cycle of coding, we compiled a comprehensive list of descriptive codes and met to discuss our individual coding decisions, reflect on emergent patterns, and negotiate differences. This collaborative dialogue enabled us to refine, consolidate, and merge overlapping codes, thus creating a more coherent coding framework.

Thematic saturation was reached when additional coding did not yield substantially new themes, consistent with Guest et al.’s criteria for saturation in applied qualitative research. Themes were iteratively refined to capture nuanced aspects of students’ rhetorical learning and their perceptions of risk and failure. These major themes are articulated in the Results section.

Results

Our reflection assignments generally prompt students to discuss what and how they learned during a project, often directly asking them to address a struggle or failure. Given this framing, stories of success (or the framing of the experience as a success) appear in almost all responses. As we coded for themes, then, we looked more specifically at characterizations of that success—how they met a challenge, demonstrated learned practices, addressed social dimensions, or used terms that we associate with rhetorical sensibilities of audience and context awareness. What emerged were our first two themes of (1) Academic or Task-Based Sensibilities and (2) Rhetorical Sensibilities. In a different vein, we attended to more affective wording that did not necessarily align with a success–failure structure, from which we derived our third category, (3) Affective Language.

Below are some representative samples from each category.

1. Academic or Task-Based Sensibilities

The reflection responses we coded as Academic or Task-Based Sensibilities often centered on mastering explicit course or program training, such as effective use of models, completing discrete tasks, and navigating the technical challenges of a project. In these responses, students expressed awareness of such things as the structural expectations of proposals, the need for document cohesion, and the practical demands of research, formatting, and visual design. For example:

The elements I found most useful was analyzing the grant in the start, because it gave me a good idea of how this grant should have been written and also how it should have been different based off information / RFP instructions.

As a class, we worked with the [client], to discuss [their] goals and projected outcomes […]. I practiced my research skills, as I researched RFPs and grant funding organizations for the first time.

For this project, a group of classmates and I collaboratively drafted a grant proposal for a non-profit organization. For this proposal, we chose a narrative approach which communicated the urgency of the situation. We distributed the work load by assigning each person a section (abstract, need statement, program description, et al.). After initial drafting, we revised the document together to increase its coherence. The biggest challenge of this project was writing collaboratively which included many voices and writing styles that required ample revision to formulate language consistency.

The funder did not have any specific layout requirements, so I tried to follow the sample proposal layout while considering the most effective layout for the viewers. […] I addressed the layout struggles by considering the most effective presentation of the information. I also referred back to the sample proposal to see how the proposal elements worked together and the presentation of the material.

When I first started making my Gantt Chart, I started off with far too much information that made it overly complex. Once I removed a lot of this information (that is already in other areas of my proposal) it began to look a lot nicer.

2. Rhetorical Sensibilities

The following responses were coded under Rhetorical Sensibilities because they demonstrate students’ growing awareness of audience, purpose, context, and the iterative, relational nature of communication in authentic settings.

I personally worked on social media and marketing strategies. Although marketing is not a field I intend to get into, professional writing heavily coincides with marketing, so I found value in the work I did. I really enjoyed researching [client] and similar programs because it made me aware of social problems that I previously did not consider.

I wasn’t sure where to look for information about [the motives and attitudes of the secondary and tertiary readers], and I was concerned I was focusing on the wrong people in each category. I didn’t feel confident in tailoring a proposal towards motives and attitudes that could’ve been inaccurate.

There were many times when my classmates and I realized we didn’t have all the information we needed in order to craft a coherent proposal. It required a lot of critical thinking to discover what was missing and ask the right questions to get that information from the clients. […] Asking questions expresses interest in developing a relationship with the grantor and shows we care about our project.

The reflection assignments forced me to chip away at the project no matter how confident I was which I was really thankful for during the large drafting processes. […] I at least had something to work with which helped me continue the process and taught me even more about what editing and revising my own work should look like.

When I thought about who all of the various readers would be with their specific desires, I had an idea of how to nuance my writing to meet multiple desires at a time. […] It was really helpful for me to talk over my thoughts in class and hear everyone else’s thoughts. I didn’t realize that there was a way to work together while still all working on our own.

I think the class project of it all blinded us to the fact that in a career setting, there would be lots of communication between intersecting projects. Looking back, more communication, both with the other group and with the people we’re working for, would have helped.

I felt that working together with my classmates to help support the [client] was a really positive experience. Whenever you can do work that is actually for a meaningful cause, it always feels more interesting and engaging.

Going forward and for future years, it could make sense to have the grant proposal team and marketing team meet to agree on vision and goals, so what both teams come up with are cohesive, consistent, and support each other. I also felt it was nice that we were all able to provide [client] with materials that they can edit and adjust to meet their needs. Sometimes there are projects were the work submitted is not able to be adjusted and reused so easily and since this is not the case with this project, it gives me confidence that what we did for them can truly be of value to them. Finally, I like that students are getting opportunities to do real-world work instead of just assignments. I think it builds confidence and connections.

3. Affective Language

A notable tension emerged between the ways students self-project as confident, competent professionals and the affective language they use to describe their experiences, which often reveals underlying uncertainty or hesitation. Many students mingled markers of mastery—positioning themselves as capable grant writers or skilled communicators prepared for professional contexts—with language that conveyed personal doubt, anxiety, or frustration.

I think that working with a client was enlightening but it also made the project much more difficult. I think that I would have been able to produce a better final product without having to consider the clients perspective. However, that is not how the real world works and I think it was a great experience.

I will admit that this proposal did come with some challenges. The main one for myself was the fact that we were working with incomplete data and idea for the proposed project. I understand that this would be a real life scenario, but it still brought some difficulty for me.

My biggest struggle was working on my draft when I felt insecure about how I was writing it (perfectionism). I wanted to write something that I was really proud of, but I had no idea how to get there, and I set some standards for myself along the way that got in my way.

I knew what I wanted to say about the project but that differed from what the client, the grantor, and you wanted from the project. I needed to find a way to try and satisfy everyone requests. It was hard. The need statement was torture for me. […] I think it’s my weakness and I’m not really sure why. Trying to satisfy everyone was difficult. I tried to only focus on what the grantor wanted to read. Then I assessed what the client wanted to say. I then filtered all of that information through my head and added my own opinions and “expertise.”

In the past, I’ve written grant proposals for another nonprofit company, but I felt that throughout the course of my work and after I produced a product I received backlash for not incorporating information which was never provided to me or brought to my attention, so it was so beneficial to be part of a give and take grant writing process where helpful resources were provided and the final product was appreciated despite their still having to go back and do a little work inserting the finer details at a later point.

I’m someone who can be easily overwhelmed with the many moving parts of such a large project, and I’m often impatient taking things step by step. This is probably my biggest takeaway from PWP in general. I’ve learned that breaking things down into phases and chunks can only benefit your future self. In fact, I tested myself with this course and chose not to rely on the specified deadlines. I held myself accountable and completed each portion piece by piece and still managed to get everything in within an appropriate window. This is a skill that will benefit me outside of college as I begin taking on client copywriting projects.

Discussion

As suggested by our examples in the Academic or Task-Based Sensibilities category, students demonstrate familiarity with how to instrumentalize failure using studied technical language. This is encouraged by our framing of the reflection prompts—and probably by educational and cultural training writ large—because when we introduce reflection assignments, we aim to defuse our students’ anxieties over a “right” way to reflect by mentioning the objective of project/program evaluation, but we also justify the time they spend writing reflections as good practice for job applications and interviews. We suggest that talking through a failure is a useful way to signal “I know how to learn,” a key skill in a rapidly evolving professional world, and to add functional evidence to the proclamations of mastery that any job candidate can easily mouth. The success narratives that emerge easily structure these moves, and we see these most regularly underwritten by confidence or pride in personal ownership of learned material. Even the verbs tend to reflect a fusion of personal and professional, as in “I practiced,” “I researched,” “I tried,” “we chose,” “we distributed,” etc.

In the Rhetorical Sensibilities category, where responses reflect student engagement with more open-ended complexities of navigating competing audience interests, the language also evidences awareness of rhetorical complexity and students’ attempts to internalize it as part of their professional writing identities. We see, however, a greater infusion of affective language and vaguer articulations when the needed information is distributed in the social context and the task is one of rhetorical listening rather than material recall. These responses reveal varying degrees of confidence tied to non-scripted social navigation, not least among their own peers. Especially where that was not reassuring, the larger project context sounds even more overwhelming. We note how verbs in the quoted samples tend to distance the student from the chosen action (e.g., “I think,” “I felt”/”didn’t feel” statements), more passive constructions (e.g., “more communication… would have helped”), and less willingness to own the learning, as in “the reflection assignments forced me to,” etc.

On one hand, the differences reflected in our Affective Language category affirm the value of our CBL coursework, where we short-circuit easy transference of audience prediction from us to an authoritative client by engaging a client who is consciously and explicitly one among competing stakeholders with varied interests in program design. However, this endeavor also amplifies the risk of failure, as in these projects, reliable information sourcing is diffused. The most confident expressions of learning within this challenge do tend to invoke the power of collaboration, of having other voices to play with in class as they tried out their own sensibilities. Conversely, where respondents show signs of getting (and staying) stuck, they describe group insecurity or mental self-isolation along with some defensiveness over the broadness of the challenge. They mention being tripped up by “(perfectionism)” and “standards [they] set for [themselves],” even to the point of dividing “everyone[‘s] requests” from what the student “knew” and “wanted to say” and reducing their own “opinions and ‘expertise’” to add-ons. We noted how these comments often even destabilize terms of mastery with parentheses or scare quotes, and we were struck by a tendency to invoke an absent reliable force: the “real world,” the “outside of college,” or the “real-life scenario” that helped them reconcile themselves to the value of the experience. This language externalizes the goal; the language in the Academic or Task-Based Sensibilities category internalizes it, perhaps sometimes only as a socially-valued performance of confidence.

These results solidify something we have already suspected: that we need to focus more direct attention on how to navigate the social risks of collaboration within the classroom itself. Relying on taught material helps gives students some useful territory of confidence through which to structure their interactions, even if we suspect that it’s low-hanging fruit and not necessarily internalized—a deployment of social expectations they think will buffer them but that does not encourage them to exercise the more locally-responsive rhetorical sensibilities we hope we are developing. We, too, have used a language of “professionalization” to convince students of the relevance of their college endeavor and degree choice. In recent years, students have been responsive to this, but we may be eliding crucial bridging territory. Anecdotally, even since the initial drafting of this study, we have experienced more instances of students retreating from an emphasis on professionalization to the point of disengagement from work, as well as more class discussion topics about feeling unable to connect to others.

This study examined the role of intellectual risk-taking and productive failure within community-based learning (CBL) and project-based courses in our Professional Writing and Public Discourse (PWP) program. While we agree that risk is essential to developing rhetorically agile writers, we also realized that failure was often buffered by instructor planning/intervention; instructors sometimes over-structure assignments to prioritize success over authentic experimentation. This suggests a potential gap between how instructors conceptualize failure in community-based learning (CBL) and how students actually experience it. Several scholars (see Carr; Commer et al.; Cornwall; Fishman et al.) have emphasized that failure, when thoughtfully incorporated into writing pedagogy, can create rich opportunities for learning and rhetorical flexibility. However, the notion of “productive failure” is often framed from an instructor’s perspective, imagining that students will feel discomfort, frustration, or challenge as a site of growth. In reality, students may not perceive these moments as meaningful failures at all. Instead, they may interpret them as minor obstacles, routine setbacks, or simply part of completing an assignment, rather than as pivotal moments of rhetorical development. This disconnect suggests that the kind of risk and failure instructors envision may remain abstract to students, particularly in the absence of explicit framing or structured opportunities for critical reflection on those experiences (Carr; Fishman et al.; Gelms). Consequently, our thematic analysis may not fully capture the depth of students’ emotional, affective, or embodied engagements with failure, especially when reflections are written retrospectively and may overlook or downplay moments of uncertainty. So, failure, when thoughtfully integrated into these learning environments, is a valuable pedagogical tool; however, we found that students did not always perceive these moments as meaningful failures without explicit framing and support.

Conclusion and Future Directions

Client-based, real-world projects continue to challenge students’ reliance on formulaic, template-based thinking. Drawing on Miller’s framework of genre as social action, the study illustrates how students engage in rhetorical flexibility when they view genre as situational and evolving rather than as a static form. Through these experiences, students are encouraged to navigate complex, unpredictable rhetorical contexts and develop the judgment necessary to use genres rhetorically in response to real-world demands. Rhetorical and intellectual risk-taking require students to move beyond compliance with genre norms and into spaces where they engage with rhetorical complexity and civic discourse.

Teaching writing reflection explicitly is essential for helping students develop metacognitive awareness about their rhetorical choices, writing processes, and growth as communicators. Scholars like Taczak and Driscoll and Wells emphasize that reflection should not be treated as a perfunctory end-of-course task but as an integral, recursive part of the writing process that guides students in transferring skills across contexts. When students are taught how to reflect meaningfully—through guided prompts, structured opportunities for self-assessment, and iterative reflection moments—they are better equipped to articulate the reasoning behind their decisions, recognize patterns in their learning, and adapt to new rhetorical situations. Teaching reflection explicitly also helps students reframe experiences of struggle and failure as valuable learning moments rather than as deficits, supporting deeper engagement with concepts like genre, audience, and purpose. By embedding reflective practices throughout a writing curriculum, instructors can foster a mindset of inquiry and adaptability that prepares students for the rhetorical complexity of real-world communication.

At the core of our own program design, and of writing studies more broadly, is an understanding that genres are not static forms but socially situated responses to particular communicative needs (Miller). In recent years, the development of LLMs has made the use of genAI continuously more prevalent in student work. The concept of a “plug and play” response that adheres technically to genre confines has been taken to an entirely new level. However, it is no surprise that when students rely on AI to generate genre-based texts without carefully considering the unique circumstances surrounding their writing tasks, they risk producing writing that may conform to surface-level conventions but fail to achieve rhetorical effectiveness. This can lead to formulaic writing that meets the “look” of a genre but does not function meaningfully within its intended context. AI has perhaps inadvertently reinforced (and encouraged) the misconception that genres are formats rather than dynamic frameworks that require writers to make nuanced decisions based on shifting audiences, purposes, and cultural settings. In this way, unchecked and uninformed use of AI risks devaluing the rhetorical reasoning and situational awareness that are central to effective writing.

Limitations and Future Research

While this study offers valuable insights into how students rhetorically navigate community-based learning (CBL) experiences and the risks that they present, it is important to acknowledge some of the limitations that shape the scope of the findings. First, the student reflections analyzed in this study were drawn from a relatively small sample size (limited number of courses analyzed, limited number of semesters data was collected, and thus a limited number of total student reflections analyzed), which limits the breadth of perspectives represented.

Another important limitation concerns the variability of the CBL experiences themselves. The reflections analyzed were derived from multiple CBL projects facilitated by different instructors across various community partnerships. While this diversity offers a rich range of rhetorical situations, it also introduces variability in course design, community engagement practices, and instructional approaches. These differences may influence the types of learning outcomes students reported and the ways in which they framed their experiences. A more uniform or standardized structure across CBL courses would allow for more controlled comparisons and could strengthen the reliability of future thematic analyses.

In addition, given that the data was collected from student reflections at the end of the semester, they may not fully capture the evolving nature of student experiences in CBL contexts over time. This study represents a snapshot of student learning rather than a sustained, longitudinal investigation. A long-term study that follows students across multiple semesters or through subsequent CBL experiences would provide additional opportunities to track the development of rhetorical skills, reflective practices, and perceptions of community engagement over time. Expanding the data set through longitudinal research could offer a more comprehensive understanding of the enduring impact of CBL on students’ writing and rhetorical awareness.

Finally, in the time since initially drafting this study, we have seen and heard genAI increasingly dominate student questions and assumptions about writing and anxieties about failure. We suspect that this would need to be factored explicitly into future study design to distinguish between CBL- and AI-inflected responses.