The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of a community literacy project on its participants. This year-long study focuses on a public library program titled Books in Motion, in which community members read children’s chapter books and meet monthly to watch the book’s film translation. Using a case study approach, the study’s data sources included small-group structured interviews, individual open-ended interviews, written surveys, field notes, and a reflective journal from monthly film nights. Findings suggest the following: (1) Books in Motion increased community literacy interactions, (2) the program motivated participants in innovative ways, and (3) the program offered participants access to literacy resources. As communities and public libraries seek to influence children’s reading today, Books in Motion illustrates reading as an act of community engagement.

With this special issue, our hope is to encourage community literacy educators, practitioners, and scholars to consider more deeply how the discipline of Community Literacy can support the development of a sustainable global society. Many thinkers, perhaps beginning with ecosopher Arne Naess, have suggested that in order to fashion an ecologically sustainable society our fundamental conception of what it means to live on a planet must deepen, expand, transform. We must develop an elemental appreciation of ourselves as equal members of the global biotic communityequal with marmot and manatee, with saguaro and birch, with amphibian, arthropod, lichen, and microbe-a community that is utterly dependent upon stable worldwide ecosystems for its continued existence.

Review of three books: Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement Linda Flower Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy beyond the College Curriculum Eli Goldblatt Making Writing Matter: Composition in the Engaged UniversityAnn M. Feldman

This essay explores how the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism, especially Richard Rorty’s work on social hope late in his career, could be relevant to community literacy. Pragmatism does not prescribe a particular approach to community literacy but, unlike many kinds of critical pedagogy, affirms a role for patriotism and liberalism in social change movements. Pragmatists such as Rorty prefer cooperative participation and incremental reform to either idealism or ideological critique.

This essay presents a case study of the modes used in training employees at a munitions plant in Ohio between 1940 and 1945. Theories of multimodal discourse and learning advanced by The New London Group (1996), Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen (2001) and Richard Mayer (2001) inform this analysis. With an unskilled labor force and many workers coming from oral literate traditions, the War Manpower Commission developed the Training Within Industry program, emphasizing visual and experiential literacies. This analysis can inform programs that use multimodal forms of instruction by acknowledging positive and negative implications of such literacy sponsorship.

In what ways do students understand and document literacies within out-of-school communities in their school-sponsored writings? How can community literacy sites and public perceptions of community disrepair stimulate students to create written responses on the politics of place? These questions are at the heart of this article's investigation into relationships between writing and contexts. Drawing on research in writing and place as well as in out-of-school literacies, the author examines undergraduate writing students' investigations of literacy practices and acts of meaning making. She details how these acts can motivate students to both document and critique literacies within a local urban community in close proximity to their university setting. The author concludes by discussing how students critiqued forms of community literacies through writing, acts that have implications for the ways writing researchers can work to bridge distances (e.g., cultural, sociological, ideological, political) across school and community spaces.

This article provides suggestions for community coalitions and other literacy service providers for implementing a performance management process that would be useful for helping coalitions and service providers to improve their efforts. It provides initial suggestions as to: the roles community coalitions might undertake in community literacy performance management; the outcome indicators that might be used to track progress; steps for selecting the indicators relevant to individual communities; handling some of the key implementation challenges; and the basic ways in which the performance information can be used. The article is based on the National Institute for literacy forthcoming guide to performance management for community literacy organizations.

The role of the professor in community service writing courses factors into the teaching, research, and overall institutional viability of these initiatives, yet too little has been written about the role of the professor in service learning. Through an analysis of recent publications on service learning and data gathered during an outreach initiative at University of California, Berkeley, this article reveals a few of the obstacles that hinder the sustainability of community literacy programs. I find that professors in service learning courses can better sustain these initiatives when they view the community site as a place where their research, teaching, and service contribute to a community’s self-defined needs and students’ learning.

Teachers at all levels of college instruction use service learning, a popular pedagogical tool since the mid-eighties, to teach students both social consciousness and pragmatic, real-world writing skills. This article explores the concept of service learning as rhetorical action in the field of technical communication in general, and the question of whether service learning is appropriate in beginning level technical writing courses. Using my experience through two years of service learning instruction in community college classes, I respond to the charge that students in lower-division courses may lack the maturity to successfully enact service learning assignments. I also analyze the appropriateness of the community college as a catalyst for community-based writing projects.

When a composition teacher incorporated community-based writing assignments into her course, she found that the curriculum did not support students’ transitions to nonacademic settings. Her success in transforming the curriculum suggests that the writing classroom can function not only as a site for “general writing skills in-struction” but also for analysis of rhetorical variation.

The move from theorizing difference to dealing with difference in an intercultural collaboration creates generative conflicts for educators and students. This article tracks the conflicting discourses, alternative representations, and political consequences the construct “Black English” had for Black and White mentors, teenage writers, and instructors in a Community Literacy Center collaboration. Comparing the accounts offered by resistance, conversation, and negotiation theory, it examines the dilemmadriven process of constructing a new negotiated meaning in the face of conflicting forces, voices, and representations. Dealing with difference in such collaboration means not only interpreting diverse verbal and nonverbal signifying systems based on values, experience, and competing discourses but constructing a new negotiated representation in the face of conflict that offers an (at least provisional) ground for action.

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