This essay examines the history of a massive literacy campaign called the Citizenship School Program that began as a response to the racist literacy tests that disenfranchised countless African American voters throughout the Southern United States between 1945 and 1965. The Citizenship Schools prepared thousands of African Americans to pass the literacy test by using materials that critiqued white supremacism and emphasized the twentieth-century struggle for civil rights.

Review Essay: Language, Identity, and Citizenship Keith Gilyard Black Identity: Rhetoric, Ideology and Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalism Dexter B. Gordon, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003 Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education. Catherine Prendergast, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003 Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity and Literacy Education, Michelle Hall Kells, Valerie Balester, and Victor Villanueva, eds., Portsmouth, NH: Boynton, 2004.

This essay reports on the first two years of the Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year longitudinal study aimed at describing as accurately as possible all the kinds of writing students perform during their college years. Based on an early finding about the importance students attach to their out-of-class or self-sponsored writing and subsequent interviews with study participants, we argue that student writing is increasingly linked to theories and practices of performance. To illustrate the complex relationships between early college writing and performance, we explore the work of two study participants who are also coauthors of this essay.

Academically oriented first-year seminars can be good venues for teaching many of the concepts important to WAC programs, including extended engagement with a research topic and situated writing. A qualitative study of a first-year seminar program at the University of Calgary highlights faculty members’ and students’ responses.

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This article suggests that literacy development in immigrant, refugee, and other historically marginalized communities can be understood as a response to rhetorical struggles in contexts of civic life. To illustrate this “rhetorical conception of literacy,” the article examines a collection of anti-immigrant letters published in a Midwestern newspaper between 1985 and 1995 and the responses to these by a group of Southeast Asian Hmong refugee writers. The essay explores the relationships of content, form, language, and audience in the two sets of letters to show how the anti-immigrant rhetoric became the basis for new forms of public writing in the Hmong community.

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Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University exposes the poor working conditions of contingent composition faculty and explores practical alternatives to the unfair labor practices that are all too common on campuses today. Editors Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, and Leo Parascondola bring together diverse perspectives from pragmatism to historical materialism to provide a perceptive and engaging examination of the nature, extent, and economics of the managed labor problem in composition instructiona field in which as much as ninety-three percent of all classes are taught by graduate students, adjuncts, and other disposable teachers. These instructors enjoy few benefits, meager wages, little or no participation in departmental governance, and none of the rewards and protections that encourage innovation and research. And it is from this disenfranchised position that literacy workers are expected to provide some of the core instruction in nearly everyone's higher education experience. Twenty-six contributors explore a range of real-world solutions to managerial domination of the composition workplace, from traditional academic unionism to ensemble movement activism and the pragmatic rhetoric, accommodations, and resistances practiced by teachers in their daily lives.Contributors are Leann Bertoncini, Marc Bousquet, Christopher Carter, Christopher Ferry, David Downing, Amanda Godley, Robin Truth Goodman, Bill Hendricks, Walter Jacobsohn, Ruth Kiefson, Paul Lauter, Donald Lazere, Eric Marshall, Randy Martin, Richard Ohmann, Leo Parascondola, Steve Parks, Gary Rhoades, Eileen Schell, Tony Scott, William Thelin, Jennifer Seibel Trainor, Donna Strickland, William Vaughn, Ray Watkins, and Katherine Wills.

Using Burkean theory, I claim that Malcolm X brilliantly exposed the rhetoric and epistemology of whiteness as he rejected the African American jeremiad—a dominant form of African American oratory for more than 150 years. Whiteness theory served as the basis for Malcolm X’s alternative literacy, which raises important questions that literacy theorists have yet to consider.

From the early 1990s to the present, Ruth Frankenberg, David Roediger, coauthors Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, and other academics have focused on race by uncovering, interrogating, and theorizing as a largely unacknowledged but vastly important rhetorical and epistemological system. Nakayama and Krizek consider relatively unchartered territory that remained invisible as it continues to influence the identity of those both within and without domain (291). Whiteness, they claim, wields power yet endures as a largely unarticulated (291). Further, they argue, whiteness has assumed the position of an uninterrogated space (293). Many whites, they argue, refuse to acknowledge their ethnicity, claiming simply to be human, thereby erasing from its history and social

Over the past thirty years, has flowered as a discipline in the academy. Doctoral programs in abound, and its position in the pantheon of academic fields seems assured. There is plenty of work in composition. But what is the nature of that work now, and what should it be? James Slevin asks such probing, primary questions in Introducing English, an overdue assessment of the state of by one of its most respected practitioners. Too often, Slevin claims, representations of take the form of promoting the field and its specialists, rather than explaining the fundamental work of and its important consequences. In thirteen thematically and methodologically linked essays, Slevin argues toward a view of the discipline as a set of activities, not as an enclosed field of knowledge. Such a view broadens the meaning of the work of to include teaching and learning, a two-way process, creating alliances across conventional educational boundaries, even beyond educational institutions. Slevin traces how emerged for him not as a vehicle for improving student writing, but rather as a way of working collaboratively with students to interpret educational practices and work for educational reform. He demonstrates the kind of classroom practice - in reading accounts of the Anglicization of Pocahontas - that reveals the social and cultural consequences of language and language education. For good or ill, writes Slevin, composition has always been at the center of the reproduction of social inequality, or of the resistance to that process. He asks those in the discipline to consider such history in the reading and writing they ask students to do and the reasons they give for asking them to do it. A much-anthologized essay by E. B. White from The New Yorker is the site for an examination of genre as social institution, introducing the ways in which the discourses of the academy can be understood as both obstacle and opportunity. Ultimately, Introducing English is concerned with the importance of writing and the teaching of writing to the core values of higher education. Composition is always a metonym for something else Slevin concludes. Usually, it has figured the impossibility of the student body - their lacks that require supplement, their ill-health that requires remedy. Introducing English introduces a new figure - a two-way process of inquiry - that better serves the intellectual culture of the university. Chapters on writing across the curriculum, university management, and faculty assessment (the tenure system) put this new model to practical, innovative use. Introducing English will be necessary reading for all those who work with composition, as well as those engaged in learning theory, critical theory, and education reform.

In this article, we discuss the literacy narratives of coauthors Melissa Pearson and Brittney Moraski, who came to computers almost a generation apart. Our goal is to demonstrate the importance of situating literacies of technology—and literacies more generally—within specific cultural, material, educational, and familial contexts that influence, and are influenced by, their acquisition and development.

Colleagues, students, friends, and members of the profession mourn the loss of Dr. Marilyn Sternglass, a tireless advocate of educational access and the study and teaching of literacy, and a major contributor to the development of composition studies.

“Should we make our tape about police brutality and youth crime or about how to become a hip-hop star?” (23). For Steven Goodman, founder of New York’s Educational Video Center (EVC), this question reveals a conflict that low-income minority students face when representing their experiences in collaborative, inquiry-based video projects.

In The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, the editors have assembled a collection of new essays about genre, rhetoric, and writing that are relevant for scholars with a diverse range of interests in composition studies, including rhetoric, professional and scientific communication, computers and writing, writing-across-the-disciplines, literacy studies, and literacy education. The engaging editorial introduction recalls Donald Murray’s suggestion that writers ask of drafts, “Does it work?”

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Although computer literacy amounts to a complex set of interconnected capacities, teachers of writing and communication have tended to ignore functional issues, which are crucial to many aspects of online work. This essay reimagines the functional side of computer literacy, arguing for an approach that is both effective and professionally responsible.

This essay responds to the problem that sociocultural literacy research has failed to adequately theorize individual literacy learners as moral agents with the capacity to produce harm or good to themselves and others. Building from the rhetorical construct of dialogism, this inquiry explores how the early ethical thought of Mikhail Bakhtin can contribute an “ethics of answerability” to sociocultural literacy studies.

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This book traces the changing conditions of literacy learning over the past century as they were felt in the lives of Americans born between 1895 and 1985. The book demonstrates what sharply rising standards for literacy have meant to successive generations of Americans and how they have responded to rapid changes in the meaning and methods of literacy learning in their society. Drawing on more than 80 life histories of Americans from all walks of life, the book addresses critical questions facing public education at the twenty-first century: What role does economic change play in creating inequality in access and reward for literacy? What is the human impact of the economy's growing reliance on the literacy skills of workers? This book gets beyond the usual laments about the crisis in literacy to offer an often surprising look into the ways that literacy is lived in America.

In this article the author explores the educational process in which college sophomores enrolled in a reading and writing course are engaged. She defines this education as translation: a process of preservation, re-vision, and re-rendering of both texts and selves, prompted by particular course assignments, readings, and forums for interaction.

Introduction Part I: Premises and Foundations 1. Illiteracy at Oxford and Harvard: Reflections on the Inability to Write 2. A Map of Writing in Terms of Audience and Response The Uses of Binary Thinking Part II: The Generative Dimension 4. Freewriting and the Problem of Wheat and Tares 5. Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience 6. Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting Part III: Speech, Writing, and Voice Part III: Speech, Writing, and Voice 7. The Shifting Relationships Between Speech and Writing 8. Voice in Literature 9. Silence: A Collage 10. What Is Voice in Writing? Part IV: Discourses 11. Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues 12. In Defense of Private Writing 13. The War Between Reading and Writing - and How to End It 14. Your Cheatin' Art: A Collage Part V: Teaching 15. Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond Mistakes, Bad English, and Wrong Language 16. High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing 17. Breathing Life into the Text 18. Using the Collage for Collaborative Writing 19. Getting Along Without Grades - and Getting Along With Them Too 20. Starting the Portfolio Experiment at SUNY Stony Brook Pat Belanoff, co-author 21. Writing an Assessment in the Twenty-First Century: A Utopian View

This article represents stories of eight former composition students, Appalachian working class women, who move from silence in the academy to voice in their communities to a more self–confident identity without destroying the community from which they came. The author argues that compositionists need to consider the two–edged nature of literacy; how literacy serves first generation, nontraditional learners; the intergenerational effects of literacy; the importance of expressivist writing as a transition into academic literacy; and the importance of region and class in multicultural conversations.

In a departure from traditional paradigms, in this work Latinos examine their own experiences in US schools and offer theories born from positions of expertise and first-hand knowledge as researchers and educators.

In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subject-object, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses.

Foregrounding issues of race, ethnicity, and education, this article ties together two important issues in teaching (so-called) basic writing: how social and pedagogical issues in higher education shape possibilities for bicultural students’ writings and how these students can use their developing sense of literacy and their texts to explore identity.

Using a variety of common forms from first-year composition, this paper examines the purposes of CCCC, transformative experiences at professional conferences, and the elements of my literacy autobiography. I then argue for recognition of the knowledge-building role of writing programs in two-year colleges and for a “write to work” principle, calling for full pay for all who teach required writing courses. Originally, this manuscript was a speech integrated with a PowerPoint® presentation using more than 100 slides (text, photographs, and music), which cannot be fully represented here.

In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subjectobject, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses. I begin with a scene written by a student in my service learning course, U.S. Literacy Politics. The scene, taken from her final paper for the course, recounts her first night at a downtown community center, where students likeJanis serve as literacy partners and mentors. Shifting back and forth between present and past tense, Janis writes:

Foregrounding issues of race, ethnicity, and education, this article ties together two important issues in teaching (so-called) basic writing: how social and pedagogical issues in higher education shape possibilities for bicultural students' writings and how these students can use their developing sense of literacy and their texts to explore

The role of the professor in community service writing courses factors into the teaching, research, and overall institutional viability of these initiatives, yet too little has been written about the role of the professor in service learning. Through an analysis of recent publications on service learning and data gathered during an outreach initiative at University of California, Berkeley, this article reveals a few of the obstacles that hinder the sustainability of community literacy programs. I find that professors in service learning courses can better sustain these initiatives when they view the community site as a place where their research, teaching, and service contribute to a community’s self-defined needs and students’ learning.

Radical feminist textuality of the 1960s and today provides a suggestive example of networked and collectively literate action, action dependent on the constant and visible contextualization of self and writing within the discourses that shape us. In this essay, I argue that an articulation of radical feminist textuality can benefit both scholarship and classroom, in that it situates writers as rhetorical agents who can write, resist, and, finally act within a network of discourses and identifications.

Student Writing presents an accessible and thought-provoking study of academic writing practices. Informed by 'composition' research from the US and 'academic literacies studies'from the UK, the book challenges current official discourse on writing as a 'skill'. Lillis argues for an approach which sees student writing as social practice. The book draws extensively on a three-year study with ten non-traditional students in higher education and their experience of academic writing. Using case-study material - including literacy history interviews, extended discussions with students about their writing of discipline specific essays, and extracts from essays - Lillis identifies the following as three significant dimensions to academic writing: Access to higher education and to its language and literacy representational resources Regulation of meaning making in academic writing rrent Desire for participation in higher education and for choices over ways of meaning in academic writing. Student Writing: access, regulation, desire raises questions about why academics write as they do, who benefits from such writing, which meanings are valued and how, on what terms 'outsiders' get to be 'insiders' and at what costs. Theresa M. Lillis is Lecturer in language and education at the Centre for Language and Communications at the Open University.

In an attempt to bring composition studies into a more thoroughgoing discussion of the place of visual literacy in the writing classroom, I argue that throughout the history of writing instruction in this country the terms of debate typical in discussions of visual literacy and the teaching of writing have limited the kinds of assignments we might imagine for composition.

This chapter seeks to add to our understanding of literacy as it relates to African Americans, with a focus on African American female literacies. Primarily, I argue that mother tongue literacy is central to literacy education.

The fiftieth anniversary issue of CCC included a call from Geneva Smitherman for compositionists to renew the fight for language rights. In this article, we take up Smitherman’s call by situating the theory of language rights in composition studies in a brief history of rights rhetoric in the United States.

I analyze the public and professional discourse of learning disability, arguing that medical models of literacy misdirect teaching by narrowing its focus to remediation. This insight about teaching is not new; resurgent demands for behaviorist pedagogies make understanding their continuing appeal important to composition studies.

... No matter how backward and negative the mainstream view and image of Black people, Ifeel compelled to reshape the image and to explore our manypositive angles because I love my own people. Perhaps this is because I have been blessed with spiritual African eyes at a time when most Africans have had their eyes poked out.... So, like most ghetto girls who haven't yet been turned into money-hungry heartless bitches by a godless money centered world, I have a problem: I love hard. Maybe too hard. Or maybe its too hard for a people without structure-structure in the sense of knowing what African womanhood is. What does it mean? What is it supposed to do to you andfor you? -Sister Souljah

Listening Up will change the way you view radical literacy education, offering a personal look at the Freirean ideas that guided Rachel Martin's early years of teaching, and the theories and classroom experiences that urged her to take a second look. Through her own compelling example, Martin demonstrates the power of a sustained dialogue between critical theory and classroom and community practice. The ideas Martin draws on help us think in new ways about how power works. They provide the possibility of seeing how teachers' own needs, fears, and desires might find a place in classroom inquiry as we come to see how our relationship to domination is a matter neither of complete acquiescence nor absolute resistance. While the goals of meaning-making and becoming colearners have become guideposts in radical teaching, Martin aims in a different direction. She advocates for a pedagogy that places teachers in a more genuine position of colearner as together with students, they question the meanings they make. Later chapters highlight the practical implications that notions of multiple voices and identities have for the teaching of writing and the questions they raise about the teaching of reading. Martin also describes community publishing projects. Poor and working-class people are too seldom able to have their written visions and strategies distributed, to become part of the way the world is described and possibilities for change are widely considered. Martin argues that community publishing does that, as it also links self-definition to self-determination.

Globalization, or “fast” capitalism, has changed the workplace and writing in it dramatically. Composition epistemologies and practices, elaborated during the twentieth century in tandem with Taylorized workplace literacy requirements, fail to embrace the complexities of writerly sensibilities necessary to students entering the new workforce. To update these epistemologies and practices, MA students in professional writing were positioned as autoethnographers of workplace cultures, reporting to classmates on organizational structures and practices as they affected discursive products and processes. Their studies produced a database of petits recits on workplace cultures, and their work is analyzed for the ways in which it forecasts subjective work identities of writers in the years ahead. Implications are drawn for composition administration, curriculum design, course design, and collaborative work among academics and writers in private and public spheres.

In early Methodism John Wesley created an extracurricular site of literacy and rhetoric that empowered women and the working classes to read, write, and speak in public. Wesley’s “method” of literacy in community not only transformed religious life in Britain but also redefined the intersections of education, class, and gender.

I argue that our responses to the Oakland ebonics resolution miss what made the resolution so significant while also making debate about it so intractable. I propose that compositionists who acknowledge attitudes that made the resolution so significant can productively engage the larger public regarding literacy education in a racially divided democracy.

early Methodism John Wesley created an extracurricular site of literacy and rhetoric that empowered women and the working classes to read, write, and speak in public. Wesley's method of literacy in community not only transformed religious life in Britain but also redefined the intersections of education, class, and gender. an article based on her 1993 CCCC Chair's address, Anne Ruggles Gere critiqued the field of composition: In concentrating upon establishing our position within the academy, we have neglected to recount the history of composition in other contexts; we have neglected composition's extracurriculum (79). Influenced by Shirley Brice Heath's study of community literacy practices, Glenda Hull's work on workplace literacy, Patricia Bizzell's concept of multiple discourse communities, and others, Gere examined the cultural work and literacy practices of writing groups outside the academy, focusing particularly on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American clubwomen, both white and African American. Gere urged us not only to expand our field's history to

To the extent that rhetoric and writing studies bases its theories and pedagogies on the self-present composing subject-the figure of the writer who exists apart from the writing context, from the world, from others-it is anti-communitarian. Communication can take place only among beings who are given over to the outside, exposed, open to the other's effraction. This essay therefore calls for the elaboration of a communitarian literacy that understands reading and writing as functions of this originary sociality, as expositions not of who one is (identity) but of the fact that we are (community).