AbstractThis article addresses the interrelationship among writing, reading, and information literacy (WRIL) by discussing a collaborative assessment project that generated a criteria map focused on process, enactment, engagement, and attribution. The authors connect this map to the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing and the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education but critique the failure of these frameworks to account for the importance of reading. In emphasizing WRIL for students, the authors contend that practitioners must help students understand WRIL practices as dynamic, developing, and complex, and they provide pedagogical suggestions for assigning reference materials, reading as researchers, and sharing visualization tools.

AbstractThis article examines the role of critical reading in a racial literacy-focused composition curriculum. The author draws on student-produced data to demonstrate how the racial literacy curriculum prepares students to explore the situatedness of language, how individual positionalities influence the construction and interpretation of text, and how sociocultural ideologies are represented and disseminated through seemingly innocuous or objective reporting. Broadly, this article offers strategies for teaching critical reading to help teachers of writing improve students’ rhetorical awareness and engage them more fully as participants in a textually mediated society.

Scholars within the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) have called for situating the field in wider social, cultural, political, and global contexts. Despite a growing body of scholarship in this area, less attention has been focused on ways these issues are bound up in 21st-century global innovation and start-up ecosystems. This article addresses these issues by examining case studies of three high-tech initiatives in an emerging start-up ecosystem within the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In making this move, the research offers a theoretical and methodological framework for examining global innovation systems as they are constructed, enacted, maintained, extended, and transformed. Arguing for attention to the links between space and the politics of mobility, the author specifically examines the interplay of literacies, identities, technologies, mobilities, geographies, and practices.

Scholarship has shown that writing groups are important sites of authority negotiation for student writers, yet little empirical research has examined how groups negotiate authority through conversation or how these negotiations influence students’ developing expertise. Drawing on observations and interviews of an undergraduate thesis and a graduate dissertation writing group, I use the concept of “presentification” to analyze conversational moments in which group members referenced advisors, “making present” advisor authority to influence group collaborations. Specifically, I analyze these moments to show how writing groups can serve as low-stakes communities in which students negotiate their emerging sense of authority. I found that whereas less experienced writers looked to advisors to solve writing problems and used advisor authority to stand in for disciplinary expertise, more experienced writers voiced advisor guidance to help pose writing problems and negotiate their own stance as disciplinary experts. This study thus theorizes one process through which student writers negotiate emerging authority across sites of literate practice and in collaboration with others who may not themselves be members of the same disciplinary community.

Language learning is context-dependent and requires learners to employ different sets of language skills to fulfill various tasks. Yet standardized English as a foreign language assessments tend to conceptualize English proficiency as a unidimensional construct. In order to distinguish English proficiency as separate context-driven constructs, I adopted a register-based approach to investigate academic English proficiency (i.e., specific set of language skills that support academic literacy) and general English proficiency (i.e., wide range of language skills undifferentiated by context that are measured by traditional assessments) as separate predictors of overall essay quality. In the study, students completed a general English proficiency assessment and an academic language proficiency assessment, and essays were coded for academic writing features at the lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels. Beyond the contribution of academic writing features and general English proficiency, academic English proficiency emerged as a significant contributor to essay quality. Findings suggest that academic English proficiency scores more precisely identified a subset of academic language skills that is relevant to essay writing. The article concludes by discussing implications for strategic writing instruction that articulates the key expectations of academic writing used in and beyond school contexts.

While social work educators have explored strategies to improve literacy development among their students, many educators continue to strive for a better integration of effective reading and writing skills. This article presents the findings of a survey that used qualitative research methods to assess the outcomes of a doctorate in social work program that employed a specialist in composition. Doctorate in social work students reported on the skill of ‘close reading’ as it related to their own writing, practice, university teaching, and field supervision. Data analysis reveals that these students had not previously learned the close reading skills necessary for strong writing skills. This article extends support for a full integration of close reading as a way to improve writing, clinical mental health practice, and critical thinking skills.

The writing that older adults, retirees, and the elderly – what might be referred to as the aging stage of life (Conrad, 1992) – remains under-examined in writing studies. This research project explores the literate practices of five retirees who write on a regular basis in order to understand how they organize themselves and their lives for writing across lifeworlds. A theoretical framework from a lifespan perspective (Bazerman et al., 2017) serves as the departure point for a grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006; Saldana, 2009) analysis of artifacts that emerged from a series of retrospective interview protocols. These protocols were based on previous work in sponsors of literacy (Brandt, 2001) and chronotopic lamination (Prior and Shipka, 2003). Analysis of these interviews and documents reveals a core category of stabilizing that retirees engage in. Writers stabilize their work in a given moment to continue making sense of a chain of literate acts, which enables them to carry forward complex literate lives. These findings suggest that retirees write their way into new contexts shaped by their pre-retirement histories. The manner in which these subjects went about this work suggests that context is an important and complicated concept when examined through a lifespan perspective.

This qualitative study examines academic support practices and students’ experiences and perspectives in a graduate nursing education program that has, for many years, emphasized research and writing by requiring aspiring nurse practitioners to pursue publication in peer-reviewed clinical research journals. In collaboration with faculty, practitioner researchers from the university’s postsecondary learning center developed and facilitated group workshops and provided students with individual consultations on research processes and manuscript development. The researchers wrote field notes and researcher memos, administered workshop evaluations, and interviewed seven participants to better understand students’ writer identities and whether writing for the discipline of nursing with the support of peers, faculty, and learning instructors led to any changes in both their individual and collective sense of disciplinary identity. More broadly, this study interrogated the role of a postsecondary learning center employing an academic literacies pedagogical approach (Lea and Street, 1998; Lillis and Scott, 2007) in working with faculty to support students’ writing for a specific discipline. Findings suggest that graduate nursing students felt anxiety and uncertainty about claiming disciplinary expertise and competence as writers. This affective experience made it difficult for students to align their understandings of nursing as a discipline, rooted in their field experiences as professionals, with a more academic conceptualization that they believed to be represented by the research and writing practices required for the assignment. By engaging with the learning center as a third space (Gutiérrez, 2008), the students explored these challenges and experimented with writing practices, directions for their research, and the conceptualization of their profession as they modified their understanding of what was possible for scholarly writing and research in nursing as a discipline and what they could contribute individually as emerging scholars. This study has implications for teaching academic writing practices in nursing contexts, as well as other academic disciplines and for forming generative collaborations between postsecondary learning centers and subject experts.

Reviewed by: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Durée of Black Voices ed. by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson Mudiwa Pettus Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, eds., The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, New York: Routledge, 2018. 894 pp. ISBN: 9780415731065 In their preface, Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson herald The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices as a landmark publication in the field of rhetorical studies. The reader, they contend, is the only comprehensive rhetoric anthology to “speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, religious, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslaved period in America to our present era, as well as to the Black Diaspora” (xxi). As expressed in their introduction, Young and Robinson hoped to meet two goals in undertaking their editorship of the anthology. First, they aimed to deliver a collection of “unequivocally rhetorical” texts that reveals how African Americans have sought to influence American society. Second, they intended to illustrate that African American rhetoric exists “all around us,” performed in every genre and mode of communication (xxi). In the final analysis, Young and Robinson achieved these goals marvelously. The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a singular pedagogical and reference text that presents African American rhetoric in all its contours, complexities, and, even, contradictions. Containing almost 900 pages of primary and critical works, the reader is wonderfully expansive. Interviews, autobiographical writings, folktales, speeches, social media posts, poetry, and theoretical treatises are among the genres showcased. Expertly, this wide-ranging content is organized into [End Page 237] four major units that are divided into sections based on themes. While Young and Robinson provide introductions to each of the major units, thirteen “expert editors,” a cohort of scholars culled from a wide range of disciplines, have provided introductions, selected readings, and crafted explanatory annotations for most of the reader’s subsections. Part 1, “African American Rhetoric—Definitions and Understanding,” presents readers with the contextual and theoretical framing for navigating the anthology. In the unit’s first half, Young and Robinson delineate the book’s purpose and codify the six elements of African American rhetoric: language, style, discourse, perspective, community, and suasion. The unit’s second half is composed of the work of Molefi Asante, Geneva Smitherman, and Keith Gilyard, foundational theorists of African American rhetoric who clarify the philosophical underpinnings, linguistic features, and the history of the systematic study of African American rhetoric, respectively. Part 2, “The Blackest Hours—Origins and Histories of African American Rhetoric,” includes texts that highlight the enduring imprint that African orature has left on African American expressive culture; the varied faith systems through which African Americans have theorized their lived experiences; Black epistemes of language, literacy, and education; and the diversity of African American political rhetoric. Part 3, “Discourses on Black Bodies,” centers the premise that considerations of gender and sexuality are essential to the study of African American rhetoric. The unit features readings on Black feminisms, Black masculinity, and Black queer/quare rhetorics. Part 4, “The New Blackness: Multiple Cultures, Multiple Modes,” is the book’s final and most eclectic unit. Potent readings that parse Caribbean intellectual thought, African American technoculture, the rhetorics of Hip Hop, and the self-reflexiveness of Black artistry are the focus. Indubitably, the anthology’s apparatus provides readers with a wealth of entry points into the study of African American rhetoric. Reinforcing the anthology’s intended pedagogical function, each section is followed by a bibliography and a set of discussion questions. Readers can use these paratextual resources to further process the anthology’s readings independently and/or within a group, in and outside of institutionalized classrooms. A companion website, containing links to recordings of public addresses, comedic performances, musical selections, and other artifacts that complement the anthology’s primary readings and critical introductions, has also been made available. The cumulative effect of these supplementary materials is that individuals with both an advanced and burgeoning knowledge of African American rhetoric can find their footing in the anthology’s vast terrain and that Young and Robinson’s contention that African American...

In this article, an analysis of multimodal representations in elementary school students’ descriptive texts about the mobile game Pokémon Go (PG) is used to discuss youths’ new literacy practices emerging from their out-of-school experiences (e.g., gaming, producing game-walkthroughs, and fan art). Social semiotic multimodal analyses of two students’ PG texts and their participation in talks around their texts are used to exemplify what occurs semiotically in the translation of meanings and designs across modes, media, and sites. Combining the analysis of the meaning potentials of multimodal representations with ethnographic accounts of their use in context produces the following findings: The PG writing task connects with the students’ life-worlds and the gaming context around PG prompts the design of their multimodal representations. The students are active creators of content and demonstrate purposeful and innovative uses of semiotic resources in self-representation, stance taking, and audience awareness. The iPad facilitates multimodal and digital crossovers between leisure activities and school subjects. The concluding discussion suggests how game-based literacy practices could be transferred into academic settings.

In this current era of policy and legislation driving curriculum and instruction in higher education, the field of college reading is grappling with how recent curricular mandates affect learners, particularly mandates that reduce or eliminate college reading instruction by assuming a one-size-fits-all approach. Questioning the ethical implications of this current reality led us to a key question: What are the pedagogical rights of undergraduate students with respect to literacy instruction? We argue here that college readers should have access to individually and culturally relevant literacy pedagogy that is intended to support their coursework and, ultimately, their lives. We therefore propose an initial draft of a bill of rights for college readers.

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There is a particular urgency in this political moment to understand children’s experiences with current events. Drawing from data generated following the 2016 presidential election, this paper focuses on three racially and linguistically diverse children’s persuasive compositions. Within a critical literacies writing unit focused on (im)migrant experiences, children called on legislators to act on the Republican administration’s policies. Building on the understanding that all literacies are political and that teaching and learning are value-laden tasks, the author engaged a cultural rhetorics orientation—grounded in the understanding of texts, bodies, materials, and ideas as interconnected aspects of communication—for data generation and analysis. The findings highlight how children strategically employed rhetoric to persuade. They used logos, pathos, and ethos, as well as story, a central tool for meaning-making and building practices in the world. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how children, when properly supported, can agentively participate in critical literacies and act on real-world politics. Through the stories of young children, this study emphasizes what children have to tell adults and what a cultural rhetorics orientation, through its emphasis on story, enables literacies researchers and educators to understand about children’s composing.

This article will explore what I have conceptualized as critical celebration within an afterschool writing club for and with Girls of Color (GOC). Using a feminist of color theoretical framework and building upon existing literature about GOC and their writing practices, critical celebration will be defined as a lens used to view GOC as important, dynamic, and brilliant in the face of an overabundance of deficitizing narratives and erasure, and to also open opportunities for girls to view the experiences and identities of GOC like them and unlike them as important sources of knowledge as they develop critical insights toward solidarity across difference. Using this definition, I will then describe the ways the feminist of color writing pedagogy engaged in this group made space for critical celebration of and by GOC, thereby offering important implications for justice-oriented literacy education, not only for GOC, but for all students.

The prevalence of high-stakes testing, scripted curricula, and accountability measures in schools discourages experimentation with curriculum. This article encourages curriculum design experimentation in teacher education by proposing playful practices, game-like activities for designing curriculum that draws on students’ out-of-school literacies. We explore the benefits and challenges of game-based curriculum design with preservice teachers (PSTs; N = 19) in two public university secondary English education courses and trace one PST’s take-up of the curriculum design moves through incorporation of these playful practices into her classroom. Data collection occurred across one academic year and included field and observation notes, written reflections, interview data, and artifacts. Findings show the potential for game-based curriculum design in literacy teacher education to (1) create an imaginative space between teacher and student, (2) encourage collaborative production, (3) connect PST university coursework to classroom practice, (4) support students’ creative language production, and (5) create playful social contexts for participatory learning. Challenges highlight the importance of attending to power dynamics in game play and design. Implications include how game-based pedagogical invitations in teacher education can help PSTs imagine new ways to organize classroom structures and literacy learning experiences that value an interplay of youth cultures and classroom curriculum.

Writing studies scholars have long examined how race- and class-based hierarchies shape teachers’ and students’ experiences of writing in US universities. But universities are also workplaces that profit from a racialized writing economy in which laborers of color () underpin writing production. Drawing from a yearlong qualitative case study that examines the writing practices of university custodial workers, this article addresses the following research questions: What kinds of writing do university custodial workers use and practice? What are the conditions for their writing? And what do these practices and conditions tell us about writing in race- and class-stratified workplaces, including educational institutions? Using critical race (; ; ; ; ; ; ) approaches to literacy sponsorship (), and observations and interviews with university custodians, this article discusses two main findings: (1) labor conditions restrict participants’ writing as a part of race and class hierarchies; and (2) the participants employ writing practices that run under the radar of institutional restrictions to serve their own purposes. This study’s findings have implications for workplace writing scholarship and higher education policy, because they expand definitions of and purposes for workplace writing in institutions of education.

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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.

rian Street reminds us that literacy practices-the "broader cultural conception of particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing in cultural contexts" ("What's 'New'" 79) -are always social acts and have to be defined in relation to the historical, economic, and political contexts in which they take place. As such, literacy is "always rooted in a particular world-view" and always "contested in relation to power" . Our introduction to this understanding of literacy practices as graduate students in the early 1990s gave us confidence that our literacy experiences as a Latina and as an international student from Austria would be addressed and valued. However, more than 15 years later, we are not sure how our own literacy experiences are reflected in our academic environments, and whether our literacy practices, like the practices of so many of our students and faculty colleagues, are social acts that have continued to be "contested in relation to power. "

Editors' introduction.

Book review.

This article focuses on how Street’s naming and delineation of the concept of “literacy practices” and the “ideological model” of literacy enable us to see and understand the literacy work of two 19th century African American women “literacy workers.” It introduces and provides an overview of the work of Frances (Fanny) Jackson Coppin and Hallie Quinn Brown and seeks to add early Black feminist voices of literacy workers in spaces often left out of dominant discourses around literacy. This article reveals how literacy for African American was, and is, tied to political, and social survival of a people.

This article is an examination of researcher positionality in literacy studies research through a historiographical study of Brian Street.

Symposium piece.

Partnerships between writing across the curriculum (WAC) and civic engagement (CE) programs are not given much attention but these partnerships improve each program significantly. CE programs can borrow models from WAC for professional development and obtain support for specific kinds of writing assignments; WAC programs can find among CE instructors a willing audience for critiquing the structural oppression inherent in literacy and for valuing dialectical, linguistic, and genre diversity. This snapshot focuses on a faculty writing retreat that emerged out of a WAC/ CE partnership and demonstrates how such partnerships can open the door for critical WAC pedagogy.

We proudly present this special issue of Community Literacy Journal on "Building Engaged Infrastructure." Our vision for this collection begins with the inaugural Conference on Community Writing (CCW), which took place at the University of Colorado Boulder in October 2015 1 and attracted 350 scholars, students, activists, and community members representing forty-two states, three countries, 152 colleges and universities, and forty-eight community organizations.This large group was drawn to a vision of higher education that connects with local, national, and international communities by using writing for education, public dialogue, and social change.The overwhelming response to the conference underscored a desire by those working in community writing (a growing subfield within rhetoric and composition that includes genres such as service learning, community-based research, community literacy, community publishing, advocacy and activist writing, and more) to have opportunities to network, share best practices, and receive mentoring.This event brought together academics and community members to explore the relationships between communication, writing, and social action.According to CCW founding chair Veronica House, a conference goal was "to build a national network of people, ideas, resources, and support structures-an engaged infrastructure-to make the work we do in and about our communities more sustainable, impactful, rewarding, and rewarded." 2 In the pages that follow, we turn our attention to the scholarship and practice of community writing that emerged from, or was reflected in, presentations and conversations at CCW.We realize, and want to highlight in this special issue, the obstacles, challenges, and paradoxes of working in community writing.For one, as the astute reader will no doubt notice, definitions of community range widely.The same is true for what counts as writing.An exploration of engagement and infrastructure is no less complex.However, we believe that the inclusion of multiple viewpoints, and the deferral of a precise definition of terms, effectively identifies the fluid boundaries of this thing we call "community writing." Those who attended CCW, or previous events like the 2008 "Imagining Community Literacy" meeting in Philadelphia and the 2011 "Writing Democracy" conference in Commerce, Texas 3 , or who are energized by work that engages the ethics and populations outside of the traditionally defined borders of the university share enthusiasm for engaged work and an optimistic belief that the study and practice of writing can lead to a more just world.We also share concerns about the risks embedded in this work.In April 2016, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) published an official "Position To this end, they hosted a conference of about 150 librarians, public historians, community leaders, and teachers and scholars from our field and beyond at Texas A&M-Commerce in March 2011 and have held pre-conference workshops at the CCCCs every year since.In July 2012, Michelle Hall Kells hosted about 25 leading scholars in community literacy in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the Summit of the National Consortium of Writing Across Communities.Clearly, the desire to establish a collaborative unit of some kind is high.3.

Emerging from the keynote address at the inaugural Conference on Community Writing, this snapshot examines how an engaged infrastructure for community writing might operate as a flow-cultivation milieu. Such a milieu would facilitate self-determination, which suggests that people do their most compelling, rewarding, and innovative work when they exercise autonomy, pursue competence, and feel purpose; wise mentorship, in which mentors and mentees interrelate in an ongoing manner that supports mutually high expectations and achievements, and a listening stance that broadly distributes participation and shared learning. This snapshot also argues that, should an engaged infrastructure ever cease operating as a flow cultivation milieu, it should be dismantled.

This article discusses the successes and vulnerabilities associated with combining the pedagogical methods of Theater, Composition, and Community Literacy in the Composition classroom. It examines how the ideas of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed can be combined to support an innovative approach to Composition teaching, one that additionally employs engaged scholarship and service learning. The essay describes how methods and cycles of story gathering, playwriting, and rhetorical analysis have been used with various community partners, including an adult day care for dementia patients, an HIV/AIDs clinic, and Public Health outreach programs that address Health Disparities. The article explains how the ready audience of community-written plays and the inherent characteristics of theatrical production enable finite and clearly definable communication moments and products—especially in the autobiography-fantasy fused genre I have termed magical memoir—while engaging and empowering the voices of students, teachers, community partners, and audience members alike. All human beings are actors (they act!) and spectators (they observe!) They are spect-actors. … Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, instead of just waiting for it. –Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors

Organizations like the John Reed Clubs and the WPA Federal Writers’ Project, as well as publications like The New Masses can be seen as “literacy sponsors” of the U.S. literary left in the 1930s, particularly the young, the working class, and African American writers. The vibrant, inclusionary, activist, literary culture of that era reflected a surge of revolutionary ideas and activity that seized the imagination of a generation of writers and artists, including rhetoricians like Kenneth Burke. Here I argue that this history has relevance for contemporary community writing projects, which collectively lack the political cohesiveness and power of the national and international movements that sponsored the 1930s literary left but may anticipate another global period of struggle for democracy in which writers and artists can play a significant role.

We understand "community literacy" as the domain for literacy work that exists outside of mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, lifelong learning, workplace literacy, or work with marginalized populations, but it can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal and technological representations as well.We publish work that contributes to the field's emerging methodologies and research agendas.

This essay argues that while fostering individual and collaborative literacy can indeed promote self-awareness, confidence, and political awareness, the threat of emotional and material retribution is ever-present in jail, making the development of infrastructure challenging. Such reality compels engaged teacher-researchers to develop tactical methods for promoting literacy with limited social and material support from institutions that are primarily invested in compliant behavior. Rather than relying upon traditional models for building engaged university-community infrastructure in such contexts, I suggest a participatory curatorial model and explore the notion of curating a program within an ever-shifting set of artists, regulations, allegiances, and expectations.

This is a snapshot of a service learning course founded on narrative medicine, a clinical practice designed to replace impersonal care with empathic listening. By utilizing poetry therapy techniques among nursing home populations, a program called HPU LifeLines promotes a community literacy of illness and provides psychological and physical benefits to elders and students alike through intergenerational relationships sustained by a community writing infrastructure.

At our workshop at the inaugural Conference on Community Writing on the rhetoric of the corporate university, participants noted that the values espoused by community literacy “in the community” are being eroded at the university. Furthermore, they noted the underlying rhetorics of missionary zeal, whiteness, and privatization in community literacy and service learning work. The authors build on these critiques by examining two successive administrations at Syracuse University. The first presented a model of “engaged infrastructure” with progressive rhetoric but oppressive outcomes; the second shed the façade of community partnership for an explicitly corporate and militaristic vision of higher education. Through this comparison, the authors interrogate foundations that community literacy has been built on with the hope of opening new possibilities.

O ne of the first things readers will notice when reading The Arkansas Delta Oral History Project: Culture, Place, and Authenticity is that most of it is written in the past tense. Launched in the spring of 2007, the five-year-long Arkansas Delta Oral History Project (ADOHP), a community literacy partnership between the University of Arkansas and rural community high schools in the Arkansas Delta, is now complete. Jolliffe et al. 's volume serves as both critical reflection of the ADOHP and jumping off point for a new community literacy project called the Students Involved in Sustaining Their Arkansas (SISTA), which began in fall 2015. Even though the ADOHP is now over, readers will be interested in the way this particular university-community partnership took shape, what flaws the authors see in the original iteration of the project, and what enduring legacy exists because of the ADOHP's strengths.

The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies, Nicole B. Wallack offers a perceptive and stimulating account of what essays are, how they work conceptually and aesthetically, and why it is important for American university writing programs to adopt an essay-centered curriculum. In an age of the Common Core State Standards, the essay has been marginalized by curriculum reform that reduces literacy to "skills acquisition" and assumes student writers are simply "protean workers who need to be readied to fulfill others' goals for their thinking and writing: intellectual 'stem-cells' for the world beyond school" that can be replicated indefinitely for someone else's use (3)(4). The director of the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University, Wallack argues that the essay-and a curriculum centered on having students read and write essays-promotes the values of a liberal arts education, while also establishing common ground for the fields of composition studies, literary studies, and creative writing. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book will appeal to writing program administrators, scholars of writing and literature, creative writers and essayists, and teachers of writing across the disciplinary spectrum. Crafting Presence includes chapters on the history of the essay as a genre distinct from other forms of nonfiction writing, close readings of specific essays from The Best American Essays series, and short pedagogical reflections, informed by Wallack's twenty-plus years of teaching experience. Although the essay may have been discarded from much of today's writing curricula for its association with the tradition of belles-lettres on the one hand and well-worn "school writing" on the other, Wallack maintains that the essay not only fulfills the goals of national curricular standards but also cultivates the intellectual, creative, and ethical thinking students need in order to become "reflective citizens, " to borrow Andrew Delbanco's term, who serve their community with their education. Some readers may chafe at Wallack's appeals to the values of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism, but her book presents a timely and inspiring vision of what the writing classroom-and, by extension, the universitycould become.

While place-based pedagogies and place-conscious education have received a great deal of attention in community literacy, these studies have often focused on classroom efforts at engaging students in their communities. This article articulates an extracurricular pedagogy of place through a historical study of a network of creative writing groups in mid-century rural Wisconsin. Rather than thinking of place-conscious education as something that emerges from the classroom, the work of these writers suggests that scholars and educators in community literacy look instead for place-based literacies already at work in our communities.

This article explores the methodological impact of building and curating a transnational archive of working-class literacy practices, spanning themes of vocation, immigration, gender, race, and disability, from the ground up alongside the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers. The article focuses particularly on how our disciplinary methods might be (re) shaped within a context of precarity when working with/archiving the literacy practices of disenfranchised populations. I argue that such precarity shapes how our methods/methodologies account for material realities—the laboring of bodies, influx of finances, physical conditions of the community involved—and changing social conditions that affect not only archival creation but also sustainability. I illustrate how The FWWCP Archival Project responded through a kitchen-table ethos in order to design the archive with the community’s expertise at the forefront.

This article has been written about, and with, the Swintec 2410cc, the typewriter model approved for incarcerated writers in the State of Nebraska and many other prison systems across the United States. The co-authors, one of whom is currently serving a six year sentence, relate their personal experiences with typewriters and typists as well as connect functions described in the Swintec User Manual to issues in community literacy. The "Left/Right Margin" function reflects some of the institutional and material constraints prison typewriters face; "Impression Control" invites us to think about the forces and functions governing representations of prison and prison writing; this writing tool and the environment for which it was designed, demand one submit to the process of "Corrections". Finally, this typewritten performance models and attempts to enact critical literacy and social justice from within and beyond the typewriter's cage.

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff. We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.

Veronica: I bet that a bunch of our readers either have community literacy projects that they're working on or are thinking of launching, and they're wondering, how do I fund the work I do, and how do I explain it in ways that make sense to people outside of writing and rhetoric studies?So to begin, could you tell us a bit about your

Writing classrooms focused on summative assessment are likely to lack formative feedback components that contribute to more motivated, confident, and autonomous writers, notes Icy Lee (2017), author of Classroom Writing Assessment and Feedback in L2 School Contexts. Ranging from $66.02 (Kindle) to $69.49– $102.24 (hardcopy), this 157-page work presents a strong case for school second-language (L2) writing education to shift away from traditional, score-based assessment. Though Lee targets L2 writing teachers and teacher trainers, she also appeals to researchers of L2 writing. Ten chapters provide thorough theoretical and research-based justification for a student-centered, learning-oriented feedback and assessment system and also provide practical suggestions for implementation. These chapters begin with the purpose, theory, and practice of L2 writing assessment and then explores various types of assessment and feedback, as well as the use of portfolios for assessment. The text concludes with chapters on technology in L2 writing assessment and classroom assessment literacy for L2 writing teachers. As a whole, the research-based guidance that Lee offers encourages writing teachers and educators to implement assessment, so it can “bring improvement to student learning and is supported by self-, peer-, and teacher-feedback” (p. 5).

for a video conference to discuss the second edition of Illegal Alphabets. Below are excerpts from their exchange, edited for clarity and length. Their conversation focused on the book's origins and the context of the scholarly commentaries that appear in the second edition. Kalmar and Leonard also discuss the book's contributions to literacy studies, teaching the book, and its lasting relevance to notions of migration, borders, discrimination, identity, language, and legality. Leonard's review of the second edition of the book follows her interview with Kalmar and frames its relevance to community literacy researchers, practitioners

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