s someone who regularly encourages students in my technical writing and first-year composition courses to participate in public writing projects, I have often turned to scholarship based in service learning-often not writing-course specific-to look for pedagogical direction and even evidence that these approaches to teaching are meaningful for students.Fortunately, as more and more rhetoric and composition specialists teach public-oriented writing courses, the emergence of related discipline-specific scholarship, conference presentations, and workshops provides necessary assistance for compositionists whose teaching and work conflate the borders between the

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.

usterity measures have affected many of us in education and non-profits.

Entering jail is an assault on the senses. Thick recirculated air feels either drafty or stuffy, never comfortable. The walls protrude with a stark, dingy white, bare of character or care. The smell is sterile, some unidentifiable cleanser stinging the tongue and nostrils. Doors clang shut and open via invisible mechanics. The wall-mounted eye of the panopticon is omnipresent.

n composition studies, "the streets" is a term frequently employed to delineate a tangible public space and/or the discourse emerging from it, particularly outside the bounds of government or other institutions (such as universities), where people interact and live. The streets also represent a site of protest for political or social change, as when people repeat the mantra take it to the streets! In his 1963 March on Washington speech, Civil Rights leader John Lewis stated, "I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village, and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete. " Many people believe that embodying this ubiquitous public space guarantees them a venue and an audience for their discourse, particularly when it takes the form of dissent.

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.

and his college and high school colleagues demonstrate the innovative, place-conscious pedagogies being practiced out of the National Writing Project (NWP) sites in

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.

espite my best efforts, I frequently found myself in the position that I feared most: sitting and being present with the family . . . In my other volunteer experiences, that isn't usually a requirement . . . I think that "doing" makes my encounters with injustice bearable for me. "Being" is hard, but maybe the act of being present with this family and allowing myself to be seen by them was a gift. It was a gift for me and it is something that will be with me for the rest of my life. -Student participant in Grassi and Armon, Chapter 16.

While the social, political, economic, educational, and cultural consequences of high rates of incarceration have been well documented, the social psychological dynamics have not received as much discussion. I offer here a first person narrative reflection on the connections between a writing workshops and raising social awareness of the realities of day-to-day lives of inmates. Appropriate writing pedagogy, personal challenges to meeting to the workshops, and the need to publish inmate stories inform the essay.

Jennifer Hitchcock interviews community activist and director of Syracuse University’s Composition and Cultural Rhetoric doctoral program, Steve Parks. They discuss Parks’s working-class background, career path, influences, and activism. Parks also considers the direction of the field of composition and rhetoric and expresses optimism for the future.

By focusing on the cookbook Peace Never Tasted So Sweet, this article argues that CODEPINK strategically combines peace activist and food literacies to engage audiences in their antiwar efforts, strategies that take on benefits and drawbacks. Although feminist scholars from a variety of disciplines have studied cookbooks, researchers have yet to fully analyze the intersections of gendered activist literacies and cookbooks. Expanding upon arguments promoting food literacies as well as feminist analyses of cookbooks, this article illuminates CODEPINK’s efforts to teach readers how to critique military action, recruit peace-workers, build a movement, and bake pie.

Eight English graduate students and a professor reflect on their semesterlong exploration of community literacy studies. The students, some in a MFA Creative Writing program and some doing doctoral work in literature, rhetoric, or English Education, discuss how the community literacies lens unsettled their relationship to English Studies.

Book & New Media Reviews Book & New Media Reviews trial.These examples illustrate how people from the outside often have comparative social power.In acknowledgement of this power differential, Coogan engages in a set of ethical best practices throughout the project. 2 For example, he purposely did not read background information offered to him about the participants' crimes.This distancing allows the writers to reveal this information when they are ready.Secondly, all participants gave final approval for the way their writing appears in the book, and they were given the option of using a pseudonym.In a consent form, Coogan also made it clear that the writers could stop participating at any time.Notably, workshop participation did not obligate them to publish in the book.These measures provide opportunities for agency and indicate a profound respect for participants.Finally, Coogan and the writers made publication decisions together.In opposition to a topdown model in which the program facilitator decides how and when the stories enter the public sphere, publication with an academic press was a collective decision.As more people venture into the uncharted territory of carceral writing, it is clear that we need to think carefully about power and ethical practices.This work offers a crucial step in the right direction.The writing workshop has been succeeded by Open Minds, a program Coogan founded in 2010, that enables incarcerated people to take courses with college students and faculty from Virginia Commonwealth University.In addition, Coogan invites former participants of the project to speak in his prison literature classes.These approaches, along with Writing Our Way Out, are critical for countering monolithic conceptions of people who are incarcerated.The stereotypes circulating in the public sphere are counterproductive to the shift in public opinion needed for meaningful intervention in the broken U.S. criminal justice system.As a counterpublic text, this book provides a valuable blueprint for scholars, educators, and activists to become part of the intervention, and ultimately, the solution.

Drawing on interviews with writing teachers, this article highlights some of the affective responses that may arise for students, community partners, and teachers when we situate our pedagogies in public sites beyond the classroom. I analyze a teacher-narrated moment of student distress to demonstrate how theories of transformative learning might help us productively theorize affect in service-learning and community-based education. To conclude, I offer a reciprocal model of care that employs tenets of feminist pedagogy, such as transparency and decentering of authority, and that acknowledges the valid emotions students, teachers, and community members may experience. I call for community literacy practitioners to see the power of all participants to both give and receive care in transformative education.

McCracken explores how material conditions encountered by sex workers-realities that "are created and disrupted by discourse and rhetoric" (xxviii)-have the potential to both deny and construct agential choice. To do this, she used an ethnographic design to embed herself within a community of sex workers as a method for asking questions and spending time "with women who exchange sex for money or drugs and the myriad people who come in contact with them" (191). Consequently, as a researcher and a self-identified advocate for sex workers, McCracken argues for more complex interpretations of the stories, ones that can lead to robust solutions to the systemic and individual traumas experienced by them. Through critical discourse analysis, she disrupts the historical and cultural interpretations of sex workers, showing how these constructed realities have led to ineffective or limited solutions because they have historically been hindered by an over-reliance on the archetypal binary of victim/ survivor. This binary obscures not only the kaleidoscopic meaning of these workers' lives, but also limits opportunities for responsible rhetorical agency, or what McCracken calls agential choice.

There are few researchers today in rhetoric and composition, particularly in emerging literacies, who are talking about transnational literacy practices and the effects of a changing global economy on migration and thus on literacy.In Del Otro Lado: Literacy and Migration across the U.S.-Mexico Border,

This qualitative study looks at how rural women in the American South have obtained access to digital technologies for reading and writing. Using the “life history” approach (Brandt; Hawisher and Selfe), we interviewed five women. We look at the challenges caused by the Digital Divide, at economies of access, including the financial factors that shape individuals’ uses of digital technologies for reading and writing, at the strategies that the women used for gaining access to needed technologies, and at the nature of sponsorship in digital, rural contexts.

In fields such as sociolinguistics and composition and rhetoric, communication is increasingly understood as translingual, that is, as negotiated socially across languages. Those of us engaged in community literacy can and should recognize the deeply multilingual nature of the communities in which we work, and we should understand, embrace, and forward the translingual approach. Here I reflect on my first conscious attempt to teach translingually in a college course with a community-based learning component. I present an overview of the translingual orientation, reflect on the decisions I made as I prepared a college community-based learning course with translingual intentions but not overt translingual objectives, and examine some the students’ reflections that reveal their language attitudes at the end of the course. I argue that small, intentional decisions made towards a broader translingual orientation towards language and literacy make an immediate difference in how students think about language, and that those engaged in community literacy partnerships are in need of a theory of communication that the translingual approach can provide.

This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard, the founder and former director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum (CPAAM), was deceased. Because oral history is narrator-driven, Gilyard’s death required us to remain especially attentive to the epistemic value of his voice.

Within community literacy scholarship, ecological perspectives are used to characterize the literacy and language practices of various groups.Director of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre, David Barton draws from biology to theorize ecology as the study of "the interrelationship of an area of human activity and its environment.It is concerned with how the activity-literacy in this case-is part of the environment and at the same time influences and is influenced by the environment" (29).The reciprocal nature of ecologies, and the way they account for the distribution, influence, and movement of organisms within and between environments makes ecology an ideal term for characterizing the relationships among groups, technologies, and cultures that influence the ways individuals learn, communicate, and interact with one another.In this keyword essay, I will highlight the appropriateness of ecology for describing networked communication and literacy practices, as well as offer an overview of how compositionists and community literacy practitioners have used ecological approaches in the work they do.It is necessary here to distinguish an ecological approach from one that is exclusively environmental.In 1989, environmentalist David Orr defined ecological literacy as "the demanding capacity to distinguish between health and disease in natural systems and to understand their relation to health and disease in human ones; knowledge of this sort is best acquired out of doors" (334).Ecological literacy in this respect is concerned with reading the natural environment.Orr's call for increased environmental awareness and attention to the ways humans impact environments remains increasingly urgent.However, this keyword essay focuses instead on how scholars and practitioners have adopted ecological metaphors to characterize literacy environments.The ecological approach I examine aligns more closely with that of ecocomposition theories than those of the ecological literacy Orr defines.In their Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition, Sid Dobrin and Christian Weisser define ecocomposition as "the study of the relationships between environments (and by that we mean natural, constructed, and even imagined places) and discourse (seeking, writing, and thinking)" (6).Dobrin and Weisser's approach does not exclude environmental concerns but instead makes the role of language and discourse central in making those concerns visible.As Rhonda Davis suggests in her discussion of ecocomposition and community literacy, "while ecological literacy and the pedagogical approaches that result do not focus exclusively on environmental concerns, they have the potential to expand participants' awareness of such concerns" (80).

As College English's recent special issue on the social turn can attest, English studies in general and composition studies in particular have often embraced the epochal language of "the turn" to gauge its self-efficacy, often hinging on the mission of its determined publics and/ or the liberal mission of the university. It is in this context that Frank Farmer's book, After the Public Turn: Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur, is welcome, as it attempts to put these turns into perspective by splicing the concept of counterpublics into our understanding of two publics often evoked in composition studies: one cultural and ad hoc, one disciplinary and institutional.

Traces of A Stream: Literacy And Social Change Among African American Women (2000), scholars interested in literacy, identity, and social change have continued to pursue ways to include the voices of women who have previously been underrepresented within scholarly work.Indeed, these recovery projects-often considered part of a revisionist enterprise-represent important examples for those interested in the literary and rhetorical practices of women who have been overlooked based on gendered, ethnic, and socioeconomic identities.Illustrating this, scholars have developed a range of archival, rhetorical, and interview projects that uncover women as historical subjects who represent the myriad ways women develop and use rhetorical skills and literacies.For instance, in Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911, Jessica Enoch describes female teachers who contested the normative educational structures that oppressed marginalized groups and, rather, developed pedagogical strategies that encouraged civic participation.In another recovery project, Beyond the Archives, Gesa Kirsch describes the role of women who participated in a male-dominated sphere as physicians and civic advocates in the 19th century.In the same book, Wendy Sharer illustrates a new understanding of uncovering voices when she finds scrapbook examples of even her own grandmother's engagement with political literacies.These examples represent just some of the important work that has emerged in order to uncover and reframe the literate and rhetorical legacies of women from multiple subject positions.Erica Abrams Locklear's book Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women's Literacies adds a unique contribution to these discussions by focusing on the literacies of women from Appalachia-a region, she argues, too-often characterized by a deficit framework.That is, Locklear challenges the gendered, regional, and classed stereotypes that represent women in Appalachia as "illiterate, " "hillbillies, " "Other, " or

In the face of the $44 billion market—and rising—for foods labeled as “natural” (despite any formal regulatory oversight on the use of this term), this article examines multiple complex layers of community literacies and movements involving foods labeled as “natural,” including an increasing availability of “natural” foods and simultaneous rise in U.S. obesity rates, as well as grassroots movements that have challenged the use of “natural.” Then, using an online survey of 707 respondents in a localized community setting, I provide my own examination of literacies of “natural” foods by assessing specific consumer interpretations and regulatory knowledge of the word “natural” as it is found on food labels. Ultimately, I discuss what role these varying levels of literacies play in the rising U.S. movement to push back against the use of this claim in the face of an otherwise flourishing “natural” food market.

Almost by definition, resisting the insidious convenience of the mainstream food supply requires persistence. This is especially true for food projects requiring fermentation—projects that unfold over days or weeks and require day-to-day science in kitchens where variables can be hard to control and where some degree of periodic failure is almost inevitable. In this article, a team of writers—scholars and community members—dramatizes a joint inquiry from which emerged a composite portrait of what we have come to call mindful persistence—an existential yet collaborative engine that drives our food literacies. Dialogic text features highlight the situated insights of individual writers, indicating that while this team shares an interest in fermentation, this interest does not require or assume identical understandings of the science of fermentation or similar positions in the probiotic debate surrounding contemporary fermentation practices. Instead, what is shared is a mindful persistence that scaffolds reflective action in this dynamic problem space.

As more and more multimodal projects emerge through writing program curricula, and as community literacy projects redefine what it means to facilitate change and reciprocity through generating multiple texts for multiple audiences, we think it would be useful to consider the significance and prevalence of the selfie as a genre, particularly in regard to its potential power to inspire social activism and critical consciousness.

This article looks at the various ways that communities can be "read" through their cookbooks. Recipes and collections can reveal much about communities, including shared memories/traditions, geographical identifications, and representations of class.

This article proposes permaculture, an ecological alternative to industrial agriculture, as a way to design first-year composition and community literacy classes. First, the paper connects permaculture with post-humanism to describe ecological community literacies—the type of knowledge that ecological theorists say we need to navigate the end of the anthropocene. Next, it describes assignments that can lead college students to this knowledge, and finally, it describes actual community literacy projects where college students can lead elementary students through assignments to gain this knowledge.