In Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum, Eli Goldblatt shares his experiences with community-based learning and encourages readers to "pay attention to the problems of the people among who we live" (6). The unique, self-

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of a community literacy project on its participants. This year-long study focuses on a public library program titled Books in Motion, in which community members read children’s chapter books and meet monthly to watch the book’s film translation. Using a case study approach, the study’s data sources included small-group structured interviews, individual open-ended interviews, written surveys, field notes, and a reflective journal from monthly film nights. Findings suggest the following: (1) Books in Motion increased community literacy interactions, (2) the program motivated participants in innovative ways, and (3) the program offered participants access to literacy resources. As communities and public libraries seek to influence children’s reading today, Books in Motion illustrates reading as an act of community engagement.

This study explains the development, implementation, and preliminary findings of an after-school pilot writing program that drew upon a peer collaborative model and a community literacy perspective. Preliminary findings suggest important benefits of this partnership for young children, parents, and the surrounding community.

The work highlighted in this essay focuses on an ethnographic study of a group of African American women, members of Phenomenal Women, Incorporated, who come together not necessarily to read and write, but who, in their “sista space”—their club—often read and write when they come together. In this space, they promote self-help through reading and writing and use their literacy skills to promote civic action and engagement and cultural enrichment. This essay examines the literacy practices in which these women engage in two types of literacy events during their annual Black History Month celebrations.

Being prepared with accurate, credible, and timely information during a disaster can help individuals make informed decisions about taking appropriate actions. Unfortunately, many people have difficulty understanding health and risk-related resources. This exploratory, mixed methods study assessed disaster information-seeking behaviors and comprehension of public health disaster preparedness resources by individuals at an adult literacy center. A convenience pilot sample of 20 adult learners (mean age: 53.1) was recruited. Health literacy was assessed using Newest Vital Sign (NVS) and modified Cloze (multiple choice) tests on biological terrorism and avian influenza information. In-person interviews were conducted to determine participants’ knowledge, perceptions, and information needs about disasters. Thematic analysis of interviews was conducted using NVivo7. Mean NVS was 3.11/6.00 implying limited health literacy. Mean Cloze scores revealed marginal disaster comprehension (avian flu: .46/1.00; biological terrorism: .48/1.00). Over half of participants with inadequate Cloze comprehension self-rated their understanding as “good.” Key themes emerging from interviews were: multiple perceptions about disasters, limited access to preparedness resources, need for visuals and plain language information, and importance of knowing where to go during a disaster. Study findings advocate for multimedia, plain language, and visual communication to influence adult learners’ literacy practices and self-efficacy in interpreting instructions and acting appropriately in preparing for and responding to disasters.

With this special issue, our hope is to encourage community literacy educators, practitioners, and scholars to consider more deeply how the discipline of Community Literacy can support the development of a sustainable global society. Many thinkers, perhaps beginning with ecosopher Arne Naess, have suggested that in order to fashion an ecologically sustainable society our fundamental conception of what it means to live on a planet must deepen, expand, transform. We must develop an elemental appreciation of ourselves as equal members of the global biotic communityequal with marmot and manatee, with saguaro and birch, with amphibian, arthropod, lichen, and microbe-a community that is utterly dependent upon stable worldwide ecosystems for its continued existence.

In this ethnographic study of an organic foods cooperative, I examine community through three different facets—the Voluntary Association, the Lifestyle Enclave, and the Neighborhood. I use fieldnote examples to show how each of these community facets corresponds with the three visions of discourse for social change considered by Wayne Campbell Peck, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins. Peck et al.’s most powerful discouse, community literacy, corresponds to the Neighborhood facet of community. The neighborhood holds promise for developing a Biospheric Literacy as developed by Anne Mareck in the introduction to this special issue. The kinds of meanings that she says acknowledge biospherically interdependent human and non-human community members are, I suggest, ritually enacted through neighborly communication. Further, it is through the cordial talk of neighbors that we communicate the kinds of understandings needed to affect positive social change and limit damage to our biosphere.

Saving the Next Tree used to be deep green. After the loss of the American chestnut and Fraser fir, yet another beautiful tree, the tree I now considered my favorite tree of the mountains, might be erased from the landscape. Also in 2004, the hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA), the insect responsible for the devastation, reached the north Georgia mountains, at the southern end of the Appalachian chain. Of course, many Georgians, and I am now one, were alarmed, and not just for sentimental reasons. This is a story of how people's disparate lives, careers, and interests can intersect, rather serendipitously, to support community action and to lead to personal growth. In the terminology of community literacy scholars, the hemlock project enabled groups to use their own situated knowledge, conveyed through both organizational and personal problem narratives such as the one above to identify wise options for action (Higgins, Long,. The project fits Jeffery Grabill's definition of communitybased research "as research that involves citizens working with professionally trained researchers [but entomologists and wildlife scientists in this instance, not writing instructors or rhetoricians] in a community-driven process to answer local questions or solve local problems []" (44). Similarly, the research is "action driven, " but the primary goal is environmental, rather than social, though "education, political and social change, and policymaking" goals do exist (Grabill 44). In the long term, all those involved in the hemlock project hope their efforts help to preserve a species, but secondary, unacknowledged goals of better understanding among stakeholders about complex environmental issues and personal and community transformation are also emerging from the process.

A recent nine-month field study considered the relationships among school-sponsored and community forms of literacy practices in a migrantsending area of rural Mexico. While many teachers in rural Mexico argue that students should remain in school rather than migrate to the U.S., this study demonstrates the ways in which schools in rural Mexico often do not recognize the needs of the communities that they serve. As a result, students in these schools often develop a pragmatic orientation toward formal literacy. While many of the skills that they learn help them navigate commercial and government bureaucracies, these students do not adopt the values embedded in formal education. Rather, they implicitly question the promise of education as a neutral means to social and economic mobility.

This essay explores how the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism, especially Richard Rorty’s work on social hope late in his career, could be relevant to community literacy. Pragmatism does not prescribe a particular approach to community literacy but, unlike many kinds of critical pedagogy, affirms a role for patriotism and liberalism in social change movements. Pragmatists such as Rorty prefer cooperative participation and incremental reform to either idealism or ideological critique.

This essay presents a case study of the modes used in training employees at a munitions plant in Ohio between 1940 and 1945. Theories of multimodal discourse and learning advanced by The New London Group (1996), Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen (2001) and Richard Mayer (2001) inform this analysis. With an unskilled labor force and many workers coming from oral literate traditions, the War Manpower Commission developed the Training Within Industry program, emphasizing visual and experiential literacies. This analysis can inform programs that use multimodal forms of instruction by acknowledging positive and negative implications of such literacy sponsorship.

This article provides suggestions for community coalitions and other literacy service providers for implementing a performance management process that would be useful for helping coalitions and service providers to improve their efforts. It provides initial suggestions as to: the roles community coalitions might undertake in community literacy performance management; the outcome indicators that might be used to track progress; steps for selecting the indicators relevant to individual communities; handling some of the key implementation challenges; and the basic ways in which the performance information can be used. The article is based on the National Institute for literacy forthcoming guide to performance management for community literacy organizations.

This article explores similarities in literacy learning across various life-span stages and considers what actions must be taken to improve literacy attainment and achievement, whether the delivery site is prekindergarten, elementary, secondary, adult, family, workplace, volunteer, or community literacy. The emphasis here is on what it takes to successfully teach individuals to read and write well separate from any adjustments that must be made for context or learner characteristics. Research is examined for five essential variables in literacy learning, including (1) amount of teaching; (2) content of instruction; (3) quality of instruction; (4) student motivation; and (5) alignment and support.

This paper explores the following questions related to family literacy programs: How is family literacy linked with family literacy programs? What are the theoretical frameworks supporting the various models educators and researchers are using in their pedagogical approaches to family literacy programs? As these questions are explored several tensions and directions in programming family literacy become apparent. By examining the various models in this way, family literacy providers and others interested in family and community literacy may be better equipped to evaluate the underlying principles of the programs they use and thereby make informed choices with regard to programming.

This essay explores the intersection between writing studies and civic engagement through the action projects developed in E465: Prison Literature and Writing. Such literacy activism creates immediate opportunities for advanced undergraduates to more fully understand the work of literacy in contested spaces like jail and extends a call to action for writing teachers to acknowledge the possibility of community-based writing collaborations.

They ain't gonna do my kid like they done me and his dad!" she protested."They know he can't read, but they're just gonna pass him on.That don't do no good, I know!"These are the words of Jenny, mother of Donny who, despite being able only to read and write his name, had just been promoted to the 2 nd grade.Jenny and husband "Big" Donny possess what Victoria Purcell-Gates calls "low literate ability" and are effectively unable to communicate with the school through print.When Jenny tries to communicate orally with Donny's teachers, they react harshly, as the author recalls a particular interaction in which the instructor exclaims, "I knew she [Jenny] was ignorant as soon as she opened her mouth!"(37).Thus, Jenny turns to the local university literacy center for help, which at the time was run by Purcell-Gates.This scenario reflects a familiar situation in which literacy workers are often faced with assisting community members in adapting to the literacies of mainstream institutions.As this special issue of the Community Literacy Journal commemorates the work of Shirley Brice Heath's Ways With Words (1983) and her work in the Appalachian region, it is fitting here to revisit a similar study concerning a group that shares a similar cultural identity yet does not reside in the actual physical boundaries of Appalachia.Victoria Purcell-Gates' Other People's Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy introduces us to a cultural group named urban Appalachians, which some have labeled an invisible minority.While many tend to think of a space defined by its boundaries as home to Appalachians, one cannot overlook the phenomenon referred to as the Great Migration.From 1940-1970 the Appalachian region witnessed an exodus of nearly seven million residents who migrated to Midwestern cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Columbus,

This paper considers how community literacy programs factor into broader economies of literacy development. The author analyzes two Appalachian community literacy projects, Shirley Brice Heath’s ethnographic project in the Carolina Piedmont and Highlander Research and Education Center’s organizing efforts with the Appalachian People’s Movement, to construct an image of sponsors of diverted literacy, people and institutions that employ three interdependent tactics to usefully redirect the means by which literacy travels through the educational marketplace.

What does it mean for a community writing assistance program to bridge the gap between the university and the community? What makes for a successful alliance between these two worlds usually considered distinct? Our paper addresses these questions by reflecting on the factors that have contributed to the growing success of our CWA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Taking into account the varied alliances forged through our work — between the funding organization, instructors, community leaders, and writers themselves — we hope to offer a multi-faceted picture of local literacy outreach and partnership.

Th is article outlines one potential model for a graduate–level course in community literacy studies. Ellen Cushman and Jeffrey Grabill taught this course for the first time at Michigan State University in the spring of 2007. In this article our colleagues with varying disciplinary backgrounds reflect on the course, its readings, and their theoretical and practical understanding surrounding many of the central questions of this new discipline: what is a community? What is literacy? What is community literacy? And what does it mean to practice “community literacy”—to write, to speak, and so on? After a wide discussion of course experience from several student colleagues in the course, Cushman and Grabill reflect on their course objectives and point toward future incarnations of the course.

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 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.