This article rethinks digital access and community literacy by sharing aspects of intentional engagement informed by social justice frameworks to establish community partnerships that empower communities both local and global with digital literacy. The article explores access, privileges, and positionalities that the author strategically utilizes to support the communities within her current locality and in her hometown Nepal. By showcasing multiple intentional and equitable partnerships informed via social justice frameworks, the article argues that we require a transnational context to redefine digital literacy and our students need to understand these contexts better given the demands of the current workplace.

This profile features the authors' shared work to co-create both a community literacy project, Stories from the Flood, and the undergraduate community-based learning courses that supported the effort. Stories from the Flood works to assist community members in southwestern Wisconsin to share their flood experiences, aiming to support community healing and serve as a resource for future conversations about flood recovery and resilience. Our collaboration on Stories from the Flood demonstrates the importance of non-university expertise and aims to daylight and correct structural asymmetries that render these rural watersheds both particularly vulnerable to flooding and absent of government intervention.

In the era of a global pandemic, this article claims that community literacy scholars are well poised to support challenges currently facing healthcare providers. To demonstrate this, I offer one example drawing on my work with The ART of Infertility and explain how I repurposed patient art and stories to curate emotional literacy amongst healthcare professionals. I argue that "rhetorical curation" is an innovative method that can support public engagement around stigmatized or underrepresented health experiences. I end with an invitation for community literacy scholars to build upon their expertise and design innovative public projects that contribute to improvements in healthcare.

As a consortium of individuals, programs, and agencies that embrace the power of collaboration, the Washtenaw County Literacy Network works to shift conversations and practices surrounding literacy and literacy inequities. Using an emergent strategy lens, the authors describe the partnerships at the center of the network and the collaborative work that has emerged from these partnerships. The authors also analyze the adaptations recent events have generated in terms of the relationships and interactions that center the work, and they explore ways to rethink the idea of assessment for community literacy initiatives. Ultimately, the authors posit that emergent strategy helps networks like the WCLN navigate change in thoughtful and sustainable ways.

In this article, we share our experiences with the ongoing language and literacy practices and pedagogies of a bilingual, community-based writing center located in South Philadelphia's Italian Market. This writing center -one in a network of sites across Philadelphia and southern New Jersey -targeted bilingual, Latinx children from ages seven to eighteen. For the past four years, we have partnered with the center to create a translanguaging space. Here, we reflect on the experience of offering translanguaging writing workshops.

Emerging from the keynote address at the inaugural Conference on Community Writing, this snapshot examines how an engaged infrastructure for community writing might operate as a flow-cultivation milieu. Such a milieu would facilitate self-determination, which suggests that people do their most compelling, rewarding, and innovative work when they exercise autonomy, pursue competence, and feel purpose; wise mentorship, in which mentors and mentees interrelate in an ongoing manner that supports mutually high expectations and achievements, and a listening stance that broadly distributes participation and shared learning. This snapshot also argues that, should an engaged infrastructure ever cease operating as a flow cultivation milieu, it should be dismantled.

From our perspectives at the University of Louisville, we address the need to provide structures for graduate student participation in community-engaged scholarship. Architectures of participation such as the ones we describe in this piece—the Community Engagement Academy and the Digital Media Academy—offer graduate students the opportunity to practice designing and implementing community engagement projects within interdisciplinary and disciplinary sites. The models we provide were designed to make the invisible work of community engagement visible and to create low barriers of entry for graduate students to become stewards of their disciplines as well as stewards of their communities. Such opportunities, we argue, help promote a more capacious view of stewardship, and thus encourage emerging engaged scholars to learn how to act responsibly and wisely in conducting communityengaged research.

This essay argues that while fostering individual and collaborative literacy can indeed promote self-awareness, confidence, and political awareness, the threat of emotional and material retribution is ever-present in jail, making the development of infrastructure challenging. Such reality compels engaged teacher-researchers to develop tactical methods for promoting literacy with limited social and material support from institutions that are primarily invested in compliant behavior. Rather than relying upon traditional models for building engaged university-community infrastructure in such contexts, I suggest a participatory curatorial model and explore the notion of curating a program within an ever-shifting set of artists, regulations, allegiances, and expectations.

Effectively addressing wicked problems requires collaborative, embedded action. But, in many cases, scholarly commitments, social justice, privilege, and precarity collide in ways that make it difficult for community-engaged scholars to ethically navigate competing duties. This article presents our efforts to support reciprocal community engagement in addressing cancer- obesity comorbidity and risk coincidence in underserved communities. Partnering with community healthcare professionals, we conducted an adapted Systems Ethnography/Qualitative Modeling (SEQM) study. SEQM offers an alternative ethical framework for community-engaged research, one that supports reciprocity through enabling participant-centered community self-definition, goal setting, and solution identification.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A case study of a graduate-level community literacy seminar that involved a tutoring project with adult digital literacy learners, this essay illustrates the value of community outreach and service-learning for graduate students in writing studies. Presenting multiple perspectives through critical reflection, student authors describe how their experiences contextualized, enhanced, and complicated their theoretical knowledge of public rhetoric and community literacy. Inspired by her students’ reflections, the faculty co-author issues a call to graduate programs in writing, rhetoric, literacy studies, and technical communication to develop a conscious commitment to graduate students’ civic engagement by supporting opportunities to learn, teach, and research with community partners.

This article presents findings from a case study of an adult literacy program. The author conducted this IRB-approved study as part of a three-year, research-based, community-engagement project that partnered the literacy program with a writing center at a large public research university. The author argues that the participatory methods afforded by community-engagement research can allow researchers to achieve insight into particular programs while contributing to local literacy. The author also argues that understanding the characteristics of particular programs can contribute to knowledge of the field of adult literacy education and help collaborators develop engagement projects that support adult literacy.

This article reclaims Jane Addams as a community literacy pedagogue and explicates her pedagogical theory through an analysis of her social thought. Addams’ goal of “socializing democracy” through education led her to both encourage immigrant students to associate across difference and to assimilate into dominant literacies—tensions present in today’s community literacy contexts. The article includes suggestions for rhetorically redeploying Addams’ pedagogy in contemporary writing instruction. The educational activities of a Settlement, as well its philanthropic, civic, and social undertakings, are but differing manifestations of the attempt to socialize democracy, as is the very existence of the Settlement itself —Jane Addams, 1902

community literacy

Educators focused on community literacy and public engagement have access to a unique critical platform from which larger social issues that impact us both as a whole and on very personal levels are open to exploration. Being particularly situated to have significant impact on community, literacy work in this area may require uncommon pedagogical strategies. Based on its comprehensive focus on sustainability, ecological literacy, sociopolitical factors that affect communities, and a multitude of other factors that underpin social injustice, ecopedagogy may be uniquely positioned to offer a more holistic view than other composition pedagogies such as place-based education and ecocomposition.

This article examines what a pedagogy of public rhetoric and community literacy might look like based on an understanding of twentieth century Mexican American civil rights rhetoric. The inductive process of examining archival materials and conducting oral histories informs this discussion on the processes and challenges of gaining civic inclusion. I argue that writing can be both a healing process and an occasion for exercising agency in a world of contingency and uncertainty. To illustrate, I describe several key events shaping the evolution of the post-World War II Mexican American civil rights movement in New Mexico. Taking a case study approach, I begin this chapter by examining the civic discourses of one prominent New Mexico leader in the post-World War II civil rights movement: Vicente Ximenes. As a leader, Ximenes confronted critical civil rights issues about culture and belonging for over fifty years beginning in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is a historical moment worth revisiting. First, I set the stage for this examination about writing, citizenship, and civic literacy by analyzing two critical rhetorical moments in the life of this post World War II civil rights activist. Secondly, I connect the Ximenes legacy to a growing movement at the University of New Mexico and the ways that we are making critical responses to current issues facing our local communities in New Mexico. By triangulating social acts of literacy, currently and historically, this article offers organizing principles for Composition teachers and advocates of community literacy serving vulnerable communities in their various spheres of practice.

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement spotlights her experiences with Pittsburgh's Community Literacy Center (CLC), an innovative project in community literacy initiated in 1990. The 2008 book details a rhetorical model of engaging the privileged and marginalized voices of community leaders, academics and urban teens into meaningful dialogue that values all perspectives and embraces differences as valuable resources. According to Flower, the discourse of academic cultural critique has taught "us how to speak up [and] speak against" (2 original emphasis). However, what we lack and what this text provides is a model that teaches us "to speak with others [and] to speak for our commitments [] for a revisable image of transformation" (2 original emphasis).

Communities—and their literacies—exist within larger contexts, and writing has the potential to empower or oppress, to maintain the status quo, or to transform the collective community. School is one such context and, in recent years, the nature of writing has changed; digital writing skills needed to participate in contemporary society do not always resemble skills of traditional, school-based literacy. This article examines the teaching of digital writing as an issue of social justice by sharing the perspectives of several novice teachers who were challenged to alter their views of what writing is and how it should be taught.

Women who work in highly male-dominated fields such as science and the military often find it difficult to establish a place for themselves within their workplace communities. In this essay, I examine how two related online communities for military women enable participants to overcome their workplace isolation, form a collective consciousness, find positive mentorship, and develop a community literacy that affords them a voice through which to enact both personal and public change.

This essay revises Paula Mathieu’s call for relationship-based tactics of engagement over institution-based strategies. Because engaged scholars operate within institutional contexts, they should utilize both tactics and strategies to make the academic institutional paradigm more conducive to relationship-based engagement. In supporting this long-term goal, community-literacy practitioners can adapt Brian Huot’s theory of instructive evaluation to enable collaborative assessment of community partnerships. One possible mechanism for such institutional invention would be the establishment of quasi-strategic, quasi-tactical Community- Literacy Associations.

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.

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.

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.