Arguing that we fail both parents and students if we continue to think of community literacy as a dichotomy between school and work, this article illustrates Labor Market Intermediaries (LMIs) as sites of community literacy. Th e investigation of LMIs in a particular community (Greater Lafayette, Indiana) allows for a more thorough understanding of community literacy outside of traditional sites such as schools, community centers, and adult education programs; in turn, the article argues that such an understanding may lead to more productive involvement by literacy educators in our communities.

For nineteen years, Mercy Learning Center, a community–based literacy organization, has provided basic literacy instruction to low–income women in Bridgeport, Connecticut. During that time the Center has grown from three students and two tutors to 450 students, 155 tutors, and fi ve full–time teachers. Th is growth has been aff ected by changes in welfare regulations and increased immigration. Using what it describes as a “holistic approach within a compassionate, supportive community,” the Center provides instruction that goes beyond the usual boundaries of basic literacy. With its expansive defi nition of basic literacy, Mercy Learning Center’s experience off ers a model for sustaining a woman–centered community literacy program through nearly two decades of changing political conditions and educational needs.

After reviewing results from the Nation’s Report Card in Writing, this article presents data from a survey of Latino students, the largest ethnic group of students at Northeastern Illinois University. These data suggest that the Hispanic students at Northeastern are similar to their national Hispanic peers in several ways, such as the levels of parental education and the number of texts in their homes, yet different from them in other ways, such as exposure to English at home or level of involvement with parents and friends. Perhaps most significantly, these students report stronger beliefs in and attitudes about literacy than either their national Hispanic peers or national peers. Although more research is needed, these data indicate the need for new literacy theories and research methods to ensure that these experiences and expectations are legitimized not as educational liabilities but as intellectual assets.

This essay describes service learning as a space for civic dialogue. In the project-oriented course discussed below—an oral history of a south-side African American neighborhood in Chicago—civic dialogue took shape when middle class students from a range of backgrounds at the Illinois Institute of Technology interviewed residents of different generations and experiences, transcribed, contextualized, and published these interviews in print and online, and reflected on the process. As a tethering of “community” across the material and discursive boundaries that typically divide us, the project performed a political critique not through issue-oriented advocacy but through a rhetorical activism more locally attuned to the absence of critical exchange, empathy, and understanding in public life.

This article addresses how community-university digital media literacy projects are redefining literacy, literate practices, and institutions. Using Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which emphasizes the organizing process itself, I analyze the shifting definitions of literacy within one particular university-community collaboration. My analysis demonstrates the importance of creating writer and producer identities for all project participants and developing networks of responsibility and sustainability through the distribution of expertise among university and community institutions. In order to sustain such collaborations and university- community networks, literacy workers and writing programs must challenge static forms of participation and expertise, as well as monolithic notions of literacy, and become more responsive to concrete literacy needs within our communities.

This paper develops a rhetorically centered model of community literacy in the theoretical and practical context of local publics—those spaces where ordinary people develop public voices to engage in intercultural inquiry and deliberation. Drawing on fifteen years of action research in the Community Literacy Center and beyond, the authors characterize the distinctive features of local publics, the deliberative, intercultural discourses they circulate, and the literate practices that sustain them. They identify four critical practices at the heart of community literacy: assessing the rhetorical situation, creating local publics, developing citizens’ rhetorical capacities, and supporting change through the circulation of alternative texts and practices.

Integrity is commonly conflated with basic literacy in assessments of the skills workers need. This case study of a word-based character education program in Springfield, Missouri examines how business leaders may blame a lack of skills by employees on a lack of moral literacy. The premise of this essay is that the expression of a literacy program by participating institutions will be influenced by the political culture of the region in which the institutions reside. Considering the influence of political culture on community literacy programs is important because such influence is likely to privilege certain sets of socio-political and economic values, and ways of knowing, over others.

This case-study examines the ways citizens took up, and in some ways resisted, city planners’ assumptions about their lived experience of “Portstown.” While it is necessary to acknowledge the coercive properties of institutional documents and genre-systems, community-literacy workers must not efface the epistemic potential of everyday compositions, for this quality creates opportunities for strategic interventions in the solicitation and reception of civic writing.