Through an ethnographic investigation of how two different groups form biliterate relationships in the quest for legal immigration papers, the author examines how literacy and assimilation function in light of the changing writing demands of contemporary immigrant life.

The author calls for incorporating into English classes what he calls museum-based pedagogy, arguing that it enables the teaching of multiple literacies: verbal, visual, technological, social, and critical. In part, this pedagogy consists of classroom instruction that enables students to understand the persuasive nature of museum displays—the ways in which digital technology mediates, powerful interests influence, social agents negotiate, and multimodal texts communicate meaning.

Teaching postcolonial literature to American college students involves taking them through a dialectical process of thinking about identification. In the first stage, students are encouraged to note similarities between their own lives and those of the work’s characters. With the second step, students examine how the work’s cultural and historical context makes the characters different from them in key ways. Finally, students use the differences that they have found in order to reflect on aspects of their own situations from a new angle. The author demonstrates this process through a discussion of her experiences teaching Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions.

We need to complicate current accounts of critical pedagogy by examining how educational institutions beyond traditional classrooms have served progressive movements. One example was the Sea Island Citizenship Schools. By examining the latter’s history, we also become better aware of how the education-related work of the American civil rights movement encompassed more than the desegregation prompted by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision.

Reviewed is An Open Language: Selected Writing on Literacy, Learning, and Opportunity, by Mike Rose.

Drawing on her interviews with professional ghostwriters who work primarily in organizations, the author examines what this practice implies about society’s current attitudes toward authorship, written work, and literacy in general. She also examines the ethical arguments that various critics of ghostwriting have made.

Letters and journals of American missionary women in early 19th century Hawai’i express conflicting desires. In some ways, the writers seek connection with the rest of the missionary community and with Native Hawaiians. In other ways, they try to separate themselves from these two groups.

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Stephen Parks’s book "Class Politics" fails to convey the complex interplay of social movements (including Black Power and socialism) behind the Statement on Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Attention to this rich history enables a better understanding of African American discourses than is provided in another influential book, Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children.

Traditional priorities of English as a discipline are now significantly at odds with the material circumstances of college English departments. To address these realities, college English needs to become literacy studies rather than literary studies.

Drawing on students’ literacy autobiographies, this article critiques the premise that academic discourse and working-class identity are not only static but also in complete opposition. The author argues for a more performative theory of class, a theory that would, she explains, recognize that academic discourse creates social class distinctions through processes that can be critiqued and reshaped.

The authors explore the interdependent relationships between learning English(es) and learning digital literacies in global contexts, and, collaborating with two women who have moved and continue to move between the United States and Asia, highlight the crucial role that the practice of guanxi has played in advancing digital literacies. Their collaboration suggests that guanxi is a useful term for describing not only the multifarious constellations of connections and resources that structure the lives of individuals, but also for understanding how these connections are related to the social, cultural, ideological, and economic formations that structure the “information age.”

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Reviewed are: A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar, by Julie Lindquist Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education, by Catherine Prendergast.

After summarizing typical criticisms of multicultural composition readers, the author draws on work in “New Literacy Studies” to point toward composition pedagogies that encourage multicultural interactions beyond selections in assigned readers The author suggests that what is ultimately needed is a productive critical frame not only for refining critical assessments of multicultural readers, but also for opening composition to “transcultural” understandings.

Tracing the revisions Frederick Douglass made as his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) metamorphosed into My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and ultimately into the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892), the author suggests that, while much attention has focused on Douglass’s seizing a “forbidden literacy” in transforming himself from object to subject, the crucial, and ever-increasing, role of African American vernacular traditions in his writing should be recognized.

hile much of the critical attention paid to Frederick Douglass addresses his use of literacy to find voice and being in his ascendancy from slave to man, his employment of vernacular tradition to tell his story in his own way often goes unnoted.1 An examination of the revisions Douglass made as his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) metamorphosed into My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and ultimately into the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892) reveals a skilled writer giving increasing attention to traditions within the circle that validate the cultural legitimacy of his African American antecedents. From edition to edition Douglass expanded scenes in which an African-derived presence manifested in vernacular atavisms became an alternative to the logocentrism that erased or devalued African American expression. Why, then, do most readings of his life story focus mainly on Douglass's relationship to the written word? typical critical paradigm reads Douglass as a black object transforming itself into subject by seizing a forbidden literacy. A sampling of some of the many fine scholars espousing this view includes Lisa Yun Lee, who notes, The connection between the power of thinking and speech is realized as Douglass the silent marginalized man transitions to active individual when a mistress cracks an opening in the white discourse. She offers to teach him to read(55); such a sampling would also include Eric Sundquist, who observes that Douglass's autobiographical writ-

The author suggests that Saul Alinsky’s concept of community organization, a theory of action devised for neighborhoods rather than for higher education, might offer a new model of service-learning, and describes the Community Educators’ Collaborative at Temple University as one example of how such a model might work.

Reviewed are Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction, edited by Pamela Takayoshi and Brian A. Huot, and Silicon Literacies: Communication, Innovation and Education in the Electronic Age, edited by Ilana Snyder.

instruction and service-learning over the last few years. Studies in the midto late nineties described courses and institutional arrangements and began to explore the ramifications for composition and English studies (Schutz and Gere; Herzberg; Peck, Flower, and Higgins). Linda Adler-Kassner and her colleagues edited an influential volume in 1997 that signaled the arrival of this new approach as a major pedagogical movement, and in 2000 Tom Deans's Writing Partnerships gave us a basic framework for thinking about the cooperative relationship between students and the organizations they encounter in these courses. More recent work has focused on how community-based learning can be sustained over time through faculty research (Cushman), how to address the gap between community and academic discourses (Chaden, Graves, Jolliffe, and Vandenberg), and what contradictions we must struggle with in intercultural inquiry (Flower), each study highlighting strategies for respecting the needs and abilities of participating community partners. In a crucial step toward establishing the institutional structures necessary for sustained partnership, Jeffrey T. Grabill and Lynde Lewis Gaillet have urged us to focus on the interface between writing programs and community partners. The need for a balanced and nonexploitive relationship in community-based learning asserts itself insistently in our discussions of this approach, and clearly at this stage writing program administrators must become much more active in developing institutional models that promise true mutual benefits for postsecondary schools and their off

The essay considers how teachers might perform emotional engagements that students find authentic and valuable within scenes of literacy instruction, suggesting that instructors’ “acting” of affect might be needed to forestall the tendency for instructors either to retain a position outside the affect generated in the classroom and merely “manage” the affective work done by students, or to impose their own affective commitments on students’ inquiry. Such a pedagogy might enable students, and particularly working-class students, to locate their own affectively structured experiences of class within more integrated understandings of social structures and identity formation.

The author argues that constructions of literacy that suppress or omit nonverbal elements such as the visual and the tactile are limiting students’ potential. She traces the way the historical relationship between image and word has consistently privileged language, and offers instances from her experience with students and with her own children to argue for a more reciprocal dynamic and a polymorphic literacy that can increase the scope and power of our literacy and our literacy teaching.

Reviewed are: A Communion of Friendship: Literacy, Spiritual Practice, and Women in Recovery, by Beth Daniell; Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir, by Lillian Faderman; and Gut Feelings: A Writer’s Truths and Minute Inventions, by Merrill Joan Gerber.

The author explores how World War II changed the rationale for mass literacy in the United States from a nineteenth-century moral imperative into a twentieth-century production imperative. She suggests that we are in a similar period of reevaluation today, and that, if the capacity to fuse older and newer ideologies is at its limit, the school may find itself running behind or even against the dominant cultural imperatives for literacy in a new world order.

The author reopens the vexed question of the use of literature in first–ear composition courses to suggest that reading and writing about literature can empower students to construct their own interpretations of cultural artifacts rather than deferring to canonical knowledge. Using his students’ work with Poe’s “Annabel Lee” as an example, he shows how such a practice can work if it places the work in a context appropriate to the literacies of first–year students and privileges the knowledge they bring with them to the academy.

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Jane E. Hindman, Thoughts on Reading "The Personal": Toward a Discursive Ethics of Professional Critical Literacy, College English, Vol. 66, No. 1, Special Issue: The Personal in Academic Writing (Sep., 2003), pp. 9-20

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Investigates questions of what the New London Group calls "multiliteracies." Looks carefully at various texts associated with the television show "Felicity" and considers what they have to say about contemporary popular literacies. Considers how "Felicity" acts as a kind of core sample, extracted from the broader soil of popular culture to help explore some workings of contemporary literacies. Discusses implications for the English classroom.

ommunity outreach brings idealism and social consciousness into the academy. It brings a human face and complex lives into the discussion of issues and ideas. But it can also plunge teachers and students into contradictory and sometimes profoundly conflicted social and literate practices. Guerrilla service (as Joe Mertz calls those short forays into soup kitchens, nursing homes, and Lisa's neighborhood) reinforces the distance between the giver and receiver, especially if the contact is superficial and the junket uncomplicated by preparation or reflection. Many current approaches to service-learning avoid this dilemma by embedding personal and social consciousness in academic work-in professional performance for a nonprofit client and/or broad critical analysis (Adler-Kassner, Crooks, and Watters; Waterman). But a fundamental conflict remains, I believe, unresolved, when students (fired up with confidence in social change) confront the suddenly

Children growing up in Hawaii, coming as they do in their plasticyears under the influence of the public school, preparing themfor the assumption of the responsibilities which life in Hawaii demands, should come tofeel that, in cutting cane on the plantation, in driving a tractor in the fields, in swinging a sledge in a blacksmith shop, in wielding a brush on building or fence or bridge, as well as in sitting at a doctors or merchants or manager' or banker' desk, there is opportunity for rendering a necessary as well as intelligent, worthy, and creative service. -United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, 1920 (4)

Discusses the first comprehensive examination of the system of public education in Hawai‘i, conducted in 1920. Notes the great importance of the study since it not only evaluated Hawaii‘s educational system but also provided the territorial government some gauge of Hawaii‘s status as a United States territory and its success in meeting the ideals of America.

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This symposium presents a written dialogue of scholars expressing not only excitement but also frustration over the ways in which current work in composition and literacy studies has explored the politics of the personal.

Considers how teachers might re-create, rather than import, Paulo Freire into North American contexts—and so not lose the power of his ideas. Takes the method of pragmatism and connects it to Freire’s concept of praxis to argue for pragmatic theory and practice in the work of teaching literacy.

Urges compositionists to reframe Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) to reach beyond university boundaries. Reviews calls for an expanded conception of WAC, describes a program that carries writing instruction and literacy research beyond university boundaries, and suggests problems and benefits that may accompany this change of orientation for writing programs.

Argues that the current electronic environment forces English studies into competition and combination with extra-verbal codes and languages. Describes a specific approach to reading, composing, and teaching the problematic combination of verbal and nonverbal features in texts conceived for or in electronic environments. Describes continuities between visual digitality and the verbal literacy currently taught within English Studies curricula.

Offers a reading of “The Music Man” that traces the ways its charm and humor are undergirded by a parodic stance toward American values as rooted in turn-of-the-century discourses of literacy, education, morality, and in the simultaneously burgeoning national obsessing with buying and selling. Considers sexual and textual anxieties in the Progressive Era, “the repressed/repressive librarian,” and consumerist rhetoric.

Uses the example of service learning to examine connections between and definitions of public and private as they are deployed in writing, literacy studies, and the field of English. Argues that, done effectively, service learning fits well into an English Studies that is reconsidering its own boundaries and internal relationships.

t was not until I had embarked upon my coming out as a deaf person that I considered my rites of passage, and dwelled on my acts, both deliberate and unconscious, both past and present, of passing. Because my coming out was a mid-life event, I had much to reflect back on and much, too, to illuminate ahead of me. This through an identity crisis, as it were, and the rites of passage then involved in uncovering the paths of my lifelong passing as hearing, took place in a hall of mirrors. (Later I would come to know this place as the art and act of rhetoric.) I first saw myself mirrored in several students I met at Gallaudet University (the world's only liberal arts university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students). I was thirty-two and finishing my PhD, writing a dissertation-that quintessential act of literate passing. What's more, I was finishing it by doing an ethnographic sort of study on deaf student writers at Gallaudet University; thus I was using the guise of an academic grant and a PhD-producing project as a professional foil to make a personal journey to the center of Deaf culture. I was always good at finding a way to pass into places I shouldn't normally be. So, there I was, doing time as a teacher and researcher at Gallaudet, collecting data for my study, taking a sign language class, living with a Deaf woman and faculty member at Gallaudet, going to Deaf gatherings, tutoring some of the students. Mostly, I was trying to pass in ways that were both familiar and unfamiliar to me: to pass (unfamiliarly) as D/deaf-and doing a lousy job of it-and to

Examines the ways in which literacy functions in institutional encounters and focuses on the ways literacy interacts with power and authority. Examines the enactment of literacy in medical encounters. Finds that institutional encounters enacting the discourse system of American medicine reproduce power and dominance in fairly predictable ways.

Examines the effects of reading and writing multivocal texts and argues that writers need to assume interpretive responsibility for creating new forms of discourse.

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