Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics is the sixth book in the Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition series, whose editor, Charles Bazerman, has set out to provide “compact, comprehensive, and convenient surveys of what has been learned through research and practice” on a single topic. The topic here is community literacy, and… Continue reading Review of Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics by Elenore Long by David Coogan

In spring 2007, I began working with a fellow graduate student in Purdue’s Rhet/Comp program on a community engagement project that would become the basis for both our dissertations. Allen and I agreed to work together because of our mutual interests in community engagement and public rhetorics, as well as our complementary interests in professional… Continue reading One Grad Student’s Reflections by Jaclyn M. Wells

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. Link to PDF

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 ID named Hillary who interned at a shelter for women… Continue reading Educating Future Public Workers: can We Make Inquiry Professional by Elenore Long

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… Continue reading Reflections: Bridging the Gap (Editorial) by Steve Parks

What makes racial segregation in the United States especially harsh is that it robs most people of the means they need to bring it down. These include mutual knowledge, trust, and, most of all, a language of engagement that can keep people talking past the negativity, hurt, and hopelessness. In Community Literacy and the Rhetoric… Continue reading Review of Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement by Linda Flower, reviewed by Deborah Brandt

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… Continue reading Views of Girls, Views of Change: The Role of Theory in Helping Us Understand Gender Literacy and Gender Equity by Gwen Gorzelsky, Frances J Ranney, & Hillary Anne Ward

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… Continue reading Writing Theories / Changing Communities: Introduction by Jeffrey T. Grabill & Ellen Cushman

As the Editor of this journal, I am delighted to have interviewed Dr. Cassandra Simon, founding editor of the Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship. Some of you who were at the Conference of Community Writing may have heard me enthusiastically talk about this journal as I showed you a copy of an issue. Some… Continue reading Interview with Cassandra Simon, Founding Editor of Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship by Cristina Kirklighter

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… Continue reading At-Risk’ of What? Rewriting a Prescribed Relationship in a Community Literacy Nonprofit Organization: A Dialogue by Cherish Smith and Vani Kannen

Community literacy workers and publicly engaged teachers of writing have long been concerned with questions not only of learning and writing, but also of social change, equity, and justice. Whether we trace roots through Myles Horton’s Highlander School to critical pedagogy and activism (Branch) or through more institutionally focused efforts of land-grant colleges and organizations… Continue reading Review: Democracies to Come: Rhetorical Action, Neoliberalism, and Communities of Resistance by Moira Ozias

Service-learning courses have typically encouraged students to write for or about communities. Such courses rarely involve students writing with the communities they serve, despite the growing number of opportunities for collaboration afforded by digital media. Scholarship on collaborative writing with communities in service-learning courses is scarce; research on collaboration using digital, multimodal texts is more… Continue reading Composing With Communities: Digital Collaboration in Community Engagements by Stacy Nall & Kathryn Trauth Taylor

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… Continue reading Editors’ Introduction by Diana George, Cristina Kirklighter, & Paula Mathieu

This essay shares stories and valorizes concepts related to sexualized identities, highlighting details and reflections about exotic dancing, and Bernadette Barton’s Stripped. Further, the essay contends that potentially powerful and profound pedagogy exists in exploring these, identities, and that explorations leading to developed awareness of sexually stigmatized individuals and groups may encourage student writers to… Continue reading A Stripped Classroom: Exotic Dancers, Sexuality, University Teaching, and Community Engagement by Carrie Jo Coaplen-Anderson

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, and as a… Continue reading The Community Classroom and African American Contributions to Community Literacy: Moving Forward while Looking Back by David Green

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… Continue reading African American Community Literacy and Urban Debate by Susan Cridland-Hughes

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… Continue reading Rewriting a Master Narrative: HBCUs and Community Literacy Partnerships, Introduction by Reva E. Sias and Beverly J. Moss

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… Continue reading Richard Allen and the Prehistory of Engaged Community Learning at HBCUs by Elizabeth Kimball

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.… Continue reading African American Students Learn by Serving the African American Community: A Jackson State University Example of ‘Challenging Minds and Changing Lives by Preselfannie E. Whitfield McDaniels, Kashelia J. Harrion, Rochelle Smith Glenn, and Gisele Nicole Gentry

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… Continue reading We need your minds, not your money. Come to my home’: An Invitation to Community Literacy from Kamp Katrina by Carla Maroudas, Denis Crlenjak, and Dawn M. Forno

In 2008, I attended a symposium that highlighted our university’s outreach and community engagement initiatives. Sessions and exhibits ranged from promoting pesticide safety programs in Africa to local community design assistance projects. The symposium was very satisfying, but my conversations with participants often began the same way, with questions arising from my “Rhetoric and Writing”… Continue reading Review of Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric of Social Movements edited by Sharon Mckenzie Stevens and Patricia M. Malesh by Megan O’Neill Fisher

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… Continue reading Engaging Community Literacy through the Rhetorical Work of a Social Movement by Christopher Wilkey

This article offers both a theoretical underpinning and a case study of practice as exhibits of a more democratic community engagement praxis for rhetoric and composition educators. The case study featured in the article suggests re-positioning the importance of collaborative and democratic engagement as the cornerstone of successful community engagement work. While the case is… Continue reading Inception to Implementation: Feminist Community Engagement via Service-Learning by Johanna Phelps-Hillen

This essay offers new ways of understanding the connection between literary studies and community engagement by focusing not just on the content of literary study, but on one of the central methods. I argue that the practice of “close reading” a literary text—Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” in particular—can illustrate the integral relationship between a… Continue reading Literary Methods and Community Engagement: The Case of Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” by Emad Mirmotahari

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… Continue reading What Changes When We “Write for Change?”: Considering the Consequences of a High School-University Writing Partnership by Heather Lindemann & Justin Lohr

Reflections currently seeks submissions for Volume 19, Issue 2, Fall 2019. Reflections publishes scholarly research articles (18-30 pages); brief profiles of community-based writing and civic engagement organizations, partnerships, programs aimed at disseminating information and sharing models from which other faculty, scholars, and administrators can benefit; brief project/course profiles of community-based writing and civic engagement that are not developed… Continue reading Call for Submissions: Volume 19, Issue 2, Fall 2019

Coeditors Laurie Grobman and Deborah Mutnick seek submissions for the Fall 2018 volume of Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning. Continuing a nearly 20-year history of leading writing and rhetoric’s scholarly and theoretical study of service learning, public rhetoric, community writing, civic writing, and community literacy, the journal publishes wide-ranging… Continue reading Call for Submissions Fall 2018 (Closed)

In this essay, I uncover the ways in which the non-binary gender community challenges what we know about privacy and reciprocity within community engaged work. Using my experience as a program coordinator for an LGBTQ youth center, I illustrate the myriad of privacy needs of non-binary gender teens and young adults who expect to be simultaneously both public and private in their online writing on Tumblr. I argue that for the nonbinary gender community on Tumblr, direct contact from the researcher not only may invade their intimate space but also cause physical or emotional harm as many non-binary Tumblr users are underage and participating on Tumblr in secret. Instead, I demonstrate how the study of non-binary gender literacy practices can be done without engaging with or quoting directly from publicly published content, instead favoring an emergent thematic methodology. Additionally, I make a case for a queer methodology which instead seeks to recruit participants in the real world and be invited into their digital community once trust and reciprocity is established should interviews be important for further study.

This article examines archival research as a generative community literacy practice. Through the example of a community-based project centered on archival research, I examine the increased possibility the archives hold as a site for rhetorical invention based on collaboration that includes contemporary community members and the recovered rhetoric of historical figures. I argue that archival research as community literacy practice creates conditions for a communal form of literacy sponsorship and offer a framework for approaching the archives.

Drawing on interviews with writing teachers, this article highlights some of the affective responses that may arise for students, community partners, and teachers when we situate our pedagogies in public sites beyond the classroom. I analyze a teacher-narrated moment of student distress to demonstrate how theories of transformative learning might help us productively theorize affect in service-learning and community-based education. To conclude, I offer a reciprocal model of care that employs tenets of feminist pedagogy, such as transparency and decentering of authority, and that acknowledges the valid emotions students, teachers, and community members may experience. I call for community literacy practitioners to see the power of all participants to both give and receive care in transformative education.

This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard, the founder and former director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum (CPAAM), was deceased. Because oral history is narrator-driven, Gilyard’s death required us to remain especially attentive to the epistemic value of his voice.

This article describes a series of community-based research projects, (Re)Writing Local Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Histories, done in partnership with the local African American, Hispanic/Latino, and Jewish communities. The author argues that these projects are one substantive response to the ongoing, growing demand that English studies teacher-scholars and students participate in purposeful, impactful public work. These projects position students as rhetorical citizen historians who produce original historical and rhetorical knowledge and promote democracy through conscious, deliberate rhetorical historical work. But these partnerships also raise complex issues of unequal, fluid, and shifting discourses among community partners, students, and faculty and, consequently, inform ways to enact publicly shared meaning in community literacy partnerships.

A case study of a graduate-level community literacy seminar that involved a tutoring project with adult digital literacy learners, this essay illustrates the value of community outreach and service-learning for graduate students in writing studies. Presenting multiple perspectives through critical reflection, student authors describe how their experiences contextualized, enhanced, and complicated their theoretical knowledge of public rhetoric and community literacy. Inspired by her students’ reflections, the faculty co-author issues a call to graduate programs in writing, rhetoric, literacy studies, and technical communication to develop a conscious commitment to graduate students’ civic engagement by supporting opportunities to learn, teach, and research with community partners.

“We remember Linda’s legacy at Present Tense as we continue publishing scholarship that advocates the kind of positive change through pedagogy, community engagement, and research that Linda worked toward her whole life. Thank you, Linda, for enriching our lives.”

This article presents findings from a case study of an adult literacy program. The author conducted this IRB-approved study as part of a three-year, research-based, community-engagement project that partnered the literacy program with a writing center at a large public research university. The author argues that the participatory methods afforded by community-engagement research can allow researchers to achieve insight into particular programs while contributing to local literacy. The author also argues that understanding the characteristics of particular programs can contribute to knowledge of the field of adult literacy education and help collaborators develop engagement projects that support adult literacy.

This article reclaims Jane Addams as a community literacy pedagogue and explicates her pedagogical theory through an analysis of her social thought. Addams’ goal of “socializing democracy” through education led her to both encourage immigrant students to associate across difference and to assimilate into dominant literacies—tensions present in today’s community literacy contexts. The article includes suggestions for rhetorically redeploying Addams’ pedagogy in contemporary writing instruction. The educational activities of a Settlement, as well its philanthropic, civic, and social undertakings, are but differing manifestations of the attempt to socialize democracy, as is the very existence of the Settlement itself —Jane Addams, 1902

community literacy

Educators focused on community literacy and public engagement have access to a unique critical platform from which larger social issues that impact us both as a whole and on very personal levels are open to exploration. Being particularly situated to have significant impact on community, literacy work in this area may require uncommon pedagogical strategies. Based on its comprehensive focus on sustainability, ecological literacy, sociopolitical factors that affect communities, and a multitude of other factors that underpin social injustice, ecopedagogy may be uniquely positioned to offer a more holistic view than other composition pedagogies such as place-based education and ecocomposition.

This article examines what a pedagogy of public rhetoric and community literacy might look like based on an understanding of twentieth century Mexican American civil rights rhetoric. The inductive process of examining archival materials and conducting oral histories informs this discussion on the processes and challenges of gaining civic inclusion. I argue that writing can be both a healing process and an occasion for exercising agency in a world of contingency and uncertainty. To illustrate, I describe several key events shaping the evolution of the post-World War II Mexican American civil rights movement in New Mexico. Taking a case study approach, I begin this chapter by examining the civic discourses of one prominent New Mexico leader in the post-World War II civil rights movement: Vicente Ximenes. As a leader, Ximenes confronted critical civil rights issues about culture and belonging for over fifty years beginning in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is a historical moment worth revisiting. First, I set the stage for this examination about writing, citizenship, and civic literacy by analyzing two critical rhetorical moments in the life of this post World War II civil rights activist. Secondly, I connect the Ximenes legacy to a growing movement at the University of New Mexico and the ways that we are making critical responses to current issues facing our local communities in New Mexico. By triangulating social acts of literacy, currently and historically, this article offers organizing principles for Composition teachers and advocates of community literacy serving vulnerable communities in their various spheres of practice.

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement spotlights her experiences with Pittsburgh's Community Literacy Center (CLC), an innovative project in community literacy initiated in 1990. The 2008 book details a rhetorical model of engaging the privileged and marginalized voices of community leaders, academics and urban teens into meaningful dialogue that values all perspectives and embraces differences as valuable resources. According to Flower, the discourse of academic cultural critique has taught "us how to speak up [and] speak against" (2 original emphasis). However, what we lack and what this text provides is a model that teaches us "to speak with others [and] to speak for our commitments [] for a revisable image of transformation" (2 original emphasis).

Reviewed are: Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement, by Linda Flower, Reviewed by Tim Taylor Writings from Life, by Tom Tyner, Reviewed by Robert A. Berens

Communities—and their literacies—exist within larger contexts, and writing has the potential to empower or oppress, to maintain the status quo, or to transform the collective community. School is one such context and, in recent years, the nature of writing has changed; digital writing skills needed to participate in contemporary society do not always resemble skills of traditional, school-based literacy. This article examines the teaching of digital writing as an issue of social justice by sharing the perspectives of several novice teachers who were challenged to alter their views of what writing is and how it should be taught.

Women who work in highly male-dominated fields such as science and the military often find it difficult to establish a place for themselves within their workplace communities. In this essay, I examine how two related online communities for military women enable participants to overcome their workplace isolation, form a collective consciousness, find positive mentorship, and develop a community literacy that affords them a voice through which to enact both personal and public change.

This essay revises Paula Mathieu’s call for relationship-based tactics of engagement over institution-based strategies. Because engaged scholars operate within institutional contexts, they should utilize both tactics and strategies to make the academic institutional paradigm more conducive to relationship-based engagement. In supporting this long-term goal, community-literacy practitioners can adapt Brian Huot’s theory of instructive evaluation to enable collaborative assessment of community partnerships. One possible mechanism for such institutional invention would be the establishment of quasi-strategic, quasi-tactical Community- Literacy Associations.

In Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum, Eli Goldblatt shares his experiences with community-based learning and encourages readers to "pay attention to the problems of the people among who we live" (6). The unique, self-

In what ways can teachers incorporate young people’s home and community literacy practices into classrooms when such practices vastly differ from the teachers’ literacy experiences? How can teacher education curriculum and teaching influence teachers’ pedagogical practices? How can children’s roles be pedagogically reframed and become meaningful strengths in classrooms? Grounded in these interrelated research questions, this article documents some of the influences of Freirean culture circle as an approach to inservice teacher education on the ways in which two Head Start teachers and a teacher educator negotiated and navigated within and across home and school literacy practices, co-creating a curriculum based on generative themes and making early education meaningful to children from multiple backgrounds. Further, it proposes that conducting extensive ethnographic studies is not a prerequisite to creating pedagogical spaces that honor children’s home literacy practices and cultural legacies. Findings indicate that as teachers seek to build on young children’s language and literacy strengths, it is pedagogically beneficial to engage in documenting glimpses of home literacy practices within and across contexts while simultaneously challenging and (re)positioning ethnocentric definitions of literacy by engaging young children as authentic curriculum designers.