Lisa Dush

DePaul University · Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse

This article articulates key ethical issues that may arise in sponsored digital storytelling initiatives, projects wherein participants' stories are used to promote the organization that subsidized their training. Analyzing a digital story from a public health project in the US, the article suggests that sponsored digital storytelling initiatives r...

This essay explores content, a word and concept now often associated with writing in fields including marketing, journalism, publishing, and technical communication. I present a definition of content appropriate to writing studies and explore a range of issues and practices that the content metaphor can bring to our professional, scholarly, and ped...

Prior researchers have identified charter documents as texts that serve an outsize role in stabilizing social reality and mediating work, writing, and network building. While charter documents are typically authoritative and text-only tomes, this article expands the category to include charter graphics, visual texts that serve similarly important g...

While much has been written about the curricular content and outcomes of capacity-building programs in community development, we know less about how theories of learning inform program design. This article presents a descriptive case study of the Chicago Peace Fellows, a capacity-building program for community leaders that was guided by a community...

Nonprofit organizations have long used the personal experience narratives of clients, staff, and stakeholders in their communications. This study explores digital-age practices with this text form, analyzing 82 collections of digital personal experience narratives (DPENs) housed at or linked to Web sites of nonprofit organizations. Results are repo...

Collaboration is not a core practice in humanities teaching and learning, despite convincing arguments that it should be. To encourage collaboration in classrooms and with communities, DePaul University has developed its Experiential Humanities Collaborative. The Collaborative connects faculty, community partners, and students to co-design and impl...

Drawing on fieldwork conducted with the designers of and participants in a new fellowship program to connect globally distributed grassroots leaders, this article defines a core set of communication-design practices that support emerging collectives and projects. The three practices detailed – creating a script, building a platform, and inventing p...

Successful nonprofit partnership projects in technical and professional writing courses require alignment between students, the instructor, and nonprofit partners. In content strategy projects, alignment is particularly challenging to establish and maintain, given the range of possible deliverables and the unsettled boundaries of content strategy a...

In this experience report, we describe a three-step heuristic to guide educators as they design content-strategy focused service-learning partnerships with nonprofit organizations. The heuristic moves students along an arc from conducting research to making recommendations. Each of the three heuristic steps also suggests an array of deliverables---...

Service-learning projects that connect students in new media writing courses with community organizations are typically framed as opportunities for students to develop production skills through “real-world” projects. This article proposes a different model and rationale for digital-age service-learning projects, in which students teach organization...