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.

Colleges and universities across the United States are recognizing the public memory function of their campus spaces and facing difficult decisions about how to represent the ugly sides of their histories within their landscapes of remembrance. Official administrative responses to demands for greater inclusiveness are often slow and conservative in nature. Using our own institution and our work with local Indigenous community members as a case study, we argue that students and faculty can employ community-engaged, public-facing, digital composing projects to effectively challenge entrenched institutional interests that may elide or even misrepresent difficult histories in public memory works. Such projects are a nimble and accessible means of creating counter-narratives to intervene in public memory discourses. Additionally, by engaging in public discourses, such work helps promote meaningful student rhetorical learning in courses across disciplines.

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.

Service learning has become a feature in higher education in courses ranging from computer science and graphic design to English and the humanities. These courses are designed to provide "internship" experience and enable students to use skills they learned in the classroom in "real world settings. " These "real world settings, " however, exist in some rather well-defined economic, social, and political system. Tania Mitchell suggests that traditional approaches to service learning either assume that such projects are already inherently related to social justice or are simply concerned with other issues such as the teaching of some rather acontextual "workplace skills. " There exists, however, a growing recognition that service learning could enable students to recognize and more deeply understand the social and economic structures they are asked to work within. The aims of this "critical service-learning" approach include the redistribution of power in the service-learning relationship, the development of authentic relationships between the university and community, and an unapologetic movement toward the goal of social change. At my university there is an interest in providing service learning in more traditional workplace settings, but there are also faculty members who are attempting to use these projects to help students understand the contexts in which they live and work. This keywords essay details some recent scholarship in literacy and critical service learning. It is by no means a complete picture of the efforts in this area but, rather, presents some interesting service-learning projects that might be duplicated at other institutions. All the projects provide opportunities for students to gain an understanding of the economic, social, political, and, in one case, environmental contexts in which they live. Writing plays a primary role in facilitating such understanding. Lisa Rabin's article "The Culmore Bilingual ESL and Popular Education Project: Coming to Consciousness on Labor, Literacy, and Community, " details a servicelearning project featured in a Spanish class at George Mason University. The project offered an alternative to more "market-based" service learning. In 2009, Rabin had been contacted by labor organizers from the Tenants and Workers United (TWU) in Culmore, Virginia to possibly have some of her bilingual students offer an ESL course for day laborers who were also new immigrants

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.

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.

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.