At our workshop at the inaugural Conference on Community Writing on the rhetoric of the corporate university, participants noted that the values espoused by community literacy “in the community” are being eroded at the university. Furthermore, they noted the underlying rhetorics of missionary zeal, whiteness, and privatization in community literacy and service learning work. The authors build on these critiques by examining two successive administrations at Syracuse University. The first presented a model of “engaged infrastructure” with progressive rhetoric but oppressive outcomes; the second shed the façade of community partnership for an explicitly corporate and militaristic vision of higher education. Through this comparison, the authors interrogate foundations that community literacy has been built on with the hope of opening new possibilities.

O ne of the first things readers will notice when reading The Arkansas Delta Oral History Project: Culture, Place, and Authenticity is that most of it is written in the past tense. Launched in the spring of 2007, the five-year-long Arkansas Delta Oral History Project (ADOHP), a community literacy partnership between the University of Arkansas and rural community high schools in the Arkansas Delta, is now complete. Jolliffe et al. 's volume serves as both critical reflection of the ADOHP and jumping off point for a new community literacy project called the Students Involved in Sustaining Their Arkansas (SISTA), which began in fall 2015. Even though the ADOHP is now over, readers will be interested in the way this particular university-community partnership took shape, what flaws the authors see in the original iteration of the project, and what enduring legacy exists because of the ADOHP's strengths.

The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies, Nicole B. Wallack offers a perceptive and stimulating account of what essays are, how they work conceptually and aesthetically, and why it is important for American university writing programs to adopt an essay-centered curriculum. In an age of the Common Core State Standards, the essay has been marginalized by curriculum reform that reduces literacy to "skills acquisition" and assumes student writers are simply "protean workers who need to be readied to fulfill others' goals for their thinking and writing: intellectual 'stem-cells' for the world beyond school" that can be replicated indefinitely for someone else's use (3)(4). The director of the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University, Wallack argues that the essay-and a curriculum centered on having students read and write essays-promotes the values of a liberal arts education, while also establishing common ground for the fields of composition studies, literary studies, and creative writing. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book will appeal to writing program administrators, scholars of writing and literature, creative writers and essayists, and teachers of writing across the disciplinary spectrum. Crafting Presence includes chapters on the history of the essay as a genre distinct from other forms of nonfiction writing, close readings of specific essays from The Best American Essays series, and short pedagogical reflections, informed by Wallack's twenty-plus years of teaching experience. Although the essay may have been discarded from much of today's writing curricula for its association with the tradition of belles-lettres on the one hand and well-worn "school writing" on the other, Wallack maintains that the essay not only fulfills the goals of national curricular standards but also cultivates the intellectual, creative, and ethical thinking students need in order to become "reflective citizens, " to borrow Andrew Delbanco's term, who serve their community with their education. Some readers may chafe at Wallack's appeals to the values of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism, but her book presents a timely and inspiring vision of what the writing classroom-and, by extension, the universitycould become.

While place-based pedagogies and place-conscious education have received a great deal of attention in community literacy, these studies have often focused on classroom efforts at engaging students in their communities. This article articulates an extracurricular pedagogy of place through a historical study of a network of creative writing groups in mid-century rural Wisconsin. Rather than thinking of place-conscious education as something that emerges from the classroom, the work of these writers suggests that scholars and educators in community literacy look instead for place-based literacies already at work in our communities.

This article explores the methodological impact of building and curating a transnational archive of working-class literacy practices, spanning themes of vocation, immigration, gender, race, and disability, from the ground up alongside the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers. The article focuses particularly on how our disciplinary methods might be (re) shaped within a context of precarity when working with/archiving the literacy practices of disenfranchised populations. I argue that such precarity shapes how our methods/methodologies account for material realities—the laboring of bodies, influx of finances, physical conditions of the community involved—and changing social conditions that affect not only archival creation but also sustainability. I illustrate how The FWWCP Archival Project responded through a kitchen-table ethos in order to design the archive with the community’s expertise at the forefront.

This article has been written about, and with, the Swintec 2410cc, the typewriter model approved for incarcerated writers in the State of Nebraska and many other prison systems across the United States. The co-authors, one of whom is currently serving a six year sentence, relate their personal experiences with typewriters and typists as well as connect functions described in the Swintec User Manual to issues in community literacy. The "Left/Right Margin" function reflects some of the institutional and material constraints prison typewriters face; "Impression Control" invites us to think about the forces and functions governing representations of prison and prison writing; this writing tool and the environment for which it was designed, demand one submit to the process of "Corrections". Finally, this typewritten performance models and attempts to enact critical literacy and social justice from within and beyond the typewriter's cage.

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff. We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.

Veronica: I bet that a bunch of our readers either have community literacy projects that they're working on or are thinking of launching, and they're wondering, how do I fund the work I do, and how do I explain it in ways that make sense to people outside of writing and rhetoric studies?So to begin, could you tell us a bit about your

for a video conference to discuss the second edition of Illegal Alphabets. Below are excerpts from their exchange, edited for clarity and length. Their conversation focused on the book's origins and the context of the scholarly commentaries that appear in the second edition. Kalmar and Leonard also discuss the book's contributions to literacy studies, teaching the book, and its lasting relevance to notions of migration, borders, discrimination, identity, language, and legality. Leonard's review of the second edition of the book follows her interview with Kalmar and frames its relevance to community literacy researchers, practitioners

Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border, Toms Mario Kalmar has composed a parable about literacy. A simple story used to demonstrate a lesson with "serious political implications" (xv), Kalmar's parable tells the tale of a group of "illegal" migrants in Southern Illinois in the eighties, working together to create an "illegal" alphabet to get by in their labor camp. After a series of violent events between the migrant and anglo populations in town, the migrants leverage their history of biliteracy-primarily among indigenous languages and Spanishto write English como de veras se oye, the way it really sounds. To do this, they break linguistic laws, creating bilingual glossaries that are governed by hybrid English/ Spanish sounds. The question of legality gives the parable its deep resonance: In order for their labor to have value, migrants must cross borders and challenge the laws that police national/linguistic geographies. In the book's terms of literacy learning, "the law itself poses a major part of the problem to be solved" (77). In other words, Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy is a story about migrants working at the borders of literacy in order to survive. That this story is true, and stems from three years of ethnographic fieldwork, makes it a book with lasting relevance for any literacy teacher or researcher working with communities whose creative, strategic, and serious writing work is marginalized or deemed somehow illegal.

his conversation/article resituates the concept of reciprocity, as it has been theorized and enacted in rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies, within a larger framework of social justice, one that recognizes legacies of struggle, survival and perseverance. When situated within the Filipinx indigenous notion of kapwa, reciprocity takes a temporal turn not only in recognizing that building trust and reciprocity happen repeatedly over time but also in recognizing how enacting reciprocity extends beyond initial research contexts, participants, and outcomes. Enacting reciprocity requires slowing down in time and working with others in social justice work strategically, tactically, and repeatedly over longer durations. To see ourselves as reciprocal beings means that we continually see ourselves as members of a larger community invested in making structural asymmetries legible and open to deep revision.

Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

ince the 2016 election, activism and protests have garnered increasing media attention. At the same time, the conduct of individuals involved in social movements is intensely scrutinized by politicians and the public at large who label these protests obscene, unruly, or even violent. The edited collection Unruly Rhetorics attempts to address the fraught implications of "civility" in an age characterized by political tension and the rise of neoliberalism. Community Literacy Journal readers will find this collection to be an important resource for community organizing and deliberative rhetoric as many chapters discuss the rhetorical power of dissent. Activists and community organizers will also find that Unruly Rhetorics gives credence to the struggles they face every day in the public eye as they fight for equality and justice.

This article introduces La Escuelita, an after-school health literacy program for youth and families that currently meets in a community center one mile from a port of entry into El Paso, Texas. Through weekly activities that include mediums like art, community-based mapping, and collaborative cooking, participants at La Escuelita interrogate notions of health, wellness, and nutrition and engage in discussions about food and environmental justice. Through their discussion of this community-based project, the authors argue that food and environmental justice efforts should center community- knowledge, asset-based frameworks, and reciprocal learning.

In this reflection, using the work of Ellen Cushman and Paula Mathieu as a framework from which to extend, I explore how my positionality as a grad- uate student affected my experience wading into community-engaged litera- cy work. Specifically, I reflect on my time with a nonprofit organization that provides no-cost legal support and safety planning for survivors of intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and harassment. Indeed, because of the ethi- cal imperatives that thoughtful community-engaged research requires—such as reciprocity and a tactical orientation—many graduate students find them- selves occupying a precarious position. I assert that, yes, we must realize the precarious nature of graduate students doing community-engaged literacy research. However, we can also turn to useful approaches, such as tactical re- sponsivity, to help us navigate these relationships with community partners.

This article centers disability justice, an ongoing and unfolding project of LGBTQA disabled BIPOC, to help understand and challenge the work of community literacy studies. By putting community literacy studies in con- versation with disability justice through three themes—"Nothing About Us Without Us,” “Access is Love,” and “Solidarity Not Charity”—this essay moves to unpack how community literacy can resist not only ableism but also the interlocking systems of oppression which support it.

This essay examines writing partnerships in 2016 and 2017 that invited com- munity nonprofit volunteers and employees into šǝqačib, which is a Seattle youth (middle school and high school) Native cultural literacy classroom community. As a white settler employed by the nonprofit during the events described, I emphasize the wisdom of šǝqačib students who reflect on the collaboration. Drawing on Rachel Jackson’s work on community listening, I find that šǝqačib students demonstrate the importance of cultivating lis- tening practices when community literacy practitioners enter identity-safe scholarly communities such as šǝqačib. I urge academic and literacy sup- porters in similar contexts to center Native and Native youth voices in their own terms.

This article highlights some of the successes the Humanities Out There (HOT) program at the University of California, Irvine had when partner- ing with progressive institutions, namely with the Chicano/Latino Studies program at the university and with the arts program in a local high school. The first program engaged students in exploring the history underlying their communities, and the second helped students to dramatize their life experi- ences before a local public using their home languages. Analyzing what en- abled HOT’s successes, I urge others sponsoring youth literacy to seek out, and make alliance with, progressive institutions within public education.

tatiana Jefferson's face shows on the large screen. Carmen Kynard looks straight at the audience packed into the Irvine Auditorium at University of Pennsylvania and asks us to consider how our teaching, our research, and our activism respond to the life and murder of Jefferson, a 28-year old Black woman fatally shot by police in her own home a week earlier. Kynard posed this question during her keynote address at the third biennial Conference on Community Writing as part of her overall challenge to community writing and literacy scholars, teachers, and activists not to confuse the job with "the work. " In her essay "' All I Need Is One Mic': A Black Feminist Community Meditation on the Work, the Job, and the Hustle (& Why So Many of Yall Confuse This Stuff), " which expands on her keynote address, Kynard argues that a Black feminist imaginative is essential for dismantling white supremacy in our classrooms. Since Kynard's keynote in October 2019, many, many more Black people have been murdered by police, in the streets and in their homes. The antiracism protests happening daily in cities across the country as we write this Introduction in Summer 2020 only heighten the urgency of Kynard's question. How, in everything we do, are we addressing white supremacy and the unrelenting violence against Black and Brown lives? Through a series of meditations and counterstories, Kynard navigates her own and imagined classrooms to investigate why she has "been sent" to do the work she does. Her advisor, Suzanne Carothers, urged Kynard, "do not confuse the WORK with the JOB. " Ultimately, Kynard finds a violence in universities that we must counter through radical and disruptive antiracist work, which we must do often in spite of job requirements or the professionalization obligations that Kynard calls "the hustle. " In fact, "the work, " the real work of justice, "the healing and regenerative practices" we're called to, may in fact run counter to our jobs insofar as these jobs are tied to the violence of institutional, linguistic, and pedagogical racism. How do we center Atatiana Jefferson in our work? Celebrated, award-winning artist Michelle Angela Ortiz has spent the last twenty years as a public artist, community arts educator, activist, and filmmaker, using art as a tool for social change and cultural expression. In "Amplifying Community Voices through Public Art, " her CCW keynote address originally delivered at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Ortiz shows us and explains several of her large-scale mural projects from around the world. In places as varied as Philadelphia, PA and Buenos Aires, Argentina, Ortiz has worked alongside populations such as patients living with mental illness and farmer's market vendors. Ortiz explains how through word and image, her murals highlight the culture and memories of indigenous peoples in the United States and immigrant families separated from one another. In this essay,

This paper considers the practical and theoretical methodologies of the com- munity literacy project, “The Recipe of Me,” conducted with homeless youth in Orlando, Florida. In this project, youth created personal, mediatized narratives in a storytelling residency aimed at examining the role of digital storytelling in fostering confidence, autonomy, and literacy awareness. The project allowed the youth to create narratives as artists, encouraging not only the creation of a work of art but also the formulation of an artistic voice.

As a graduate student in the humanities, I am often fearful that my labor is performed for the sake of performing labor. Exacerbated by academia’s in- creasingly precarious landscape, this fear requires a hopeful antidote: a new pedagogy of and for the public. Constructed through empathic conversa- tions between universities and communities, this new approach to pub- lic scholarship and teaching relies on the aims and practices of community literacy (e.g. sustainable models of multimodal learning, social justice, and community listening) in order to refocus the humanist’s work – particularly the disjointed labors undertaken by graduate students – around the cultiva- tion of publics and counterpublics. In turn, a pedagogy of and for the public also implements the digital frameworks and organizational tools of public humanities projects to enliven community literacy praxis. Graduate student conferences are one site where we could enact this jointly constructed ap- proach. By rearticulating these conferences’ capacity for professionalization, by expanding their audience, and by reimagining their form beyond the uni- versity context, I argue that we can establish sustainable programs aimed at expanding community literacies.

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff. We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.

In this article, I take up the underrecognized and almost unstudied literacy work of Maria Varela, a Latinx Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staff member in charge of developing literacy materials for African Americans in the South during the 1960s. I analyze the use of community activism in the multimodal literacy materials that Varela and African Amer- ican communities collaboratively produced. These filmstrips played a critical role in those communities developing a new ethos of place: an imagined and embodied relationship between local and national communities that offers a new identity, sense of participatory agency, and place from which to speak.

While current community literacy scholarship foregrounds the importance of listening carefully to communities in the process of establishing, developing, and sustaining equitable and ethical community partnerships, the field does not yet offer explicit methods for practicing community listening, especially in the early, preparatory stages of the process. We address this gap by drawing on a case study of “preparatory community listening” in San Bernardino, California. In this project, we articulate an asset-based method for practicing community listening that emphasizes attention to discursive, material, political, and economic dynamics, particularly in communities shaped by deficit narratives.

This article foregrounds stories told by Kiowa Elder Dorothy Whitehorse DeLaune in order to distinguish “community listening” from “rhetorical listening” and decolonize community writing. Dorothy’s stories demonstrate “transrhetoricity” as rhetorical practices that move across time and space to activate relationships between peoples and places through collaborative meaning making. Story moves historic legacies into the present despite suppression enacted by settler colonialism, and story yields adaptive meanings and cultural renewal. When communities listen across difference, stories enact resistance by building a larger community of storytellers, defying divisive settler colonialist inscriptions, and reinscribing Indigenous peoples and their epistemologies across the landscapes they historically inhabit.

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

In this essay, I uncover the ways in which the non-binary gender community challenges what we know about privacy and reciprocity within community engaged work. Using my experience as a program coordinator for an LGBTQ youth center, I illustrate the myriad of privacy needs of non-binary gender teens and young adults who expect to be simultaneously both public and private in their online writing on Tumblr. I argue that for the nonbinary gender community on Tumblr, direct contact from the researcher not only may invade their intimate space but also cause physical or emotional harm as many non-binary Tumblr users are underage and participating on Tumblr in secret. Instead, I demonstrate how the study of non-binary gender literacy practices can be done without engaging with or quoting directly from publicly published content, instead favoring an emergent thematic methodology. Additionally, I make a case for a queer methodology which instead seeks to recruit participants in the real world and be invited into their digital community once trust and reciprocity is established should interviews be important for further study.

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

When community literacy partners work to gether with academic organizers, both groups recognize the uncertainties of risk, the importance of trust, and the necessity of clear communication in accomplishing their goals.Likewise, professors who use service learning must help their students negotiate experiences that are often unpredictable or uncomfortable.In both scenarios, conversations that spark reflection, untangle problems, and guide action are vital.These objectives, and their reliance on open, guided conversation, are central to a new offering by mother-daughter team Nel Noddings and Laurie Brooks: Teaching Controversial Issues: The Case for Critical Thinking and Moral Commitment in the Classroom.In this book, Noddings, an emerita Professor of Education at Stanford and prominent contributor to feminist care theory, and Brooks, a member of the board of Provident Financial Services and advisory boards for North Carolina State and Rutgers universities, point out that teachers today must help students cultivate critical awareness while navigating a minefield of highly controversial issues such as authority and obedience, religion, race, gender, and socioeconomic class.While Noddings and Brooks intend to target K-12 teachers, administrators, and parents, many community literacy scholars and practitioners will appreciate the ideas the authors suggest that enable their readers to more thoughtfully create room for co-inquiry, conversation, and examining resources across different disciplines and perspectives.Noddings and Brooks' core purpose with this text lies in their dedication to helping students "prepare for active life in a participatory democracy" (2).To achieve this, they insist that adults not shy away from joining forces with students to examine complex and challenging questions.The authors advocate for critical thinking bolstered and emboldened by moral commitment, which, in their words, is "to bring people together-to help them understand each other in the fullness of their humanity" (159).Noddings and Brooks approach this task from an interdisciplinary lens, one that enables them to reach across and through traditional divisions among disciplines, genres, and media.This text provides specific suggestions for educators

This paper examines the language, literacies, communicative, and rhetorical practices of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The work pays attention to the communication practices of the BLM and Hip Hop generation in its extension of Black and African American language traditions and prior liberation movements in their unapologetic performance of Black chants, Black grammar, phonology, vocabulary, Black fashion and music, to die-ins, hands-up, and the technologization of the movement through social media, Black Twitter, hashtags, and memes. The language and literacies of the Black Lives Matter movement represent diverse identities within Black community, vernacular associated with various economic and educational classes, diaspora, culturally rooted, Hip Hop generations, cis-gendered women, men, as well as LGBTQ and gender non-conforming. In this way, the language and literacies of BLM promote the value of ALL Black lives.

and rhetoric research where Pritchard hopes

hat does literacy mean, and why does it matter? Lauren Rosenberg posits that literacy, a term that remains contested, is not merely a set of skills but "a means of knowing and interacting in the world that can be shared" (154). Rosenberg's book is the result of a qualitative study about adult literacy learners' writing practices and their reasons for seeking literacy skills. Referring to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's subaltern class, "that sector of the population whose experience counters the dominant and who are, therefore, shut out from dominant ideological concerns" (3), Rosenberg raises the question of whether those who have been positioned by dominant literate discourses as voiceless and without knowledge can gain the tools not only to be heard and to exercise their voices, but also to challenge the scripts that have been ascribed to them. Observing students at Read/Write/Now Adult Learning Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, Rosenberg focuses her study on four older adults, George, Violeta, Chief, and Lee Ann (pseudonyms), who are no longer in the workforce and who have voluntarily chosen to become literacy learners. She invites us to ask the important question: What are the motivations of these individuals, who have been rendered mute by societal values that equate literacy with intelligence, to become more literate?

This article examines archival research as a generative community literacy practice. Through the example of a community-based project centered on archival research, I examine the increased possibility the archives hold as a site for rhetorical invention based on collaboration that includes contemporary community members and the recovered rhetoric of historical figures. I argue that archival research as community literacy practice creates conditions for a communal form of literacy sponsorship and offer a framework for approaching the archives.

Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism Through Literacy Education, which makes a hopeful yet nuanced case for how networked efforts within institutions might create change. The book combines deep illustrations from the civil rights era with contemporary efforts in community literacy, layering perspectives as it moves forward and backward in time, to explore how different practices of literacy education shape notions of citizenship and how activists in literacy education go about pursuing social change. Laying out a parable to ground a key idea in his book, Feigenbaum retells the traditional story of the starfish savior: a man walking along a beach notices thousands of starfish washed up on the shore, and he sees another man throwing the starfish back into the sea, one by one. He tells the man throwing the starfish that this is a waste of time, as there are thousands of starfish-he cannot make a difference. The man throws another starfish into the sea and replies, "I made a difference to that one. " This story is meant to be inspirational, but Feigenbaum, drawing on Buzz Alexander's Freirean interpretation of the parable, points out that this story is an individualistic myth that limits the potential for activism: rather than running into to town to gather others to help, or researching the cause for why the starfish are being washed up along the shore, the man exemplifies the idea that good citizens act alone. As Feigenbaum writes, "The starfish savior's willingness to sacrifice time and energy toward a good cause makes him appear to be morally righteous, but in failing to enlist aid in resolving the macroproblem, he ensures that the vast majority of starfish will perish" (9). Acting out of a starfish savior mentality-or, as my students termed it, starfishing-means blending romantic naivet and individualism in ways that are ultimately ineffective in forwarding activism.

Sustainability in community engagement projects depends on careful attention to the ways we navigate complex, often challenging relationships with our partners, our students, agencies, and the institutions in which we occupy multiple, sometimes competing roles. This article considers the difficulty inherent in developing and maintaining relationships with the community members who choose to participate in our research. Based on the experiences of three undergraduate students in a community literacy seminar, the author traces the ways these students confront challenges in their projects, arguing for the value of difficulty in community literacy work.

Literacy “sponsorship” in refugee communities is not without its risks and limitations. For potential sponsors, risks include the commodification of refugee voices, while limits include inaccurate generalizations of those being sponsored. This essay draws from a case study of refugee student discourse to discuss how a more explicit decolonial approach to sponsorship can help sponsors rethink a giver-receiver paradigm. This approach would first deconstruct imperialist discourses of power and then replace them with new, alternatives to meaning-making. While contingent on local contexts, this study aims to set an agenda for continued debate within refugee community literacy support projects.

In gathering and circulating histories, the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) enacts both community publishing and self-publishing models, as they have been defined in literacy studies. As a community institution situated within a larger constellation of counterpublics and dominant publics that have often overlooked, erased, and/ or misrepresented their histories, forms of ownership, access, and authority are central to the purpose of FANHS. In this article, I share how two modes of community/self publishing 1 , historical tours and archival practices, serve to (re)member community and prompt further community-sponsored selfpublishing projects.

This article reports from instances of child language brokering among emergent bilingual youths and parents at a New York City after-school community literacy program composed largely of Mexican immigrant families. I argue that youth language brokers negotiated literacies with and for their parents in differing contexts, with different audiences, and under different dynamics of power relations. Young language brokers utilize bilingual practices to translate, interpret, and advise between adults and family members of different ages. Language brokers, I argue, use their bilingual learning to help their families and to show they care.

The purpose of our study was to discover who researches functional literacy. This study was situated within a larger systematic literature review. We searched seven electronic databases and identified 90 sources to answer our larger question regarding how functional literacy is defined and conceptualized as well as the specific question pertinent to this paper. An analytic template guided our data collection. The analysis was completed by using a spreadsheet to examine two levels of institutional affiliation: 1) the larger institution such as a university or government unit, and 2) the department, program, or division within the institution. Findings showed the 209 authors of these 90 sources represent a diverse set of fields. Further, it appears that multidisciplinary research is being conducted. We discuss implications of these findings and call for more interdisciplinary research.