This article explores the intersections of queer subjectivity, community storytelling, and recovery literacy through the digital storytelling project, Voices from Rock Bottom (VFRB). Drawing on feminist and queer theoretical frameworks, including queerstory of recovery (Bacibianco) and the concept of rhetorical velocity (DeVoss and Ridolfo), this research highlights how VFRB creates an inclusive multimodal platform for recovering alcoholics and addicts to share their stories beyond the privatized, hegemonic spaces of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). This article argues that VFRB’s feminist construct creates a civic space where queer recovering alcoholics and addicts can resist institutionalized constraints, perform their stories, and engage in collective knowledge-making. Ultimately, this study advocates for a broader understanding of recovery storytelling as a communal act of dissent that empowers queer individuals to challenge hegemonic frameworks and offer new ways of knowing, being, and narrating recovery experiences in the public sphere, through what the author terms as “queerstory of recovery.” Keywords: Voices from Rock Bottom, queerstory of recovery, recovery literacy, queer subjectivity, queerstory, queer rhetoric, recovery rhetoric

The rise of mass incarceration since the 1970s in the United States and the many ways that prisons touch our lives have positioned prisons as inevitable—even essential–-institutions (e.g., Davis, 2003). Prison abolitionists challenge this norm by offering alternatives that do not rely on prisons to solve social problems and address violence. Drawing from a collection of over 500 letters from the LGBT Books to Prisoners archive, we examine the many ways that abolitionist literacy practices contribute to envisioning this future. The literacy practices of the incarcerated letter writers, we argue, challenge the ways that incarcerated people are meant to engage and what they are meant to know, allowing for the building of new immaterial and material worlds. These queer immaterial worlds are the textual worlds where queer lives, experiences, and desires exist within the prison system; they are often ephemeral, leaving ghost-like traces as people navigate both the affirming and community-building role of literacy practices in prison, as well as the dangers associated with those same practices. The imaginative practice that these letter writers engage in is essential to the broader work that envisions a more abolitionist future. As acts of worldmaking, these literacy practices have much to teach us about what it means to imagine an abolitionist future, and to practice worldmaking in a world of impossibility.

Scottish Gaelic, an endangered language, has attracted small pockets of learners in the U.S. This essay explores the complicated, contradictory, and affective reasons Scottish Gaelic learners in the US take up their learning practices, examining the love stories at the heart of learner’s accounts of learning activity. The author argues that cultural and community-based love stories have much to teach community literacy scholars as they help us to understand the deeply emotional bonds language learners build within the linguistic communities they seek to join. These stories traffic in the concept of the “New Gael” (Dunmore, 2025) a product of Gaelic diaspora, a figure that provides a road map for countering the effects of historical erasures in the U.S. as it foregrounds the post-vernacular and translingual realities of Indigenous language revitalization within global movements for cultural and linguistic sovereignty.

Drawing on their embodied experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing a student-founded, student-led community literacy program, this article foregrounds queercrip embodied experiences to reinterpret normative notions of failure in community literacy programs. Using our own experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing the community literacy program, queer and disability theory, and community literacy studies scholarship, the authors unpack their own stories of failure and argue, through queercrip readings of that failure, that failure should be seen as generative, as relational, and as bound by institutional perspective.

Compositionists are committed to social justice in classrooms, in academia, and in our communities, but we must also respond creatively and strategically to the structural consequences of precarity capitalism, even more urgently so in the wake of Covid-19. Precarity has shaped both composition studies’ and community literacy’s histories, and compositionists have often had little choice but to develop entrepreneurial responses to austere conditions. In this article, we advocate owning up to this history so that we can more intentionally direct entrepreneurial practices toward social justice, noting that people across numerous communities have worked along these lines for some time. Justice-oriented entrepreneurship is especially relevant for community literacy practitioners. To contextualize this argument, we examine how scholars in community literacy and technical and professional communication have conceptualized entrepreneurship as an analytically useful frame and/or employed entrepreneurial practices themselves. We then unpack the work and values of justice entrepreneurship, highlighting traditions of communalist Black entrepreneurs who have fought for economic and political self-determination. Next, we offer a model of justice entrepreneurship practiced by Youth Enrichment Services, a Pittsburgh-based non-profit that has demonstrated community-responsive, entrepreneurial flexibility in confronting Covid. We conclude by considering the future of justice entrepreneurship in a society simultaneously trending toward further crises of precarity and, contradictorily, new opportunities for progressive experimentation.

This article details a flood-focused, community-based writing course that was derailed by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis to argue that despite major challenges, the course helped to prepare students to face some of the fear and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, offered them a space through weekly reflection responses to process their isolation, and positioned them to more capaciously empathize with community members who had lived through the trauma of persistent, catastrophic flooding. The stunted community-based learning course still allowed students to contribute to the work of the community partner and offered unexpected chances for students to process their own trauma. By the end of the semester, students emphasized the importance of community-based learning for cultivating the kinds of empathy and critical civic responsibility they felt would become necessities in a COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 world. We detail some of the important lessons of adapting the course to the COVID-19 crisis and suggest pathways for other faculty and community partners to build flexible, long-term collaborations that can not only ride out traumatic interruptions but actually provide students with the equipment they need to navigate these challenges.

The COVID-19 outbreak impacted regional Australia in ways yet to be measured; for many of the country’s regions, the pandemic immediately followed natural disasters including droughts and bushfires. In such affected regional communities, activities such as writing offer opportunities for pleasure, engagement, and connectedness. Yet the restrictions developed in response to COVID-19, such as the need to move traditionally face-to-face learning online, significantly disrupted the usual way of undertaking these activities. For the New England Writers Centre (NEWC), a productive community writing organisation operating in the North Western part of the state of New South Wales in Australia. These restrictions required both quick responses and more long-term consideration of the ways writing instruction is delivered to the community it serves. This profile provides an example of a community-based writing project, an online course in writing historical fiction, developed in response to COVID-19 restrictions. The profile offers three distinct perspectives on the course: Chair of the New England Writers Centre, Sophie Masson, gives an overview of the Centre’s role in the region, the effect of the pivot to online teaching on the centre’s programming, and the initial learnings that impact the centre; online workshop facilitator Ariella Van Luyn provides an overview of the pedagogical design principles and learning objectives underpinning the design of the course and her observations of participant engagement; and NEWC program director and workshop participant Lynette Aspey reflects on her experiences learning online. Together, these three perspectives offer initial findings about online community writing instruction useful to other regional writing organisations.

In a sociopolitical context that continues to constrain reproductive agency, many organizations, media, and people construct pregnant or mothering teenagers as “things that are other than it should be” and many young mothers report being talked to as if they were a defect that must be addressed. People who experience dominant discourses of “teenage pregnancy prevention” are prompted to immediately respond to the rhetorical exigence of pregnant and parenting teen bodies. When visibly young pregnant or parenting people venture into public, they face an unpredictable and potentially hostile rhetorical arena. In this article, I reflect on a community-based workshop I facilitated in Boston from 2015-2019 at an annual one-day event for young parents called the Summit for Teen Empowerment and Parenting Success. Drawing on feminist rhetorical theories of interruption tactics, this workshop prepares young pregnant and parenting people with researched information and scripted responses they can use to interrupt and transform everyday moments in public places when strangers read their bodies as problems to criticize or loudly bemoan. However, findings from the surveys circulated at the 2019 workshop indicate that what participants value most about this experience is the opportunity to share and relate to one another’s experiences of reproductive injustice. This article offers feminist rhetoricians, community literacy scholars, and other scholar-activists an approach to sharing research findings and facilitating discussion in a useful way with those who embody exigences of reproductive justice.

Since its inception in 2000, Reflections has functioned as a site of synthesis for community-based writing pedagogy, service-learning, public rhetoric, and community-engaged research. Such a diverse range of influences leads to the formation of a journal that is ever shifting in its identity, scope, and mission. This complexity is what ultimately defines Reflections: a publication that constantly pushes the boundaries of knowledge creation and strives to remain receptive to topics and voices that are often excluded from other academic sources. The following collaborative article offers a content analysis of all publications in Reflections’ twenty-year history (2000-2020). Though not exhaustive, this analysis highlights unique aspects of the journal’s history, methods, non-traditional genres, pedagogical and disciplinary impact, and evolving interactions with power and privilege that have made it the public conscience for Writing Studies.

This article is an experimental collaboration that blends qualitative data, archival research, and rhetorical theory with autoethnographic writing. Utilizing Jenny Edbauer’s (2005) conceptualization of rhetorical ecologies, we engage strategic contemplation and critical imagination (Royster and Kirsch 2012) to explore Reflections’ past, present, and future rhetorical landscapes. We designed, distributed, coded, and analyzed a fifteen-item questionnaire to discover the journal’s readership demographics, its archival contents, and its reverberating effects/affects on issues of public rhetoric, civic writing, service learning, and community literacy. We identified four themes—inclusivity, advocacy, pedagogy, and discovery—as the most salient features of Reflections’ twenty-year legacy. Amplifying our participants’ voices, we discuss the ways in which these four themes work to cultivate an affirming space of theoretical inquiry and ethical intervention—a networked community of mutual reciprocity that continues to transform the field of rhetorical studies today. Altogether, this article offers unique insight into Reflections’ rhetorical ecology, including its professional legacy and the ways in which the journal has innovated the genre of writing scholarship.

The unique perspective that adult learners have on writing and its instruction in low or no-cost education programs offers valuable information to both instructors of written components in these courses and to scholars exploring how writing in adult education functions as community literacy. After conducting interviews with instructors and students at six adult education programs, I identify significant tensions between the ways that instructors perceive their students to experience writing and the ways students describe their own writing experiences, particularly in the areas of process, enjoyment, and feedback. After situating low and no-cost adult education programs as sites of community literacy, I explore these tensions and propose that they contribute to and arise from instructors’ understanding that personal development through writing occurs with free-forms such as journaling, whereas students experience these benefits through prescriptive modes such as note-taking, rote copying, and dictation. I introduce a concept called the “curriculum of the self” to identify students’ use of prescriptive modes to enjoy and engage with writing, and I end by situating this concept in other tensions inherent to and ongoing in community literacy, including “turbulent flow” and sustainable practices of reciprocity.

The research in the area of community literacy has flourished along the lines of activist and curricular work. The field explores these lines in journals such as Reflections and Community Literacy Journal, a bi-annual conference The Conference on Community Writing, and with the formation of a non-profit professional society The Coalition of Community Writing. It has been nearly ten years since Ellen Cushman and Jeffrey T. Grabill published their special issue on “Writing Theories: Changing Communities” in Reflections. In the introduction, Cushman and Grabill called for attention to the use of “community,” especially in these activist and curricular areas, a question we wish to pursue further now.

This article celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Reflections Journal, as a premier publication in service learning, public writing, rhetoric, community literacy, and activism. The author applauds Reflections as a space that nurtures emerging voices and professional development, even prior to the printing of individual volumes and issues. In general, the author showcases four professional collaborations between doctoral students, early-career professionals, and/or more seasoned scholars that are demonstrated through and within select special issues in Reflections. More specifically, the author recalls successes and challenges of editorship when taking on the duties as a coeditor for an African American literacy special issue. The author highlights visible and mostly invisible editorial processes, reflects on the labor of editing submissions, and discusses high and low stakes editorial choices that impacted the final production of the special issue. The author makes the case that editing and editorial decisions may illuminate scholarly voices, show community engagement, and reify pre- and early-career professional development, which has been a twenty-year hallmark of Reflections.

I became Editor of Reflections in 2008, soon joined by Brian Bailie as a graduate intern in 2008 and, then, as an Associate Editor beginning in 2009. Just prior to this moment, Reflections had been transformed from a saddled-stapled publication for engaged dialogue to more formal academic journal binding with more extended articles. The move from an “informal” to a “formal” academic structure also echoed the emerging status of community partnership scholarship in the field. Increasingly, academic and community-based scholars were finding that interest in such work was expanding beyond the capability of traditional journals and series to publish. Reflections’ expansion was designed to meet that need and to provide it a formal “disciplinary” space. Indeed, this moment also marked the emergence of Community Literacy Journal. And it speaks to the ethos of community partnership work that, since that time, the two journals have fostered a collaborative ethos, both finding a home in the Coalition for Community Writing.

Reflections offers a plethora of stories, strategies, and applicable content for community-based writing projects as well as considerations for our pedagogy within institutional walls. In this piece, I, a first-time contributor, reflect on a few of my own endeavors in community-engaged work over the last decade alongside a reading of this journal and its continued impact on my pedagogy and research. Specifically, I discuss the value of community engagement efforts for graduate students developing as teachers and scholars in the discipline. Through this writing, I contribute to and build upon the ongoing knowledge-making practices at the heart of this journal.

Review of Community Literacies en Confianza By Steven Alvarez.

Common in higher education in prison (HEP) and writing studies research is the idea that writing and education are transformative for incarcerated populations. While we believe that both can be powerful tools for reflection and social change among people on the inside, the prevalence of such transformation narratives can contribute to stereotypical depictions or understandings of incarcerated people and their literacy practices. Drawing upon our experiences with the Education Justice Project (EJP), a college-in-prison program, this article argues for expanded recognition and study of literacy practices, genres, and prison education beyond those typically discussed in HEP and writing studies scholarship. In doing so, we draw on the work of Martinez (2017) to present four personal scenes of writing and education as counterstories that intervene in master narratives about how incarcerated students are transformed by literacy. This approach not only grounds our work in methodology that values the lived and experiential knowledge of marginalized people but also enables us to push back against stock stories of prison writing that might inadvertently stereotype incarcerated students. Through telling our stories in this article, we call on academics to join us in composing different stories about incarcerated students that honor the complexities of our multiple identities and literacy practices.

This article suggests that the framework of prison abolition in prison literacy studies should be developed through the relational potential of queer community literacy practices among incarcerated writers. To that end, the author presents findings from a critical discourse analysis of a newspaper by incarcerated LGBTQ+ writers. Three primary forms of audience address and rhetorical approach are identified, as well as the opportunities they offer to understand the risks and complexities of writing in prison. These differentiations in literacy practice highlight the necessity of building relationships among and between incarcerated LGBTQ+ people in prison literacy initiatives, and situate the conclusion that prison abolition’s demonstrated commitment to transformative social relations has a direct application to understanding and shaping prison literacy programming and practice.

Community writing partnerships between university and incarcerated students typically focus on developing critical reading and writing skills through shared assignments, peer review exchanges, and group discussion. This article examines a prison-university writing partnership between two semester-long yoga classes, one at a maximum-security women’s prison and one at a competitive university, that privileges building community over building academic skills. The yoga students shared reflective writing on yoga-related topics—from philosophy, to tips and modifications for poses, to personal experience—in a monthly newsletter called “The Om Exchange.” The sound of “om” in yoga symbolizes the universal “oneness” of all living beings. The purpose of the newsletter was two-fold: to support reflective writing for deeper engagement with class material and to connect with the larger yoga community beyond classroom walls. While the yoga students only met in person once, the newsletter enabled them to build a sangha, or a local community with shared values that offers members motivation, guidance, support, and accountability in practicing those values. I suggest that the intersections between contemplative practice and feminist rhetorical listening facilitated these students, who may appear distinct, in finding “oneness” with each other; with its focus on building community, this writing project affords visibility to the power of forming partnerships around explicit shared values through the lens of sangha, and offers transferable methods for more conventional community literacy projects. A contemplative approach fosters social and emotional learning, including civic and democratic values, that bridges institutions, cultures, and differences for a more equitable society. As one incarcerated yoga student reflected: “If what we do for the good inside these walls doesn’t reach beyond these walls, then what’s the point—[this partnership] is the point and a start.” Read more at https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/19Sp_KINE_1410-1_Yoga/.

Editors’ Note: With this interview, we inaugurate a regular feature of the journal focused on interviews and articles about community-based writing projects unaffiliated with higher education. Discovering the genesis, evolution, and meaningfulness of such projects illuminates theories and practices of writing as a potentially transformative social activity that fosters creativity, communication, equity, and justice. It broadens our understanding as researchers, teachers, writers, students, and community members about what, why, how, and to what end community-engaged writing provides a compelling ground for educational, social, cultural, and political dialogue, personal growth, and collective inquiry. We envisage rich descriptions and investigations of the phenomenon of the written word as a liberatory tool that helps realize individual potential and promotes democracy, equality, and inclusiveness. We are delighted to begin this series with an interview with New York Writers Coalition Founder and Director Aaron Zimmerman. A former co-chair of the Board of Directors of Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA), Zimmerman has been leading creative writing workshops using the AWA method since 1997. He has an MA in creative writing from City College, where he has also taught creative writing. His novel By the Time You Finish This Book You Might Be Dead (Spuyten Duyvil) was selected in 2003 by Poets and Writers as “new and noteworthy.” His fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The Brooklyn Rail, Georgetown Review, South Dakota Review, Jeopardy, and Mid-America Poetry Review.

With increased interest in community-engaged course design, instructors across the United States are looking for ways to encourage their students to become more connected with their local contexts and the larger communities surrounding their university’s walls. Moving beyond a “feel good” approach to making college courses more meaningful, I think it is crucial that educators recognize the need for explicitly anti-oppressive and anti-racist approaches to education in our world today. As anti-immigrant sentiments and white nationalist hate crimes surge in the United States alongside an explicit anti-Mexican rhetoric guiding policies with the current administration, there is a kairotic urgency to de-center whiteness in our curricula, to support community-based organizing in Latinx and other marginalized communities, and to recognize oppression within our own practices and institutions.

Scholarship in community writing and service-learning has called attention to the lack of community partner voices in the assessments of writing partnerships. This article foregrounds those missing perspectives by reporting on the consequences of a community literacy program, Writing for Change, from the perspective of the high school youth involved. Analysis of high school student interviews and letters demonstrates myriad benefits of the partnership, extending from personal growth to a heightened sense of social responsibility. However, our study also reveals disconnect between participants’ development as writers and rhetoricians and their perceptions of that growth and its relevance to their academic work. We ultimately argue for the importance of building connections between the rhetorical activism often forwarded by community literacy programs and the “school literacies” that youth associate with writing.

As our first volume as co-editors of Reflections goes to press, we look back at the journal’s achievements and forward to shepherding it through an exciting period of growth in the subfield of community-engaged writing. We are at once committed to upholding its history of quality, cutting-edge scholarship—which has contributed significantly to new ways of viewing, practicing, and theorizing community-based writing—and eager to break new ground. Not least, we are keenly aware that we follow a Reflections editorial tradition of excellence and innovation in advancing knowledge in community-engaged writing.

Review of Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies (2017a) and Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning from Bilingual After-School Programs (2017b) by Steven Alvarez.

The author conducted a seven-month ethnography of literacy practices in Mexico in 2003-2004 and returned in 2013 to conduct a follow-up inquiry. This essay traces both the researcher’s disillusionment with traditional, school-based literacy programs, curricula, and assessment consortiums as practiced in many postcolonial countries, and her growing interest in what she calls “ecological literacy.” The study narrates the lives of two Mexican students’ engagements with ecological literacy to argue that literacy as tested and valued in international organizations (PISA, UNESCO, etc.) is highly overrated; indeed, it is a “literacy myth” that success in autonomous literacy has any redeeming effect on the majority of material lives in countries such as Mexico, who suffer from uneven effects of the global economy. In ecological literacy, students have opportunities for action—affordances that alter lives if perceived and utilized. The author argues for a new narrative about literacy, one that understands literacy as ecological by tracing the embodied and experienced literacies of two students, ultimately elaborating on what literacy might look like if we open ourselves to the multiple literacies of most of the world. This essay also argues that traditional literacy assessments neglect to consider how individuals use literacy to navigate an environment impacted by certain global economic policies.

This paper draws on our time working together in a community literacy organization in New York, NY. In it, we describe the strengths of the program while also detailing our questions about how our “mentor/mentee” relationship was represented in the organization’s mission statement and fundraising rhetoric: specifically, the term “at-risk,” which was applied to the “mentees.” We describe the difficulties we faced when we proposed a writing workshop that challenged the organization’s mission statement and raise questions about the rhetorical tension inherent in education nonprofits’ reliance on funding. We ask community literacy nonprofits to consider whether their mission statement and fundraising language inadvertently individualize and/or racialize systemic inequities in public education and argue in favor of community-defined mission statements.

Regular Reflections readers will notice, among other things, a change in the journal’s subtitle. We are now “A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning,” having shifted from “A Journal of Writing, Service Learning and Community Literacy.” Title changes—even subtitle changes—are no small things, so we begin with a note on what led us to make that decision.

In “A Narrative of Teaching, Community, and Activism,” youth minister, Tim Lee, narrates his journey towards establishing a literacy program dedicated to the personal and spiritual development of young black men. In addition to spiritual advisement and critical dialogue, his program exposes young men to prominent black thinkers such as Langston Hughes, Etheridge Knight, Malcolm X, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. This community-based initiative is dedicated to the development of a community literacy specific and, as Lee sees it, necessary, for the successful development of the black male youth in Chicago and beyond.

In this article, Williams-Christopher calls for greater awareness of the educational import of non-traditional texts, specifically black women’s memoir, for college composition and rhetoric courses. Williams-Christopher contends that including texts that illustrate the various ways black women have transcended forms of oppression, abuse, and disenfranchisement helps to validate the experiences of black women inside and outside of academe. In doing so, the university becomes a space where the transaction of knowledge is multi-directional rather than merely from teacher to student. The goal of holding both community literacy and academic literary in equal regard is to create a space where students can start to break down sharp divides between academic spaces and local communities.

African American community literacy (AACL) originates with the belief that collective social interactions frequently provide the best chance for individuals to develop—through dialogue, personal interactions, and storytelling—into critical citizens. Community, although often taken for granted, figures into the learning of all students as a primary influence on their language and reading habits, as a space for deliberating with others. In response to this understanding, the editors and authors of this collection ask how we might use the long tradition of African American community literacy to teach students to write and respond to traditional academic concerns and the broader social world. Our interests in AACL extends from an understanding that “if writing instructors are to open their typically controlled, teacher-centered classrooms to the press of local community life, they should be aware of how literacy is figured differently across various contexts" (Deans, Roswell, and Burr 5). In this case, we focus on the way black Americans have used specific social practices to organize and educate one another.

This article examines an African American urban debate league in order to understand the types of literacy training youth in these leagues undergo. As the author notes, debate leagues are important sites of community literacy that are often overshadowed by the popular views of these leagues as highly competitive, predominantly white, and for the socially affluent. However, Cridland-Hughes shows that facilitators and organizers in urban debate settings often shape these leagues as sites of communal and cultural education and support. Her discussion of City Debate, one such organization enacting community literacy, illustrates the relationships built through these sites of rhetorical training and their connection to the development of black youth as critical thinkers, speakers, and citizens of tomorrow.

This article examines Alexander’s experiences teaching literacy and African American Literature to prison inmates at the Orange County Correctional facility in Hillsborough, North Carolina. For Alexander the conversations and insights provided by these inmates about their experiences and the experiences of the writers they read were indeed emancipatory. As Alexander explains, the process of reading and discussing the works of African American writers can provide a critical lens for understanding one’s own subjugation, and participates in a long tradition of African American community literacy by helping to transform the lives and minds of a population disproportionately comprised of people of color.

Roosevelt Wilson is the former owner and editor of Capital Outlook newspaper and a former Professor of Journalism at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU). This interview with Van Wilson investigates Roosevelt Wilson’s commitment to FAMU and the African American Community. The Capital Outlook newspaper bridges FAMU and the black community as a service-learning site, and links the black community to the university as an African American Community literacy partner. As such, Mr. Wilson is an “agent of social change” in the African American community.

This essay argues that African American church founder Richard Allen (1760-1831) developed a rhetorical pedagogy that prefigures the community literacy partnerships of later Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). While Allen did not enjoy the material opportunities of institutionalized higher learning, we can interpret passages from his autobiography as a rhetorical pedagogy that affirms the ways of knowing in language of his community, suggests a relationship between language and the truth, and points toward a community pedagogy rooted in language. Allen also figures as a rhetor whose own higher literacy is sponsored by his community, and who returns his rhetorical power to the community for its own betterment. These same dimensions can be witnessed in the pedagogies of later nineteenth-century African American educators, particularly that of Fanny Jackson Coppin of the Institute for Colored Youth, and Daniel A. Payne of Wilberforce University. Moreover, Allen’s very lack of formalized schooling affords us a way of reframing contemporary efforts in university and community partnerships, and offers compelling precedent for Linda Flower’s model of inquiry. For African American higher learning, community literacy partnerships are not merely an additive element of a traditional curriculum; instead, they are the lifeblood of the school itself.

This article discusses Shaw University’s mission and service to African American Communities. The author asserts a definition of community literacy that exemplifies the “communal” relationships of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and African American community literacy partnerships. By analyzing historical and contemporary literacy partnerships and agents of change at Shaw University, the author highlights an insider view of community literacy, as lived experiences that reflect the university’s mission. This insider view draws attention to the shared experience of a people as well as the uplift and education of African Americans. The author believes that this focus speaks to Shaw University’s motto of service to Christ and humanity.

This article investigates service-learning practices and pedagogy at Jackson State University (JSU), a Historically Black University, founded in 1877 to educate underserved and underrepresented African Americans in Mississippi. As a reflection of the university’s motto, “Challenging Minds and Changing Lives,” this research highlights JSU’s concerted efforts to foster students’ participation in school-community literacy partnerships. Since 2009, the university has facilitated academic instruction in first-year English Composition and Literature courses and in second-year Humanities courses. Not only have these efforts enabled JSU students to partner with Elementary schools and African American women’s help initiatives in the Metro-Jackson area, but JSU students have also completed service-learning projects in Limon, Costa Rica. To further illustrate JSU’s commitment to African American literacy partnerships, the authors present a selection of course materials to demonstrate course designs dedicated to service-learning and African American community literacy partnerships.

For several decades now, the scholarship of rhetoric and composition studies has shown an increased interest in community literacy and community-based pedagogy. Many point to the emergence of the Ethnography of Literacy (see studies by Heath, Barton, Cushman) and New Literacy Studies (Gee, Street, among others) as an origin for this initial focus on community literacy practices. These areas of scholarship turn our gazes to community literacy practices as rich sites of inquiry that emphasize the social nature of literacy and writing. Linda Flower explains that this turn is, due in part, because “rhetoric and composition studies has long held itself accountable to the public and social significance of writing,” while recognizing its “potentially contradictory goal of developing personally empowered writers” (Community Literacy 76).

This article discusses found literacy partnerships—collaborations around literacy practices that emerge unexpectedly when Spelman College students enact the spirit of service and activism that has defined the historically black liberal arts college for women since its inception. Through an examination of institutional rhetoric, a required general education course and three student cases, the article considers the relationship between doing and becoming as students’ literacies align with the interests of community agencies. Literacy partnerships are not always planned; they can emerge from a spirit of service and commitment to activism that encourages students not just to do service, but to become, through their doing, civic-minded women who use their literacies to promote positive social change.

This article argues that community publishing initiatives might extend the scope and impact of their work by critically examining the ways in which technology influences the production and circulation of their [counter]public discourse. Building upon the work of Paula Mathieu, the author analyzes the material and discursive complexities of the “street paper” movement as a site of community-based publishing, finding both limitations and potential in the survival-driven, print-based, and hyperlocal character of street paper media. Discussing an emerging digital platform for participatory blogging among homeless and low-income street paper vendors, the author suggests how a model of Web-based, multimodal, and interactive communication might work to extend the community literacy practices of the street paper movement.

This article presents The Kamp Katrina Project, a community literacy partnership with Kamp Katrina residents in New Orleans. Kamp Katrina is a colony for displaced artists, musicians, and low-wage earners. In this article, Kamp Katrina residents relate their stories about life in post-Katrina New Orleans after the levee failures devastated the city (now exacerbated by the recent BP oil disaster). As part of this article, we enclose the documentary short Kamp Katrina: A Love Letter to New Orleans, one of several community texts including a book of photography and a website (http://public.csusm.edu/kampkatrina/) where visitors can access video biographies and performances and learn how to support Kamp Katrina.

Angela Y. Davis is Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. In 1998 she founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. Her activism and scholarship engages with Feminism, Marxism, and African American studies. Benjamin D. Kuebrich met with Professor Davis at Syracuse University to ask her about issues of pedagogy, rhetoric, and community literacy.

This article discusses the practices of sexual literacy by two members of Legato (the collegiate Lesbian and Gay Association) in Istanbul, Turkey, through the perspectives of gateways, sponsors, and the accumulation of literacies. The discussion reveals that sexual literacy is community-based. Therefore, the complex and conflicting notions of community, as inflected by the politics of place and use, are essential for theorizing present and future configurations of sexual literacy in different ways. The conclusion provides suggestions for further research and some thoughts about ways of incorporating pedagogical understandings of how literacies are (self) initiated and acquired, in community-based literacy education.

This essay establishes a context for discussing how community literacy pedagogy can benefit from critical engagement with the rhetorical actions of a grassroots social movement. Drawing from ongoing community literacy work in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, I detail the prospects of speaking truth to power in relation to composition studies’ ongoing skepticism of rhetorics of social protest. I end by arguing that there are central aspects associated with oppositional rhetorics that can be encountered in community literacy initiatives and used to support forms of social change often excluded from conciliatory rhetorics.

Rhetoric and composition now has a history of teaching, research, and engagement with communities. We also have a number of terms for describing this work, each with its own history: community literacy and service learning are but the two most common. The historical roots that led to community literacy have also yielded shoots of growth in the areas of public rhetoric, cultural rhetoric, ethnography, research, and professional and technical communication. Central to all these areas is the fundamental understanding that writing matters; it can make a difference for peoples, organizations, and institutions. Depending on the purposes and exigencies for writing in these contexts, community-based writing can mobilize people, inform policy, seed new initiatives, draw audiences to events and forums, allow for greater participation in decision making, and make decision making transparent. For the last decade and half, scholars in rhetoric and composition have worked hard to define our roles in facilitating writing in the public interest, though we have not often done so in ways that create a synergy around shared research interests or theoretical projects.

This paper draws on two sources to theorize gender literacy. First, it examines several influential theories of social change embedded in community literacy scholarship. Next, it uses two of these theories to analyze qualitative data from an after-school program. In this program, university students mentored Latina middle-school students to promote both gender literacy and academic literacy. Based on this analysis, it argues that (1) only a collaborative, negotiated approach can promote effective social change, (2) that such efforts must include reflexive work by researchers to produce viable negotiations, and (3) that this approach highlights the intersection between pragmatic and ethical concerns that underlies effective social change.

Review of Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement by Linda Flower. Southern Illinois University Press, 2008.

"Educating Future Public Workers: Can We Make Inquiry Professional?" begins with an observation: students in CIT 300: Communicating in the Helping Professions are preparing for the very human service careers that caused community residents in Ellen Cushman's The Struggle and the Tools such grief. Exploring options from community literacy research for addressing this contradiction, the paper commends a problem-based pedagogy focused on collaborative inquiry and knowledge building designed to represent the agency and expertise of others. The paper dramatizes this model of rhetorical education through the work of a pre-professional named Hillary who interned at a shelter for women and children seeking sanctuary from domestic abuse. The paper follows Hillary conducting a series of "rival readings" on the shelter's no dating policy with theorists, professionals, and, most importantly, those most directly affected by the rule: the shelter's residents. "Educating Future Public Workers" argues that community-based rhetorical research can offer faculty and students outside of English both a theoretical frame and a practical guide to community partnerships.

This article focuses on America's Army Game, the first-person-shooter video game now being peddled by the U.S. Army for classroom use. In my community-based literacy class, where students partner with children and teens at a local youth center, this "game" helps us to grasp and problematize literacy sponsorship and recruitment-the idea that literacy education involves not just learning a new set of practices but also trying out a social identity. Through this class, I argue for a pedagogy of multiliteracies that's committed to counter-recruitment: to enlarging ideological space so that critical questions can be formed and alternatives entertained.

Although conventional academic wisdom discourages young scholars from becoming involved in community-based work, the growing interest in service-learning and community literacy reflected in contemporary scholarship in composition and within the larger academy suggests that these are now viable paths to pursue throughout the trajectory of a scholarly career. Ellen Cushman maintains that by using service-learning and activist research methods to bridge the gap between university-based knowledge and community-based knowledge, “faculty members can have readily apparent accountability, and their intellectual work can have highly visible impact” (“Public Intellectual” 335). The growing visibility of community-based scholarship and practice has allowed emerging scholars to set an agenda that our scholarly work must become legitimized and that the climate of resistance to conducting community-based work early in our professional careers must change. I suggest that we work toward mainstream acceptance of the scholarly value of community-based work to support young scholars’ careers while maintaining the edginess of this type of work by addressing key critiques.

While community literacy and service-learning are now established areas within the larger field of Composition and Rhetoric, I have been in the field long enough to remember when these were new areas – a not so long ago period where what counted as “scholarship” and “appropriate sources” was still very much in flux. During this period, our work wasn’t quite so comfortably situated within the mainstream and our very marginality pushed us to invent (and re-invent) the work our scholarship and, perhaps, ourselves as scholars.