The English Department at the University of Minnesota has made great strides toward a more engaged, civic-oriented curriculum. As literary practitioners , many of us teach students the critical skills of reading and writing in the context of community involvement and real public spheres. Increasingly visible in our department are faculty, lecturers, and several graduate students who are actively building the university's connections with Twin Cities organizations by incoporating community and service-learning components into their literature and composition classes. Regular course offerings in EngL (American Literacy and Cultural Diversity, Analysis of the English Language, new EngL courses (EngL 1501: Democratic Ethics and the Literature of Public Life, EngL 3501: Public Discourse, EngL 3880: Literature, Literacy, and Education), EngC courses (Citizenship and Public Ethics, Writing Beyond the Academy) highlight literary-civic themes and/or emphasize real-world writing scenarios. Some recent discussions of EngW courses have focused on developing deeper and more consistent collaborations between the department and the literary arts community (the Loft and Open Book in particular). Additionally, our Literacy Lab initiative emerged from a departmental Service-Learning Work Group; we have served on the university's Civic Learning Work Group; and we have received a Bush Foundation Grant, a Graduate Research Partnernship Grant, and Minnesota Campus Compact Grant for developing disciplinary structure around service learning and community engagement. We see such work as fundamental in inspiring, strengthening, and creating opportunities for student participation in the public sphere, and--in the larger scheme of things--as instrumental in renewing the university's civic commitment. Such work is timely: With The Presidents' Declaration on the Civic Responsibility of Higher Education calling for schools to become "agents and architects of a flourishing democracy," the Civic Engagement Task Force appointed by Provost Bruininks in response to the Presidents' Declaration, and a critical mass of instructors committed to civic engagement in our department, the time is ideal ideal for more deliberately coordinating some of these efforts.

Despite the rhetoric of democracy in our society and the commonsense idea that the democratic way of life is learned through democratic experiences, schools have been remarkably undemocratic institutions.
- Michael Apple and James Beane

For the past three centuries learning to write has been the very definition of entering into a capitalist and conquering society. Such is its fundamental initiatory practice.
- Michel De Certeau