We introduce the need for scholars interested in literacy, geography, and cultural studies to examine the role of English language literacy in shaping assimilation experiences of recent immigrant groups. We consider a case study of English language self-efficacy among ethnic Chinese immigrants in the Philadelphia metropolitan area to suggest how language, place, and economic participation are mutually constructed. We conducted interviews with 21 individuals to gain insights about how they perceived this relationship. We also considered the effects of English language self-efficacy on the geographic extent of their daily activities. Perhaps it is not surprising that those who reported stronger English language skills had larger activity spheres in the metropolitan region. Among those who did not note strong language skills, Philadelphia’s historic Chinatown remained prominent as a place of economic participation and center for daily activities and cultural cohesion. We suggest that more attention to the role of literacy and language self-efficacy is warranted among geographers interested in migration studies, assimilation experiences, and workforce participation issues related to immigrant groups.

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.

The field of adult literacy is complex. This complexity poses many challenges for literacy programs. This paper addresses the challenges of collaboration, diversity, attendance, assessment and professional development as they apply to adult literacy programs. Recommendations for increasing the success of literacy programs are provided.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the efficacy of early literacy interventions and to discuss possible roles for volunteer tutors in helping prevent reading difficulties within the Response to Intervention process. First, we describe a landmark study that evaluated the impact of primary classroom instruction on reducing the proportion of students at risk for reading failure, and a more recent series of studies exploring the effects of individualizing classroom reading instruction based on students' initial skills. Second, we review studies of more intensive early intervention to demonstrate how these interventions substantially reduce the proportion of students at risk. Third, we examine effective tutoring models that utilize volunteers. Finally, we discuss the potential role of community tutors in supporting primary classroom instruction and secondary interventions.

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.

for Literacy Program Director, who helped to plan and facilitate this first Summit, whose goal was "bringing together more than 80 community leaders, scholars, and literacy experts to begin a national dialogue on improving and expanding

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.

Ernesto Cardenal, former Minister of Culture of Nicaragua and recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, began painting, wood carving, and poetry workshops on Solentiname—an archipelago of 36 islands and 1,000 people—in the mid-1960s as part of his developing an artistic and contemplative community among sustenance farmers and fishing families. Forty years later, he continues to spend time on the islands and the church he built there, and holding poetry workshops as recently as January 2008. These poems are from young people who participate in the community poetry workshops.

This article is part of a project that involves case studies of four adults who attend an informal literacy center. I examine people’s motivations to write when their main purpose is not to gain a degree or other credentials. Here I focus on one study member and how she uses writing to gain textual agency. By composing narratives that investigate her social positioning, this woman rewrites her own story. I demonstrate how her texts and interview comments reveal a strong desire to connect with public audiences so that other people might follow her model of speaking out to change culture.

The article explores the rhetorical dimensions of witnessing. We concentrate, in particular, on two groups: 1) university students at the University of San Carlos, Quetzaltenango, whose murals are dramatic reminders of the massacres that resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 indigenous people in the 1980s and early 90s and of the corrupt governmental leaders responsible for them, and 2) U.S. accompaniers sponsored by an organization within our own community, the Copper Country Guatemala Accompaniment Project (CCGAP).

This article analyzes one prison literacy program in Texas that trains inmate participants to teach other men and women, likewise incarcerated and often dyslexic, to read and write in English. Noting the regular recurrence of the words “repair” and “hope” in participants’ descriptions of HOPE and associated activities, the author makes extensive use of feminist-epistemologist Elizabeth Spelman’s theory of “repair” and Paula Mathieu’s articulation of “hope” in her attempt to understand the nuances of “repair” and the “hope” it enables/generates behind these prison walls. Finally, given HOPE’s configuration as a faith-based program with Christian origins and Carter’s own position as a secular academic, the article ends with an extended discussion of the tensions between Bible-based discourses and the academy.

for Literacy Program Director, who helped to plan and facilitate this first Summit, whose goal was "bringing together more than 80 community leaders, scholars, and literacy experts to begin a national dialogue on improving and expanding

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 article explores the literacy lives of students enrolled in English Composition courses at two open-admission universities in Central Appalachia and the complex role of immediate and extended family members as sponsors of literacy. Some relatives emerge as both sponsors and inhibitors—or perhaps more accurately, sponsors of competing meanings of literacy—and illustrate the larger social forces surrounding literacy in students’ lives.

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.

To become literate when we move from one part of the country to another with significant cultural differences, our first task is to learn the new culture so we can more effectively work with our colleagues and our students. When I moved from Bay City, MI, to Morehead, KY, there were many customs I needed to learn. Fortunately, what I learned helped me to cherish both my new colleagues and students.

Linda Scott DeRosier’s autobiographical accounts of literacy attainment in Creeker: A Woman’s Journey and Songs of Life and Grace reveal that entrance into a secondary discourse community via literacy can bring both pleasure and pain. Analyzing the identity negotiations DeRosier encounters reveals that although she experiences a sense of loss as a result of continued formal education, such schooling also makes possible the creation of her memoirs, which help overturn stereotypes connecting Appalachia with illiteracy.

This article revisits the debate between cultural and critical literacy through ethnography challenging popular academic views in education and literacy. Set in a preschool classroom at the inception of the “No Child Left Behind” initiative, this essay focuses on teaching assistant Marylou Anderson. Her experiences growing up in Appalachia inform a teaching philosophy that differs significantly from her colleagues. Her story invites us to reconsider how “the culture of power” functions as a formidable gatekeeper.

I conducted a survey in order to determine whether or not the cultural values shared by parents from a poor mountain town in West Virginia discourage high school students from pursuing a college education. The results suggest that the persistence of poverty in rural Webster County can be attributed to the region’s traditional set of cultural values, which discourage the importance of higher education.

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.

In this article, we briefl y review national statistics on older adults and computer usage —statistics that led us to volunteer to develop technological literacy programs for older adults at local community centers. Because we recognize that all literacies are developed and used by specifi c people in specifi c contexts, we describe the community centers where we volunteered, our roles as teachers and later as researchers, and the technological literacy curricula we developed and revised based on extensive input from participants. We discuss the barriers and benefi ts to older adults’ acquisition of technological literacies. We argue for the importance of building communities of practice based on relational support and interaction and for the importance of drawing from assets and needs existing within communities.