Tolerance and Collaboration

Fish believes that professors should stick to analysis while Ellen Cushman feels strongly about the relevance of service learning. These conflicted perceptions amount to the glass being neither "half full or half empty." The kind of careful dedicated neutrality proposed by Fish could in fact produce accurate and abundant analysis that those who have a practical agenda might translate into action research and service learning approaches (collaboration).

The fact that definitions for literacy vary presents a challenge. How is the individual's literacy competence measured by social-economic-institutional as well as individual constructs. Who gets to make the rules? Should a standardized form of English be declared the official language of the land, Native Americans, French, and Hispanic peoples were actually present in what became the United States before the English. English power became dominant and that's that?

Why should it matter? Should English be a "high culture" elite process or should service learning become a vehicle for challenging the entire multicultural society?