This article argues that traditional models of WAC too narrowly privilege academic discourse over other discourses and communities shaping the worlds in which our students live and work. Writing Across Communities represents a shift in paradigm informed by Ecocomposition, New Literacy Studies, and Sociolinguistics. A Writing Across Communities approach to writing program reform foregrounds dimensions of ethnolinguistic diversity and civic engagement in contrast to other models or WAC currently institutionalized across the nation. Writing Across Communities, as a resistance discourse, calls for transdisciplinary dialogue that demystifies the ways we make and use knowledge across communities of practice.

Review of four books including: Todd DeStigter. Reflections of a Citizen Teacher: Literacy, Democracy and the Forgotten Students of Addison High. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2001. Mark Lyons and August Tarrier, eds. Espejos Y Ventanas/Mirrors and Windows. Philadelphia: New City Community Press, 2004. Lena Sze, ed. Chinatown Lives: Oral Histories from Philadelphia's Chinatown. Philadelphia: New City Community Press, 2004. Mark Salzman. True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall. New York: Vintage Books, 2003.

In this essay, I explore the institutional and intellectual resources necessary to develop, revise, and sustain an outreach initiative involving new media composing with community organizations. A retrospective analysis of one course central to this initiative will be offered to illustrate what I term a praxis of new media. A praxis of new media unfolds at the intersection of critical, digital, and community literacies in order to produce transformative knowledge products with all stakeholders. I argue that particular alignments of material and intellectual resources must be in place if such community literacy projects are to sustain the capacity building of stakeholders.

This article reflects upon four years of exploring Augusto Boal’s Image and Forum Theatre techniques in prisons for youth in upstate New York with young men aged 1420. These practices work for prisoners by respecting the “literacy” of survival inside prison and by putting prisoners in control of making meaning with their bodies. Examples show the “embodied knowledge” of prisoners as the basis for collaborative, critical deliberations by prisoner communities who use it to re-envision conflict. The “well-contested” site of the body and the definition of “respect” by prisoners are keynotes to this work.

During the spring of 2003, I made three trips to the New Jersey State Prison to observe and participate in the prison literacy program run by the grassroots humanities group “People and Stories.” In the course of these visits, I bore witness to the power of short stories in bringing forth the emotions and personal responses of what is likely New Jersey’s most emotionally repressed population. Gradually, the stereotypes and fears I held about prisoners began to dissolve as the time spent with these men revealed their deep humanity.

Editors’ Note: This photo essay, created by an undergraduate student at Howard University enrolled in a service learning class taught by Arvilla Payne-Johnson, preserves and documents the graffiti at the now closed Washington D.C. area Lorton Prison. The essay highlights a genre of hidden literacies claimed by inmates even in spaces of vast power differentials and exaggerated social control. We suggest that readers inspired by this project to pursue similar work also consult Jeff Ferrell’s Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality (NY: Garland, 1993), Ralph Cintron’s Angels’ Town : Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of Everyday, and Pete Vandenberg et al.’s “Confronting Clashing Discourses: Writing the Space between Classroom and Community” in Reflections 2.2 (Spring 2002): 19-39.

This article explores a unique approach to becoming literate about prisons ––through a dialogical exchange between individuals on both sides of the wall. The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program offers a semester-long course through which college students and incarcerated men or women attend class together weekly inside a local correctional facility. Pivotal to this pedagogy is the power and reciprocity of the exchange between the “inside” and “outside” students. The depth of discussion involved, the collaborative nature of the engagement, and the consideration of the issues (literally from the inside, out)––together encompass an approach to learning that changes lives.

The critical lenses provided by the author’s framing of the domains of charity, civic engagement and social action highlight the assumptions and implications of different service-learning models. Classroom practices and writing assignments are interrogated for their affinity with each of the domains and their inherent power to shape students’ reading of the world.

This article examines the implications of service-learning educators’ commitments to community literacy for professional development in higher education. It places stories of professional development in composition studies within the context of community literacy needs and of broader debates about tenure and promotion practices. The article proposes a set of questions that challenge compositionists to draw on community-based work to redefine professional development in rhetoric and composition studies.

This essay explores the many benefits of adding a community-based writing component to the first year composition course. It looks closely at the self-selected projects of 25 freshmen at a large suburban university to show how service-learning creates a context in which students can gain greater control over their own literacy and learn more about self and others.

This article investigates the successes and failures of an upper-level service-learning composition course on the theme of “literacies” in order to uncover the particular challenges of engaging in community-based critical teaching in a faith-based institution. It identifies a religiously grounded form of noblesse oblige revealed in students’ literacy autobiographies and proposes pedagogical interventions to engage students in considering their own and their institutions’ ideological assumptions about literacy and service.

In the service-learning writing courses I teach at Wright State University, my academic goals seem simple. I want my students to improve their writing skills and to develop civic literacy. The special challenge of achieving these objectives begins to come into focus in defining civic literacy. In my courses, I define it as having the ability to critically examine the complex social situations that create and perpetuate needs in our communities and an awareness of our responsibility as literate individuals to address those needs.