This online antiracist program for children as young as 3 and their parents/caregivers took place in June of 2020 early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Driven by a desire to build change in opposition to racism and unite families during a time of quarantine and isolation, the program fuses family literacy practices to create space for discussions surrounding race, racism, anti-racism and alliance. The model of the program uses children’s literature to make difficult topics accessible to young children, and provides literacy activities which are engaging, age appropriate, and adaptable to materials at hand, interests, abilities and attention spans of each child. This success of this program demonstrates the power of the model to engage with young children and issues of social justice.

Writing teachers are at the forefront in helping newcomers become members of the academic discourse community as writers of essays, reports, and dissertations. Newcomers may be native English-speaking, nontraditional students with limited writing skills or multilingual learners whose primary language is not English. The gap between their limited rhetorical practices and the norms of their professional disciplines concerns educational institutions seeking to facilitate the development of these students’ literacy skills. To lessen that gap and provide information on an underresearched population, this article reports on an exploratory case study of students at a Mexican university enrolled in a Chicano literature course taught in English. The data-based study adopts a situated literacy theoretical approach to learn about participants’ efforts to become successful multilingual writers. It is part of a larger ethnographic study of the rhetorical literacy practices of Mexican multilingual writers concerning the sociocultural context of writing instruction in the contemporary Mexican educational system. An understanding of students’ literacy practices in the local context can help researchers and teachers to better understand problems and issues regarding academic writing from participants’ perspectives.

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long (2008) West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press. pp. 316 ISBN: 978–1-60235–056–4

Though sometimes seen as remedial in nature, writing centers have pedagogical missions that are far broader in scope in most educational institutions. This reflection traces both the growth of writing centers since their origins in the early 1900s and their current points of intersection with other writing programs – first year composition, writing across the curriculum, and community literacy initiatives. In spite of the economic and administrative difficulties they will face in the future, writing centers will continue to thrive.