The use of comics can be a powerful tool to expand educational outreach efforts for improving the health and well-being of people everywhere. Dr. Ian Williams coined the term "graphic medicine" to denote the use of comics in medical education and patient care ("Graphic Medicine"). Alzheimer's disease affects approximately five million Americans and is expected to triple to 13.8 million by 2050. Hispanics and Blacks are disproportionately affected at a higher rate than other groups ("Facts and Figures"). There is a lack of culturally relevant educational materials available for these populations. To address this disparity, an interdisciplinary community engaged collaboration was initiated with the Alzheimer's Association West Texas Chapter, The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), and Dukes Comics to produce a series of virtual workshops entitled, "Journaling and Doodling for Stress Reduction and Relaxation" for caregivers of people living with Alzheimer's and other dementias. These sessions were live-streamed and began during the COVID-19 pandemic. Spanish sessions have also been provided to the public. Health information about the disease process and common caregiver challenges are provided in each session. A guided journaling and doodling activity are also included. Journaling has been shown to be an effective and easy tool to use for stress management (Scott). The impetus behind this project was to address the dire need for increasing access to Alzheimer's disease education and resources in El Paso, Texas, a border community that is also home to Fort Bliss Army base. Hispanics comprise approximately 82% of the population and include a large Spanish-speaking segment. Language is often a barrier to health care access and education. To meet the aim of increasing accessibility, the workshops and comics are available in both English and Spanish and soon in-person. This project received a 2022 joint seed grant from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso and UTEP to conduct research and examine data from these workshops that will be provided in-person in marginalized and multilingual Latina communities surrounding El Paso starting in the fall.

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.

Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border, Toms Mario Kalmar has composed a parable about literacy. A simple story used to demonstrate a lesson with "serious political implications" (xv), Kalmar's parable tells the tale of a group of "illegal" migrants in Southern Illinois in the eighties, working together to create an "illegal" alphabet to get by in their labor camp. After a series of violent events between the migrant and anglo populations in town, the migrants leverage their history of biliteracy-primarily among indigenous languages and Spanishto write English como de veras se oye, the way it really sounds. To do this, they break linguistic laws, creating bilingual glossaries that are governed by hybrid English/ Spanish sounds. The question of legality gives the parable its deep resonance: In order for their labor to have value, migrants must cross borders and challenge the laws that police national/linguistic geographies. In the book's terms of literacy learning, "the law itself poses a major part of the problem to be solved" (77). In other words, Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy is a story about migrants working at the borders of literacy in order to survive. That this story is true, and stems from three years of ethnographic fieldwork, makes it a book with lasting relevance for any literacy teacher or researcher working with communities whose creative, strategic, and serious writing work is marginalized or deemed somehow illegal.

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.

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

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

The subject of refugee experience poses compelling problematics for the study of community literacy. Yet, community literacy projects that support language acquisition, cultural orientation, and cross-cultural communication are some of the most important resources available to newly resettled refugees. Refugee students and adult learners arrive in the U.S. and are forced to learn English as quickly as possible while also having to figure out the new and complicated bureaucratic trappings of finding a job, making doctors' appointments, and enrolling in school. Refugees, however, cannot be considered one homogeneous group, and the issues surrounding refugee resettlement and community literacy play out in a myriad of ways. Community literacy research, particularly of the ethnographic variety, teaches us that very little can be generalized or concluded about literacy practice or literacy acquisition from one community to another. This observation cannot be overstated when it comes to the literacy issues faced by refugee communities in the U.S. In this keywords essay, I outline several aspects of refugee experience that carry important implications for understanding literacy in the contexts of refugee resettlement. While this essay is not meant to describe how refugees gain literacy or what their literacy practices look like-such work requires ethnographic study-instead, I offer a range of ways for talking about literacy in relation to refugee experience, particularly through the lenses of the interdisciplinary field of refugee studies and rhetoric and composition. Despite the implications refugee experience might have for understanding literacy in global contexts, the perspectives of refugees have been given only cursory attention. A synthesis of contemporary scholarship, however, affords us sufficient grounds to enact a more reflective, ethical, and responsible approach to understanding literacy-learning in refugee communities.

This case study investigates Carolyn, an effective volunteer ESL and literacy instructor of adult African refugees, in order to understand both what it means to be a qualified instructor, and also how community-based volunteer instructors may become more qualified. The study’s findings suggest that Carolyn’s qualifications are a combination of personal dispositions, such as cultural sensitivity, and professional behaviors, including self-education, seeking mentoring and outside expertise, and purposeful reflection on her teaching. Several implications for supporting community-based volunteer literacy and ESL instructors emerge from these findings.

This exploration begins with the history of libraries in the United States, examining the ways in which Jefferson’s library, the Library of Congress, and Benjamin Franklin’s ideas about libraries intended to address public literacy levels and problems. Changes to the structure, function, and role of libraries in public life are discussed in terms of the changes made since the first libraries were founded in the US with an eye toward developing public literacy and critical literacy as presently understood. Finally, the current practices of public libraries, including their support for community reading projects, their use as sites of literacy instruction (both ESL and basic education), and their use of technology and related functions are explored to see how libraries contribute to the goal of improving adult literacy in America. Two case studies will show how public libraries function as key sites and librarians as key supporters of this goal.

This paper, presented at the CCCC 2008 Senior Citizens Writing session, draws upon my experiences as a senior workshop member and past teacher. Addressing workshop leaders, it emphasizes the need for the many-faceted seniors’ voices to be “translated” and tested within a workshop’s microcosm before entering the outside world’s macrocosm.