The hegemony of English, or at least a particular form of English, has been robustly critiqued, yet is far from having been abandoned in teaching.[1] In addition, dominant discourse deems Native American languages “extinct” or otherwise incapable of speaking to academic topics. However, Indigenous peoples develop language for various subject areas, and languages are used in ways that represent the cultural perspectives of their users.[2] Such perspectives are part of the heart of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty, and the right to use Indigenous languages supports, quite simply, Indigenous peoples’ right to speak and think.[3] Declining to accept assignments in an Indigenous or any heritage language (or requiring translations) conveys the message that English is needed in academic contexts, and is therefore communicatively superior. I argue that writing courses should support student refusals of translation, creating a situation where an instructor may not know what the content of a student submission even is, and that this inability “to know” serves the aims of decolonization.   [1] Alim & Smitherman 2012 [2] See: Kimura & Counceller 2009, McCarty & Nicholas 2014, Wilson & Kamanā 2011, Reyhner 2010, McIvor & McCarty 2017 [3] These rights are a main tenet of how Leonard (2008, 2011, 2021) theorizes language reclamation

“The Schooling of Gestural Listening” attends to how gestural listening—defined as all of listening’s embodied manifestations, such as nodding and nonverbal backchanneling—is used, shaped, and then evaluated by school. The author shows how gestural listening is first leveraged to help students gain literacy, then disciplined into overly-restrained embodied norms, eventually fusing with notions of classroom management and student attitude. To illustrate this trajectory, the article draws upon Nicolas Philibert’s 2002 film Être et Avoir and the work of early literacy figures Marie Clay and Megan Watkins. Throughout, the essay argues that gestural listening’s relegation to an amalgamated landscape of “good” or “correct” conduct in school inordinately affects neurodiverse students. The author investigates this phenomenon by highlighting the writing of two students with self-disclosed ADHD diagnoses, and by engaging with scholars of neurodiversity and disability such as Melanie Yergeau, Shannon Walters, and Thomas Brown. By reminding readers of gestural listening’s affordances in early literacy acquisition, and its subsequent flattening by the process of schooling, this article ultimately aims to render it visible to educators once again, especially to those working in secondary and college environments where listening’s rich gestural register is often delimited to narrow perceptions of “correct” conduct.

Deborah Brandt’s concept of literacy sponsorship remains foundational in writing studies but, as Brandt herself noted in 2015, its sharper insights into power, ideology, and asymmetry have often been softened in application. Building on this framework, Kara Poe Alexander has shown how reciprocal forms of sponsorship emerge in service-learning contexts where students act as both recipients and providers of literacy support. Inspired by this expanded model, this symposium essay returns to the original concept of sponsorship not to dispute its fundamentals but to continue extending it toward a more networked, mutual vision that better reflects the conditions of AI-mediated, experiential learning. Drawing on my own institutional example, this essay traces how literacy sponsorship moves bidirectionally across instructional, technological, and community spaces. It invites further dialogue about the future of literacy sponsorship in an age of distributed expertise and asks how our field might adapt its theories to better account for the tangled, mutual economies of literacy unfolding around us.

In the 1930s-1960s, Phibun’s Thai Nationalism campaign promoted the use of the Thai language while segregating and discriminating against non-Thais, especially the Chinese community in Thailand. The government associated the Chinese language with communism, amplified by global Western xenophobic ideologies, leading to the closure of Chinese schools and widespread fear of Chinese literacy. This article explores two key questions: how xenophobic ideologies manifested in education and how the members of this suppressed generation navigated their language and literacy education in and out of school. Drawing on the narratives of five Thai Chinese individuals, aged 73 to 93, it illuminates the factors contributing to the creation of a repressive language ecology, its impact on their learning experiences, and how individuals within such a context made sense of their surroundings. This research enriches literacy studies by broadening its geographical and historical reach, revealing the intricate interplay between language ideology and ecology, and how these concepts help us understand factors in literacy and language learning. Additionally, it underscores narrative inquiry as a teaching and learning tool and offers strategies to prevent the emergence of suppressive ecology in the classroom.

tudent-centered learning, gamification, and critical pedagogy represent some of the most prominent and increasingly influential paradigms in contemporary educational scholarship.Central to these frameworks is an expanded understanding of literacy, one which acknowledges and embraces literacy as broad, inclusive, and context dependent.The concept of "multiliteracies, " introduced by the New London Group (NLG) in 1996, sought to redefine literacy beyond "formalized, monolingual, [and] monocultural" understandings (61).This framework was developed in response to the growing diversity of communication channels and remains relevant in today's global political climate, especially given the spread of misinformation (Abrantes da Silva; Kalantzis and Cope; New London Group; Zapata, Kalantzis, and Cope).However, the rapid development of multimodality and the ubiquity of the internet, which the NLG could not have fully anticipated, necessitate a reevaluation of their framework in light of these developments (Anstey and Bull 15).This review examines how multiliteracies, as a theoretical framework and pedagogical approach, has evolved over the past three decades.Through an evaluation of three recent publications, it explores how the concept has been adapted, reshaped, and expanded to address the needs and perspectives of diverse groups.First, I briefly discuss critiques of the original NLG conception of multiliteracy from the perspectives of critical literacy and critical pedagogy, as these are often paired with the concept of multiliteracies.At first glance, multiliteracies, critical literacy, and critical pedagogy appear compatible, as all emphasize the importance of fostering a critical understanding of the world.The NLG's call for "efficacious pedagogy" explicitly includes the development of students' critical abilities to "critique a

In this article, I focus on an everyday writer, my mother, engaging in self-sponsored writing to learn (WTL) activities across her lifespan. Focusing specifically on her personal journals and her accounts of her longitudinal WTL trajectory, I trace the learning pathways she took to develop her identity as a mother across her life. Writing was a benefit to her everyday life given, as she puts it, there is no set “instruction manual” for how to parent. Additionally, I trace the “multidirectional” nature of her literacy by investigating how literacy learning circulates given Jane’s intent to pass her WTL journals down to her children as a text to learn from when they become parents (Lee). In making my argument, I extend conversations happening in our field about writing and learning as a lifewide activity. I emphasize the importance writing has on identity development and learning across one’s life and, as such, this article helps literacy studies, lifespan development of writing studies, and motherhood rhetorical studies gauge the vast ways writers write to learn outside of formal schooling. 

The language movement in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was a social movement that seeded Bangladeshi consciousness and is often considered as prefiguring Bangladeshi independence in 1972. It underscored the centrality of linguistic identity in modern nationalism. Developments in the language movement also provide a generative example of how development and modernity can frame discussions around language reform and literacy in contexts characterized by a multilingual norm and postcoloniality. This article examines the rhetorics of language reform in the movement through a reading of a set of recommendations for developing a simplified register of Bangla, called Shahaj-Bangla, within a sense of the overall language movement and its discourse. I argue that the new register simultaneously presents a scientific and cultural view of language to suit the needs of the region. This study contributes to current scholarship in the field by showing how an example of language reform assumes a fluid nature of language while also arguing for a form of standardization aligned with modern nationalism. It also adds to our developing conversations around language and literacy transnationally through its focus on a language debate about a non-European language set in a non-Western context.

No abstract as this is a book review.

This article extends the engagement with decolonial theories within Latinx writing studies, particularly by engaging the ways literacy has been taken up within Basic Writing scholarship. In what follows, I argue that coloniality and decoloniality are crucial resources for Basic Writing and literacy scholarship under the larger umbrella of literacy/composition/rhetoric studies, and that in a symmetrical fashion a consideration of Basic Writing and the “politics of remediation” cannot be neglected or ignored within LCR studies’ decolonial turn if the decolonial imperative is to be achieved. To this effect, I advance three core claims. First, that the decolonial turn in LCR studies offers a potent set of resources for resolving core contradictions in Basic Writing scholarship. Second, that the decolonial turn offers Basic Writing scholars an opportunity to connect advocacy for students and student centered resources to larger public conversations about pedagogy and literacy. Finally, I argue that a decolonial turn in LCR studies offers Basic Writing scholarship a way to reconceive of its own historiography so as to overcome its current deadlocks.

Too often, those new to community literacy work naïvely overlook issues of paternalism (Mathieu), the violent aspects of literacy (Baker-Bell, Pritchard, Stuckey), and the deep legacies of racism that shape engagement (Kannan). Or, as graduate students and novice community-engaged teachers learn about ethical challenges, they can become disillusioned and paralyzed (Feigenbaum). Mentoring others in community literacy therefore requires nurturing critical hope, which I define and theorize as a disposition that blends a commitment to act with an unflinching awareness of harmful dynamics enmeshed in community literacy.  Drawing on data from sixteen students in a graduate community literacy practicum, I introduce a provisional matrix for mapping orientations to critical hope and explore factors that influenced students’ movements across the matrix. The most impactful factors were not pedagogical choices in the class, but ecological factors shaping students’ lives and community experiences. Given this finding, I suggest that instructors, mentors, and professional development facilitators who work with those new to community literacy provide spaces for personal reflection on individual critical hope ecologies, and I raise questions to consider as our field learns to better support those who are entering the unwieldy and energizing work of community literacy.   

This article examines the presence of intensive mothering within incarcerated motherhood and how mothers in jail manage the constraints this ideology imposes on their mothering practices. Analyzing questionnaire data collected from mothers in a Texas county jail through a feminist maternal framework reveals that these mothers have been influenced by the ideology of intensive mothering to serve as their children’s educator. Considering the standard to educate one’s children reinforces the idea that mothers must apply an autonomous model of literacy to childrearing, this article examines the ways in which mothers feel compelled to seek further instruction in order to mother and communicate with their children effectively. This article also examines incarcerated mothers’ simultaneous use of literacy to (re)appropriate intensive mothering and (re)claim agency as mothers. 

Conversations around GenAI and Linguistic Justice are dominating scholarly conversations in composition studies, and yet little work looks at the two together. We argue that the rise of A.I. can serve as a kairotic moment for enacting linguistic justice by returning to expressivist approaches to student writing. We share experiments working with GenAI platforms in attempts to produce diverse voices in writing and then offer our own experiences as writing instructors centering student voice in instruction.

In my sometimes-murky role as a writing program administrator, I often think about Eli Goldblatt's chapter "Lunch" in Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum.Goldblatt posits the main job of a writing program administrator is to have lunch with as many people on campus as possible.His advice is simple.I tell myself it's a lesson I already know.Yet again and again, just as I begin to wonder if I should renew that WPA contract the next time, I run into someone new on campus, we discover all that we share in our hopes for our institution, we make a plan or two, and I remember I have Eli to thank.This kind of move characterizes Goldblatt, both as a person and as a writer and scholar.His personability leads, distracting us from the fact that he is also a profound thinker whose writing models what we value most in composition, rhetoric, and literacy studies: it gently sets aside our concerns with form-genre form, forms of difference, disciplinary forms-and helps us commune, instead, through practice.For that reason, we are lucky now to have Goldblatt's new book, Alone with Each Other: Literature and Literacy Intertwined, a compilation of his published writing from the beginning of his career in rhetoric and composition to the present, between 1995 and 2022.Divided into three sections by topic-Composition Theory and Pedagogy, Community Literacy, and Poetics and Practice-the collection reveals, at last, just how much is really going on in Goldblatt's work when we see it in its wholeness.In the excellent new introductory chapter, Goldblatt shows us how he's been thinking of his tripartite work all these years, straddling university writing programs and literature departments, community literacy settings, and the poetry community.Goldblatt loosens literacy and literature from their disciplinary forms and reframes them, so that "literacy" denotes reading and writing in the world, and "literature" means reading and writing for art's sake.Then he argues that this reframing allows us to make our way around and through their politicized institutional histories.While we in composition have often lamented our precarity and lesser status in relation to literary study, Goldblatt shows us how to respect our own grounding in our peculiar intersection of college writing, English literature, and English education.But what Goldblatt also achieves-without stating as his aim-is a tender embrace of the varying stances, and dare I say open conflicts, within composition itself.He extols Aja Martinez's work drawing on Critical Race Theory, for instance, seeing a kindred spirit in the conviction that "argumentation divorced from accounts of lived experience too easily leaves oppressive structures in place" (7).He brings this newer critical work into conversation with the earlier energies of the social turn, especially the "often . . .

Because algorithms form the audiences that reach us online, students need algorithmic literacy as well as rhetorical awareness when learning to write online. This article examines student writing to explore how students can use theorycrafting to systematically test an algorithm to gain more critical awareness of how the algorithm functions and forms publics online. Finally, this article explores how students can use the algorithmic knowledge they learned from theorycrafting to reflect on the ethics their algorithm constructs for users and how it constructs ad hoc publics. The article then explores how students can create multimodal intersectional counternarratives in response that they can also more effectively circulate online to more deliberately construct inclusive online publics.

This essay reconsiders the role of the “self-sponsored” writer in the attention economy by suggesting that contemporary do-it-yourself publishers have not only attempted to negotiate a public sphere which has linked "self-sponsored" to "entrepreneurial," but contend with a digital environment that makes it difficult to parse authorial desire from neoliberal rationality. Ultimately, this essay suggests that materialist models of circulation should be accounted for in studies of extracurricular literacies, specifically by drawing from the literacy narratives of public writers such as zine authors. It thus provides a method of analysis for understanding how these writers, who must necessarily exist within a broader political economy, have developed publishing strategies to negotiate an alternative position — a stance which can benefit not only our disciplinary research on literacy and public writing, but our publicly-oriented composition classrooms as well.

This essay is one of a series on my mother’s late-age composing, studying a writing project she started at age 70 and worked on for more than 25 years. Her intention was to integrate extensive reading, personal experience, and cultural observations to explain changes in parenting (and, by extension, education and enculturation of the next generation) from her childhood in the 1920s through the 2000s.When she died at 97, she left behind a 75-page draft, but was unable to complete her plans for revisions and an ending. I focus here on identifying the multiple factors in the ecology of her aging literacy that interacted to interrupt, slow down, and ultimately prevent her from finishing the essay. By studying her artifacts and documenting stresses on her literacy system (defined as body/mind/environment), I constructed timelines for her aging literacy and composing, expressed in visualizations. These demonstrate a pattern of persistence and resilience, “bouncing back” from setbacks, but at progressively lower levels until she reaches the limits of her literacy system in late old age.

Researchers use a variety of oral methods to include the knowledge and perspectives of historically underrepresented communities in their explorations of writing and literacy studies, and these methods are vital to more accurate understandings of the breadth of how literacy functions in societies. However, simultaneous to this important work of recording new oral histories, interviews, and videos is an overwhelming reliance on written sources in the Works Cited sections of these pursuits. In this article, I argue that recording new oral forms of information without citing oral sources perpetuates connections between written text as an authoritative source of evidence for the past and oral sources with the present. I share the low frequency with which authors in writing and literacy journals include oral history in their Works Cited sections and explore possible reasons for and consequences of a near-complete reliance on written sources. I conduct a close reading of an oral history donated by a woman named Jazz to emphasize its relevance to writing and literacy studies as a primary source. I end by suggesting that more intentional citation of oral sources contributes to ongoing efforts of inclusion in academic research, writing, and publishing. 

Precarious Citizenship: Ambivalence, Literacy and Prisoner Reentry examines the role of literacy in the experiences of formerly incarcerated people as they navigate the process of reentry into mainstream citizenry. I argue that the unsustainability of mass incarceration has created uncertainty about the place of formerly incarcerated people in the democratic imaginary, opening for debate who deserves to participate in civic life. In response, higher education is increasingly being called upon to address the precarious citizenship of formerly incarcerated people and, I argue, serves to credential formerly incarcerated people not only for future employment but for inclusion in social life. The literacy narratives these individuals tell, however, are marked by an ambivalence toward the power of literacy as a mechanism for inclusion, as well as an ambivalence toward mainstream inclusion itself.

In this article, I develop a conceptual framework, informed by “circles of kinship and friendship,” that contributes to my understanding of how close-knit ties to family, friends, and community in the context of disruptive migratory processes influence the selection, ebb and flow of women’s investments in language and literacy acquisition later in life. I pay close attention to the role of kinscripts in women’s literacy development. As a familiar concept within sociological studies of the family (Stack and Burton) and intergenerational literacy research (Gadsen), kinscripts is helpful in examining how family members navigate the life course across multiple generations, especially as their interactions are shaped by value systems and related behaviors patterned over their lifetime. Put to use as a verb, I consider how literacies kinscripted in earlier stages of life are in tension with resettlement imperatives experienced later in life, as social roles within the family are called into question by migration processes. Over the course of lives spanning refugee migrations, I illustrate how scripted family relationships that influenced women’s literacy investments earlier in life, shift toward non-biologically linked, intergenerational friendships later in life, rearticulating literate lives in critical solidarities around literacies that had not been made possible prior to resettlement.  

How can it be possible for disempowerment to be mistaken for empowerment?Isn't the dichotomy between the two abundantly clear?Erec Smith thinks not.Smith's ethos as a Black professor of rhetoric and composition places him in a unique position to critique anti-racist pedagogy.It is not his perspective that racism is not present in the academy: far from it.He has been the recipient of prejudice and discrimination from his graduate work all the way to his teaching.In his book, Smith includes personal experiences and anecdotes that help to illustrate his perspective.As a Black rhetoric and composition instructor in the majority White institution of York College of Pennsylvania, Smith has experienced these issues firsthand and has found that anti-racist pedagogy alone, which he argues can lead to a lack of academic rigor, is not necessarily the appropriate answer.Smith's main argument is that anti-racist pedagogy in rhetoric and composition often inadvertently disempowers students by ignoring important aspects of empowerment theory.This pedagogy instead encourages marginalized students to embrace their positionalities as the center of all arguments and to fall back into positions of victimhood.Smith explains that this "victim framing" creates "disempowered entities in need of enlightenment instead of empowered agents with selfefficacy and a desire to broaden the interactional and behavioral components of empowerment" (88).This victimhood allows students to escape from proper academic scrutiny which, in turn, reduces academic rigor.In his introduction, Smith begins his critique with a vignette in which W. E. B. Du Bois recounts an experience in a composition class at Harvard.In his first essay for that class, Du Bois had railed against racist issues present in society at the time and had let fly his own colloquial grammar and syntax.This first effort was met with a failing grade.From this experience, Du Bois noted, "[he] realized that while style is subordinate to content, and that no real literature can be composed simply of meticulous and fastidious phrases, nevertheless solid content with literary style carries a message further than poor grammar and muddled syntax" (Smith xix).Du Bois realized it was imperative to adapt to "standard English, " or what Smith prefers to call the "language of wider communication" (LWC) (5), rather than insist on communicating in the vernacular he grew up speaking.Using Du Bois as an example of code switching, Smith addresses the present climate of code meshing taught in many quarters of the rhetoric and composition field.According to scholars like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Asao Inoue, and others, rhetoric and composition instructors who require their students of color to adapt to the LWC engage in a form of racism because this adaptation automatically alienates students' home dialects.As such, they propose that students in rhetoric and composition should be encouraged to inject their writing with African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as well as other dialect forms.In writing and speaking this way, anti-racist scholars argue, students embrace

This issue centers the stories of people who (re)define what meaningful literacy practices are from such positions as an aging mother, women refugees, a returning student, and formerly incarcerated people.These articles explore how literacy practices shift and change over the life course and across contexts in ways that ask us to reorient our own understanding of the relationship between literate subjects and the knowledge they produce.In this issue's lead article, "Bouncing Back: Resilience and Its Limits in Late-Age Composing, " Louise Wetherbee Phelps undertakes the study and analysis of an unpublished body of lifespan writing by her late mother, Virginia Wetherbee, as part of her own contribution to retrospective lifespan studies and "literacy lives in relation" (2).Phelps begins by asking how to undertake the daunting task of a project that has challenged her in multiple ways: "challenges of methodof genre of grief, responsibility, and learning under the condition and unpredictable trajectory of [her] own aging" (ibid).One of the sayings Phelps inherited from Wetherbee, "proceed as way opens, " provides a framework for a series of articles in which Phelps considers the intersections of longitudinal and lifespan studies, late-age literacies, cross-generational literacies, slow composing, and ecosystemic and chronotopic approaches to literacy.In this article, Phelps charts the relationship between her own composing project on parenting and her aging literacy in figures that visualize a pattern of moments of disruption and resilience that Phelps terms "bouncing back." Ultimately, Phelps reminds us that our understanding of the intersections of literacy and aging are, to quote an embroidered saying that Wetherbee passed on to her and that hangs by her desk, "It's not as simple as you think."Katie Silvester examines how women refugees living in "protracted displacement" (39), or "decades-long displacement and massive refugee resettlement process" (ibid), use dialogue, narrative, and re-story to offer perspectives on literacy learning across their lifespans.In "At the 'Ends of Kinship': Women Re(kin)figuring Literacy Practices in Protracted Displacement, " Silvester draws from an ethnographic study of women's literacy learning experiences in the Bhutanese refugees resettlement process and considers the relationality they take up as they negotiate various people, places, and contexts.Specifically, she elaborates on "the ends of kinship" (40), which she defines as "a dialogic space of negotiating relational ties that have become stretched and transformed by localglobal forces" (ibid).This dialogic space allows women to "kin-script and (kin)figure their own ideas about and practices of literacy in relation to kin and friends as these relational ties stretch, contract, and become transformed throughout a protracted displacement and ongoing resettlement process" (42).In the process of kinship, friendship, and woman-centered community, these women were able to redefine their literate subjectivities, relationships, and practices through grounded, embodied, and imaginal means.Silverster argues for a dynamic methodological and theoretical approach to better understand adult literacy learning in migration through "the tensions and contradictions of everyday living in relation to others over time" (46).Maggie Shelledy's "Precarious Citizenship: Ambivalence, Literacy, and Prisoner Reentry" uses case studies to explore "the literacy myths that surround higher education in prison" by foregrounding formerly incarcerated people's experiences with and the effects of their participation

Even as education is always a high-stakes endeavor, the stakes of prison education contexts are even higher. Given the ongoing violences of surveillance, censorship, and obfuscation in prisons, these environments are neither conducive to literacy practices nor do they support the flourishing of human life or growth. Simultaneously, however, prison educators working with incarcerated students navigate and push back against these oppressions to support students learning in everyday contexts. In exploring these tensions through qualitative research, I argue that prison educators mobilize complex and highly situated literacy practices to subtly and quietly bend the rules in carceral environments. In deploying subversive acts of “creative maladjustment” (King Jr., Kohl), these instructors circumnavigate state power to sustain educational commitments to incarcerated students in the face of state violence. Through such explorations, I contend that literacy educators can better comprehend what it means to resist the state: for research, praxis, and survival.

Although literacy narratives have been a popular assignment in college composition classrooms, the role of context and interaction in students’ writing and understanding of literacy is one of the least explored areas. This article reports the findings of a qualitative case study conducted in a regular first year composition class (English 101) of a public research university in the Southwest. The data is comprised of fifteen literacy narratives accompanied by reflective letters written by a group of English monolingual and bi- and multilingual students; transcripts of nine personal interviews; and twelve one-on-one conferences that were coded and analyzed using a combination of inductive, deductive, and literal or verbatim coding methods mostly informed by grounded theory. The findings show that a literacy narrative assignment in college writing can foster a complex understanding of literacies among student writers. When we adopt a translingual orientation to literacy, encourage cross-cultural conversations through various collaborative activities and diverse readings, and emphasize the role of little narratives to resist the master narrative of literacy, both English monolingual and bi- and multilingual students mutually enrich their understanding of literacies. In this process, the writing classroom becomes borderland and the instructor and students become border crossers.

This paper seeks to offer a constructive critique of the idea that in order to align US writing instruction with the learning needs of a globalized, linguistically diverse population, writing studies should challenge the notion that the English language needs to play a central role in college composition courses. I point out rhetorical and pedagogical fallacies in a language rights discourse that warns against “ceding rhetorical ground to monolingual ideologies” (Flowers 33) by affirming writing studies’ commitment to ensuring access to English while promoting linguistic diversity within writing instruction. I then discuss a translingual writing program I started at a Hispanic Serving Institution that links ESL and Spanish writing courses within a learning community. I discuss how the implementation of this program relied on finding a common ground with “English only” ideology and show how this program disrupted “unilateral monolingualism” (Horner and Trimbur 595), in spite of the fact that it foregrounded the need to facilitate English academic literacy acquisition.

Failure is a significant issue for researchers conducting community-engaged work. This article responds to calls to share research failures more transparently and to create reflective spaces for students to examine moments of failure. We offer our experience adapting three problem-solving strategies from a community literacy course (adaptive problem-solving, rivaling, and critical incident interviewing) to help each other revisit our own “failed” attempts at community-engaged work. By applying these problem-solving strategies to reflect on our experiences—advocating for graduate student parents, working with a summer literacy program, and collaborating with parents of disabled children—we show how these strategies can transform an initial sense of stigmatized failure into a longer process of inquiry and growth. Our approach, we believe, represents an important literate practice for community-based scholars, not only for those seeking to create more collaborative reflective space within university-community partnership, but also for novice scholars navigating the challenges of community-engaged work for the first time.

he first class I ever took as an undergrad with Dr. Mara Holt was titled "Women's Rhetorics. " I barely knew what rhetorics were (testing out of first-year composition via the AP exam was a mixed blessing for someone who became an English major), and I certainly didn't know what the word "pedagogy" meant. The first readings in Dr. Holt's course-Nancy Schniedewind's "Teaching Feminist Process" and Carolyn Shrewsbury's "What Is Feminist Pedagogy"-left me a little blindsided. Not only did both address concepts that felt above my understanding, but what I could make out focused on teachingsomething that seemed, from my inadequate understanding, as distinct from the focus of the class. (The teacher might be interested in articles like these, I thought, but why would the students be?) This reaction is the almost textbook response of a student who had, until then, been inculcated in the traditional power dynamics of a teacher-focused educational system. Only gradually would I come to understand how different, and important, it was that Dr. Holt was making clear her own pedagogical influences and opening these up for discussion.

With this issue, we welcome you to nearly a decade of Literacy in Composition Studies!We plan to recount and honor the work that has brought us this far in our spring issue, but for now we are delighted to welcome Al Harahap to our Editorial Team, as well as to express our appreciation to Kara Poe Alexander for stepping into the role of Submissions Editor.We send our heartfelt thanks to Chris Warnick for his ten years (so far!) of partnership with LiCS and wish him productivity and rest on

Because bisexuality, even within queer spaces, is often made invisible and erased, here I argue that bisexual literacy practices are also often similarly invisible and erased. Additionally, I ask that we consider bisexual survival and literacy in terms of age and sexual fluidity. Creating space for people to identify as queer throughout their lives—and to recognize sexual fluidity as an embodied literacy practice that challenges normativity—is, I argue, also necessary for survival. Yet as I tried to read myself queer later in life, the literacy practices that had once sustained me were no longer life-affirming. When even queer texts fail to sustain us, what options do we have for survival? How do we teach, how do we live, when we know that literacy and composition practices are often simultaneously a means of both survival and risk? In this essay, I interrogate how bisexual and later-in-life literacies challenge normative reading practices and contribute to queer literacies and possibilities for survival. I argue that we need more possibilities for bisexual and later-in-life reading and writing practices, both to affirm who we are and to help navigate the binaries that insist we deny part of our identities.

This article explicates trade as a fierce literacy by critically engaging with literacy narratives of Black queer people who meet with heterosexual men for sexual encounters. I focus on the “trade” knowledges and ways of knowing of Black gay men and transwomen at Harlem Pride 2017. Informed by the literacy work of Eric Darnell Pritchard, I argue that the participants deliberately engaged in corrective literacy practices that speak back to dominant sexual pathologies about straight Black men (and men in general). It is this ability to read and share against dominant scripts that I see as a fierce literacy. Their responses and narratives complicate heteronormative understandings of sexuality based on orientation. Trade is a term used in the larger gay culture that has existed since the late 1800s (predating down low, which I touch on below) but has particular traction in the Black queer community. Building on the works of other scholars (Johnson “Snap!”; McCune; Bailey), I found that my participants’ responses were in line with a larger discussion in the Black queer community about straight Black men who engage in queer sexual acts. Specifically, the participants told stories or literacy narratives to offer a queer-counter narrative, or an on-the-spot oppositional read of heterosexual men and heterosexuality more largely. I critically engage three ideas: (1) trade as a literacy, (2) “the truth about straight men,” and (3) “sex is more than tops and bottoms.”

The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine & Resistance is a critical contribution to the field of rhetoric and composition. Chvez's book demonstrates queer coalitional work as it examines heteronormative cistems of oppression that have disempowered and marginalized migrant bodies and folks of color since the early AIDS epidemic. 1 However, before engaging with Chvez's work, it is important to note that Ryan Mitchell, Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College, has also written a review about this book. In his review, Mitchell provides a strong account about the parallels to current events, as well as articulating Chvez's ability to add to archival histories by "shifting focus from the work accomplished by mostly white, mostly middle class, cosmopolitan AIDS activist groups . . . . [and] draw[ing] from queer of color, migrant, and feminist traditions to recover an alternative history of AIDS, one that is attuned to how the epidemic affected (and continues to affect) those on the borders of civic and national belonging. " As Mitchell illuminates, Chvez's work adds to archival work by amplifying a historical perspective that captures racialized migrant bodies and moves away from centering White bodies, organizations, and perspectives. Building from Mitchell, I also see this book queering heteronormative institutionalized cistems of oppression to signify white supremacy's dominance and its violence against marginalized, disempowered, and ignored bodies. 2 As my review suggests, this text argumentatively informs readers about perspectives, identities, and literacies that are not often discussed in dominant heteronormative educational and archival scholarship.

This essay, in three parts plus a conclusion, is a performance of US third world feminist praxis for our contemporary moment. Part one is a literacy narrative that resists generic convention. Part two uses conventions of academic writing to explore the damage that is happening to the field of composition and rhetoric due to the academic erasure of US third world feminist praxis. Part three is a gift. The conclusion is a manifesto to end the economic exploitation of students and teachers in our first-year writing classrooms. The sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

Although much scholarship on community-engaged pedagogies attends to student negotiations of difference, little attention has been paid to how instructors navigate difference, particularly racial difference, across classroom and community spaces. In this article, we use the concept of brokering to examine how seven different instructors of a community-engaged writing course titled “The Literacy Narratives of Black Columbus” imagined the racialized spaces of the course and facilitated engagement between students and community members in those spaces. Drawing primarily on instructor interviews, we present three approaches instructors took to imagine and facilitate student and community engagement across racialized and spatialized boundaries. We found that instructor positionality influenced how they imagined and negotiated the roles of brokers who could facilitate connections between students and community members as well as provide students with cultural knowledge necessary for navigating the course’s racialized spaces. Ultimately, we argue that instructors, particularly in predominantly white institutions, must carefully consider race, space, place, and their own positionalities when planning and implementing community-engaged pedagogies.

In this article, we explore how the concept of wayfinding allows us an opportunity to map post-collegiate writers’ complex and recursive movement in and out of different territories, realms, spaces, and spheres of writing ecologies.  Focusing specifically on accounts from seven alumni who participated in focus group interviews during 2018-19, we offer stories of writers’ navigating the transition from college to workforce. Using wayfinding as our theoretical lens, we pay attention to the ways in which these writers articulate their increasing understanding of these domains -- college and post-college -- as far from separate. Such examples show us how alumni “find their way,” and introduce three emergent themes in our ongoing analysis of wayfinding. Our participants describe their ongoing and developing journeys as writers: (1) encountering the unexpected, (2) navigating career plans and paths, and (3) seeing beyond the boundaries of writing contexts. In each case, we narrate how wayfinding helps us illuminate the complex dynamics at play as these writers’ continue to explore how writing is meaningful in their lives and across multiple contexts.

020 was an unprecedented year for the entire world but more so for the US, where COVID-19 killed far more people than in any other country and caused widespread unemployment, food insecurity, and homelessness. What is more striking is the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on minority, immigrant, and low-income populations. These disparities question the notion of post-racial America and call for a long and difficult journey toward social justice. Moreover, 2020 will also be remembered as a year of inflammatory political rhetorics, extreme polarization, and racial tensions. Recurrent deaths of Black people at the hands of law enforcement resulted in protests and riots across the country. Published during such tumultuous times, April Baker-Bell's 2020 monograph, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, shows how language and racism are intertwined, makes a strong case against the anti-Black linguistic racism affecting millions of lives both inside and outside the classroom, and offers an Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy as a way to deal with linguistic injustice. Throughout the book Baker-Bell introduces Black Language Artifacts as a part of the antiracist pedagogy where Black experience and Black culture are used as a resource for learning. Bringing together theory, history, culture, pedagogy and activism, Baker-Bell aligns with the mission of social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and calls for action to create classrooms where Black students' linguistic and cultural resources are valued and imagines a world without anti-blackness, where another George Floyd doesn't get killed despite his repeated plea-"I cannot breathe"-in "Standardized American English. "

beginning of a new chapter in composition studies,

The roots of the once "new literacy studies" lay in the 1960s and spread in the 1970s and 1980s. By the early 2000s they were ascendant, with new journals like Literacy in Composition Studies and significant presence in journals, book publications, conference sessions, and course catalogues. The transformation of our understanding of literacy remains far from complete, and fundamental lessons remain to be learned.

In Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines and Academic Literacies, researchers have produced compelling evidence of the disjunction between faculty members’ assertions that good writing is universal—i.e., the autonomous model of literacy—and faculty’s own tacit practice of discipline-specific conventions. In studies of race and language in education, scholars have identified disconnections between what teachers profess to value—e.g., students’ right to their own language—and how they actually grade. Contradictions are a natural part of any ideology, and these are commonly understood to demonstrate the resilience of the autonomous model. In this article, however, I introduce a set of theoretical tools from the sociology of scientific knowledge—namely, the concept of interpretative repertoires and of variability in participants’ interpretations as an analytic resource—that can reveal cracks in the autonomous model. Although these tools are over thirty years old, they have not circulated widely in literacy and composition studies. I apply the tools to text-based interviews with two faculty writers who had espoused universal “rules” for writing. After identifying apparent disconnections between the rules and their own practices or those of other writers with whom they worked, I present this evidence to them and analyze their explanations: They maintain that the rules still apply, but their accounts are complex, shifting, and self-contradictory. These case studies reveal, rather than its strength, the inherent instability of the autonomous model. Ultimately, I hope that these research tools can, in conjunction with systemic efforts, aid in dismantling the construct of “good writing” and its inherent privileging of white language practices.

This paper examines three students’ multimodal composition experiences in Basic Writing where conceptions of literacy interacted with moments related to transfer across media. Extending Brian V. Street’s work on literacy and Rebecca S. Nowacek’s transfer theory to multimodal composition through video, we use analysis of ethnographic data to conclude that for some students, video facilitated both a robust conception of literacy as ideological and transfer across media. For others, external forces inhibited opportunities for transfer and reinforced a conception of literacy as autonomous. We close reflecting on how we might more usefully scaffold student learning for transfer and more complex conceptions of literacy.