Sustainability in community engagement projects depends on careful attention to the ways we navigate complex, often challenging relationships with our partners, our students, agencies, and the institutions in which we occupy multiple, sometimes competing roles. This article considers the difficulty inherent in developing and maintaining relationships with the community members who choose to participate in our research. Based on the experiences of three undergraduate students in a community literacy seminar, the author traces the ways these students confront challenges in their projects, arguing for the value of difficulty in community literacy work.

Literacy “sponsorship” in refugee communities is not without its risks and limitations. For potential sponsors, risks include the commodification of refugee voices, while limits include inaccurate generalizations of those being sponsored. This essay draws from a case study of refugee student discourse to discuss how a more explicit decolonial approach to sponsorship can help sponsors rethink a giver-receiver paradigm. This approach would first deconstruct imperialist discourses of power and then replace them with new, alternatives to meaning-making. While contingent on local contexts, this study aims to set an agenda for continued debate within refugee community literacy support projects.

This article reports from instances of child language brokering among emergent bilingual youths and parents at a New York City after-school community literacy program composed largely of Mexican immigrant families. I argue that youth language brokers negotiated literacies with and for their parents in differing contexts, with different audiences, and under different dynamics of power relations. Young language brokers utilize bilingual practices to translate, interpret, and advise between adults and family members of different ages. Language brokers, I argue, use their bilingual learning to help their families and to show they care.

In the following conversation, conducted asynchronously through email, three current and former editors discuss the role of publishing in creating a disciplinary identity. Speaking from the academic (Villanueva), digital (Selfe), and community (Parks), and, often crossing these three categories, the editors discuss how the field has failed to fully embrace the full range of cultural, economic, and gender experiences that have been present in our field since its founding. In doing so, they also note that this absence has continued despite the ability of new publishing technologies to incorporate a wider range of embodied experiences, non-traditional knowledges, and literacy practices.

Educational literacy scholars have demonstrated the rich possibilities of the English language arts, and of queer-inclusive and critical literacy practices in particular, to disrupt heteronormativity and affirm gender and sexual diversity (GSD). However, there are few empirical studies that report what’s involved in preparing literacy teachers to organize classrooms in which recommendations for inclusive practice can land safely. In this article, we provide an account of what happened when we endeavored to prepare a group of secondary preservice literacy teachers for GSD-inclusive education in the context of a university-based literacy methods course and the negotiation of discomfort that ensued. Drawing on queer theoretical perspectives and Kumashiro’s (2001) framework of anti-oppressive education—which figures an important relationship among the concepts of desire, resistance, and crisis in unlearning common sense—we explore how the methods curriculum put many students into a state of emotional crisis. The sources of participants’ discomfort included learning that teachers have been complicit with the oppression of queer youth and wrestling with questions about how to bring their commitments to GSD-inclusive literacy instruction to bear in practice. Our findings suggest that participants who were willing to move toward their discomfort—what we call a deliberate move to lean in—positioned themselves to become strong advocates for queer youth. We argue that emotional discomfort should be figured as a productive tension in queer interventions in English education. Toward that end, we offer leaning in as a generative tool for grappling with the dynamics of heterosexism, homophobia,and broader oppression.

A growing body of research suggests that adolescents’ reading identities play a significant role in how they make decisions about their involvement with classroom literacy practices. In this yearlong study in an eighth-grade English classroom, I used a formative design to consider how an instructional model intended to support students’ reading identities and development influenced their talk about classroom reading practices. I closely followed five students with varying reading identities and abilities, documenting how they talked about texts within the context of the instruction they received. I found that both the quality and quantity of students’ talk shifted over the course of the study. All students, but particularly those with reading difficulties and negative reading identities, increased how often they talked about texts. They also changed the ways they spoke about texts, shifting from asking questions primarily about assignments to asking more questions about the content they were reading about. However, as students began to change their talk, others responded by attempting to silence them or limit what they said. This study shows that while teachers can create a context that helps students reconstruct their reading identities, they will need to foster a climate where students support each other’s growth as readers and development of reading identities. Therefore, changing the habitus as it relates to reading and being a reader becomes the responsibility of everyone in the class.

This article reports on research addressing the role of incident reporting at the workplace as a textual representation of lean management techniques. It draws on text and discourse analysis as well as on ethnographic data, including interviews, recorded interaction, and observations, from two projects on workplace literacy in Sweden: a study in an eldercare facility and a study in a large factory. Analysis of the data set demonstrates striking similarities, both in the way incident reporting texts are structured and worded and in the literacy practices that contextualize them. Dominant characteristics in the texts are the absence of actors and the structured, process-based approach of problems and problem handling. The forms often generate conflicts in the ways workers are asked to textually represent an incident. In this article, we argue that lean thinking has penetrated texts and literacy practices of two considerably different workplaces, and this has a large impact on the way workers are instructed to think and act with regard to problem handling techniques.

In rhetoric and composition, much of the research on Black college students of the 1960’s and 1970’s has uncomplicatedly tied these students to basic writing historiography and left under-challenged the representational politics that positioned them as the products of open admissions and marked them as politically militant but underprepared and/or remedial in their literacy practices. Extending our purview beyond open admissions and basic writing, this article applies pressure to these disciplinary trends by turning to the extracurriculum and recovering the political literacies of the student-activists of the Black Liberation Front International (BLFI), a Black student organization at Michigan State University from 1968 to 1975. For Black students such as the BLFI activists, there were nonacademic political spaces that provided them with opportunities to learn and practice literacy for political aims. This article focuses on one of these sites of literacy education—a place the BLFI activists called The People’s House. Drawing upon archival research and oral history, the author recounts how the BLFI activists’ relationship with the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James created the contexts for them to organize reading groups at The People’s House, where they developed a form of critical reading praxis that enhanced their abilities to engage reading as a political, rhetorical, and epistemic act. The collaborative writing the BLFI activists composed at The People’s House is also constructed as a site for translingual production, where they practiced how to use the linguistic and discursive resources they had available to them to attend to the rhetorical and material aspects of writing.

Literacy researchers might develop a richer understanding of how literacy practices construct communities and writers within those communities through more detailed attention to what writers do when they write. Very little is currently known about the processes by which individuals are actually composing in digital writing environments. However, in this cultural moment of sweeping social, linguistic, and technological literacy transformations, research on digital composing processes involves unique methodological challenges. Contemporary writing technologies intersect with digital literacy composing processes in ways that require critical ethical and methodological decision-making by literacy researchers at all stages of the research process. In this article, I argue that research on contemporary composing processes provides a crucial window onto literacy as a social practice, and further, that such research poses unique methodological challenges for researchers. Through an examination of Facebook writers’ composing processes, I articulate some of these challenges and offer guidance for future research.

Textbooks are commonly used to teach English in Africa, and most often are designed either by Westerners who are native speakers or by the Western-trained educators who took over the education of Africa’s children after colonialism. The issue is whether these educators can emancipate learners through the curricular choices they make in the versions of textbooks endorsed by their governments. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This article examines the content of nonfiction passages in four textbook series that have been used or are currently in use for English language and literacy education in Anglophone Cameroon to understand the shift in educational philosophies that might have occurred between the colonial period of the first textbook and the modern globalization period of current textbooks. It also questions the criteria for selection of passages to be included in these textbooks and their possible ramifications for learners’ identities as Africans,Cameroonians, and global citizens. Informed by postcolonialism, with a particular bent toward decolonial theory, the study utilizes content analysis, a qualitative research method that validates textual interpretations through inference (Krippendorf, 2004) and that seeks to understand meanings embedded in texts and their sociocultural/political significance. Findings reveal that while the Oxford English Readers for Africa of the colonial times are long gone, this series’ ideology of white superiority lingers in contemporary textbooks. They also reveal that there is an attempt to standardize cultural practices and belief systems based on Western models. This draws attention to minority rights, reminding educators to acknowledge pluralism in their literacy practices.

Literacy scholars have long studied migrant literacies in host countries, but have largely overlooked how emigration shapes literacy learning in migrants’ homelands. Yet homelands are crucial site sof literacy research, as left-behind family members of migrants learn new literacy practices to communicate with loved ones laboring or studying abroad. This article examines this overlooked phenomenon by reporting on an ongoing qualitative study of migrants’ family members and return migrants in a midsized town in Brazil. Further developing a sociomaterial framework for transnational literacy, it demonstrates that emigration promotes literacy learning among homeland residents via the circulation of “writing remittances”—the hardware, software, and knowledge about communication media that migrants often remit home. As objects of emotional and economic value, writing remittances demand literacy learning as one condition of their exchange. Because such learning, like money, is fungible, homeland residents often circulate and reinvest it locally, with varying returns. Writing remittances mediate both intimate interpersonal communication and the larger context of global economic inequity in which migrant families are implicated, making such remittances rich sites of print and digital literacy practice across borders.

This qualitative study traces different articulations of the public, emotional honesty, and economic advantage in the literacy sponsorship of detained writer Lil’ Purp by The Beat Within, a publication for incarcerated youth and adults. Findings are compared to The Beat’s own account of Purp’s progress, revealing a set of practices reminiscent of Socratic parrhêsia that revise understanding of literacy sponsorship by expanding it to a philosophical register. Because The Beat also becomes a site of affective solidarity among detained writers in a way that resists the directional logic of writing toward civic participation, the study supports thinking about affect in public writing not as a process that moves toward political action, but rather as action in the immediate space of its utterance and reception. Such findings have implications both for public writing pedagogy and for community-based literacy scholarship.

What does a twenty-first-century writing pedagogy look like? What principles should undergird contemporary writing pedagogy and practice? How should writing teachers today design writing courses, motivate student engagement, and promote literacy practices? Each of the five books reviewed here takes up these questions in calling for sensitivity and care in understanding students and the many ways that they are positioned in the world, for more attention to reading pedagogy in conjunction with writing, and for the continued study of transfer.

Eight English graduate students and a professor reflect on their semesterlong exploration of community literacy studies. The students, some in a MFA Creative Writing program and some doing doctoral work in literature, rhetoric, or English Education, discuss how the community literacies lens unsettled their relationship to English Studies.

This article argues for the importance of teaching reading in first-year composition courses within a metacognitive framework called mindful reading. Crucial for developing more comprehensive literacy practices that students can transfer into other courses and contexts, this framework encourages students to actively reflect on a range of reading practices in order to become more knowledgeable and deliberate about how they read. This work is intended to prepare students to successfully engage with the range of complex texts they will encounter throughout their postsecondary academic careers and beyond.

This article revisits the scholarship on emotion in composition studies and extends this work through a consideration of emotion in community-based writing courses. With examples from student reflection essays from one such course, Writing With the Community, I explore emotion as a generative aspect of the students’ semester writing projects for community organizations. In particular, I examine students’ emotional responses to their community work, which include empathy, shame, anger, and unease, as I argue that students’ emotions were an effective means of attaining their writing goals and a necessary component of their desire for social action and justice. I also offer three concepts from education theorists—emotional scaffolding, encouraging students to inhabit an ambiguous self, and emotion as a mode of critical inquiry—which I develop as strategies for achieving common goals in community-based writing courses.

This article uses data from a study of college students’ digital reading and writing to examine the influence of interface on literacy activity within participatory online spaces. While most existing work treats activity within these spaces largely as a function of individual interest in a space’s content, students’ firsthand accounts suggest that interface features and design play a significant role as well, particularly as students transition from one form of engagement or activity to another. Using Teena Carnegie’s framing of the interface as digital exordium, the author argues that, since participatory interfaces and the composition classroom share several central goals, students’ experiences with interface offer important lessons for translating that engagement to an academic setting.

This essay argues that literacy actors compose agency through the embodied practice of literacies in combination with self-aware feedback loops. The argument brings together recent conversations on agency, embodiment, and cognition in composition studies, neuroscience, and the humanities to develop the concept of discursive readiness potential. Discursive readiness potential refers to one’s embodied agency and accounts for the range of possible actions available to an actor on the basis of her or his past experiences. Furthermore, discursive readiness potential points to one’s capacity to navigate a field of potential literate practices into one actualized action. As such, the essay supports a renewed call for research on agency and embodied cognition in composition studies by outlining discursive readiness potential as a flexible process model for understanding how agents act in emergent discursive situations.

This article examines students’ literacy practices during Mass and other Catholic religious services in a multilingual, multiethnic urban Catholic school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It discusses three dimensions of their literacy practice: (a) how parents, teachers, and priests draw on the tradition of Catholic schooling and ritual to structure what constitutes literacy during Mass; (b) how students use body posture and performative orientations to the text of the liturgy to engage in these structured practices; and (c) how students strategically use these performative literacy practices for advantage and social positioning. These results invite complicating what literacy practices are valued in contemporary urban Catholic school and how opportunities to draw on these literacy practices are unequally distributed among students for unequal gain.

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.

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.

There are few researchers today in rhetoric and composition, particularly in emerging literacies, who are talking about transnational literacy practices and the effects of a changing global economy on migration and thus on literacy.In Del Otro Lado: Literacy and Migration across the U.S.-Mexico Border,

In fields such as sociolinguistics and composition and rhetoric, communication is increasingly understood as translingual, that is, as negotiated socially across languages. Those of us engaged in community literacy can and should recognize the deeply multilingual nature of the communities in which we work, and we should understand, embrace, and forward the translingual approach. Here I reflect on my first conscious attempt to teach translingually in a college course with a community-based learning component. I present an overview of the translingual orientation, reflect on the decisions I made as I prepared a college community-based learning course with translingual intentions but not overt translingual objectives, and examine some the students’ reflections that reveal their language attitudes at the end of the course. I argue that small, intentional decisions made towards a broader translingual orientation towards language and literacy make an immediate difference in how students think about language, and that those engaged in community literacy partnerships are in need of a theory of communication that the translingual approach can provide.

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.

Within community literacy scholarship, ecological perspectives are used to characterize the literacy and language practices of various groups.Director of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre, David Barton draws from biology to theorize ecology as the study of "the interrelationship of an area of human activity and its environment.It is concerned with how the activity-literacy in this case-is part of the environment and at the same time influences and is influenced by the environment" (29).The reciprocal nature of ecologies, and the way they account for the distribution, influence, and movement of organisms within and between environments makes ecology an ideal term for characterizing the relationships among groups, technologies, and cultures that influence the ways individuals learn, communicate, and interact with one another.In this keyword essay, I will highlight the appropriateness of ecology for describing networked communication and literacy practices, as well as offer an overview of how compositionists and community literacy practitioners have used ecological approaches in the work they do.It is necessary here to distinguish an ecological approach from one that is exclusively environmental.In 1989, environmentalist David Orr defined ecological literacy as "the demanding capacity to distinguish between health and disease in natural systems and to understand their relation to health and disease in human ones; knowledge of this sort is best acquired out of doors" (334).Ecological literacy in this respect is concerned with reading the natural environment.Orr's call for increased environmental awareness and attention to the ways humans impact environments remains increasingly urgent.However, this keyword essay focuses instead on how scholars and practitioners have adopted ecological metaphors to characterize literacy environments.The ecological approach I examine aligns more closely with that of ecocomposition theories than those of the ecological literacy Orr defines.In their Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition, Sid Dobrin and Christian Weisser define ecocomposition as "the study of the relationships between environments (and by that we mean natural, constructed, and even imagined places) and discourse (seeking, writing, and thinking)" (6).Dobrin and Weisser's approach does not exclude environmental concerns but instead makes the role of language and discourse central in making those concerns visible.As Rhonda Davis suggests in her discussion of ecocomposition and community literacy, "while ecological literacy and the pedagogical approaches that result do not focus exclusively on environmental concerns, they have the potential to expand participants' awareness of such concerns" (80).

Review Article| April 01 2015 Living Literacies of the Mountain Woman Whistlin’ and Crowin’ Women of Appalachia: Literacy Practices since College. By Sohn, Katherine Kelleher. Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. 224 pages. Meaghan Elliott Meaghan Elliott Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2015) 15 (2): 397–402. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2845241 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Meaghan Elliott; Living Literacies of the Mountain Woman. Pedagogy 1 April 2015; 15 (2): 397–402. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2845241 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 by Duke University Press2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

In Portuguese higher education, teachers from different scientific areas recognize that their students have difficulties with writing. Nevertheless, preparing students for academic writing is not a priority and any intervention depends more on the interest of particular teachers than on any institutional policy. The development of a more institutional approach to academic writing in Portugal will imply a deeper knowledge of the multifaceted reality of the students’ situation, involving identification of their own perceptions of their writing processes and of the academic writing practices they are subject to. This is the aim of our study, based on 1150 students’ answers to a questionnaire about literacy practices in Portuguese higher education.Our results show that students seem to be conscious of the procedural nature of writing and of the role and importance of planning, composing and reviewing in the course of their writing processes. As for their perceptions about institutional interventions aimed at fostering writing abilities and teacher feedback on their written work, the answers to the questionnaire allow us to conclude that such support is not frequently offered. There are, however, some differences in the way these issues are considered across the various fields of study.

John Trimbur's much-cited 1991 essay, "Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis," persuasively argues for a view of literacy crisis discourse as "always strategic," and demonstrates the ways in which it has reified "the meritocratic educational order" (285-286). This project considers Trimbur's argument close to 25 years later, examining twenty-first century literacy crisis discourses immersed inextricably in a technological age. The notion of literacy crisis is a popular trope in the field of composition, rhetoric and literacy studies. Scholars such as Bronwyn T. Williams, Michele Knobel, Colin Lankshear, James Paul Gee, Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail Hawisher among many others have developed innovative heuristics in order to understand the nature of literacy learning in a digital age and enrich readers' understanding of the epistemologies underlying new literacy practices. However, this innovative book project considers the ways in which literacy crisis discourses have reinvented themselves in the twenty-first century through a richly textured view of these varied discourses.

In the face of the $44 billion market—and rising—for foods labeled as “natural” (despite any formal regulatory oversight on the use of this term), this article examines multiple complex layers of community literacies and movements involving foods labeled as “natural,” including an increasing availability of “natural” foods and simultaneous rise in U.S. obesity rates, as well as grassroots movements that have challenged the use of “natural.” Then, using an online survey of 707 respondents in a localized community setting, I provide my own examination of literacies of “natural” foods by assessing specific consumer interpretations and regulatory knowledge of the word “natural” as it is found on food labels. Ultimately, I discuss what role these varying levels of literacies play in the rising U.S. movement to push back against the use of this claim in the face of an otherwise flourishing “natural” food market.

As more and more multimodal projects emerge through writing program curricula, and as community literacy projects redefine what it means to facilitate change and reciprocity through generating multiple texts for multiple audiences, we think it would be useful to consider the significance and prevalence of the selfie as a genre, particularly in regard to its potential power to inspire social activism and critical consciousness.

This article proposes permaculture, an ecological alternative to industrial agriculture, as a way to design first-year composition and community literacy classes. First, the paper connects permaculture with post-humanism to describe ecological community literacies—the type of knowledge that ecological theorists say we need to navigate the end of the anthropocene. Next, it describes assignments that can lead college students to this knowledge, and finally, it describes actual community literacy projects where college students can lead elementary students through assignments to gain this knowledge.

Pathways of Latinas and Latinos Writing in High School and College might seem a strange fit for a review in Community Literacy Journal.

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.

Chapter 1: Making Writing Accessible to All: The Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers and The FED, by Nick Pollard and Pat Smart Chapter 2: The Challenges of Circulation: International Networking of Homeless Publications, by Paula Mathieu Chapter 3: Respect, Writing, Community: Write Around Portland, by Sara Guest with Hanna Neuschwander and Robyn Steely Chapter 4: Listen to My Story: The Transformative Possibilities of Storytelling in Immigrant Communities, by Mark Lyons Chapter 5: Oral Histories as Community Outreach: Toward a Deeper Understanding of a Rural Public Sphere, by Laurie Cella Chapter 6: Unfinished: Story of sine cera, a Community Publication in Process, by Rachel Meads Chapter 7: Here in this Place: Write On! of Durham, North Carolina, by Kimberly Abels, Kristal Moore Clemons, Julie Wilson, Autumn Winters and Mahogany Woods Chapter 8: Sharing Space: Collaborative Programming Within and Between Communities, by Mairead Case, Annie Knepler, and Rupal Soni Chapter 9: Katrina in Their Own Words: Collecting, Creating, and Publishing Writing on the Storm, by Richard Louth Chapter 10: Writers Speaking Out: The Challenges of Community Publishing from Spaces of Confinement, by Tobi Jacobi and Elliot Johnston, with the SpeakOut! Writing Workshop Facilitators and Writers Chapter 11: A Bunch of Us Beg to Differ!: Queer Community Literacy and Rhetorics of Civic Pride, by A.V. Luce

Scholars have recently begun to conceive of literacy practices as drawing from resources that are simultaneously situated and extracontextual. In particular, studies of transnational literacy affirm the importance of both locality and movement in literacy studies. Continuing this inquiry into the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy, the author investigates the distinct effects that shuttling between national contexts have on the accumulation and use of genre knowledge. Specifically, through a case study of one Third Culture Kid student writer, the author reports on how her genre knowledge develops in response to transnational relocations between Italy and the United States and the way this transnational genre knowledge informs her writing of a high-stakes in-school genre. This case illustrates the value of rhetorical genre studies for understanding the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy and begins to outline the distinctiveness of transnational boundary-crossing practices.

English educators are contending with the proliferation of mobile devices in students’ lives, and with the imminent integration of mobile devices into classrooms. Concurrently, literacy researchers using social semiotic theories of multimodality to investigate adolescents’ digital composing have focused on screens, paying scant attention to the bodies moving with them. Responding to recent critiques of multimodality that have centered on a lack of attention to embodiment and affect, this article leverages the concept of real virtualities to avoid artificially bifurcating screen and body, and to contribute a beginning theorization of the embodied experience of composing with mobile devices, which includes feeling-histories, affective atmospheres, and the felt experience of time. The data analyzed in this article come from a 12-week enrichment course in which five adolescents composed digital narratives with iPods. The overarching analysis describes all literacy practices with mobile devices in the course, and the microanalysis, using multimodal interaction analysis, compares two students with contrasting histories of mobile device use. Findings show these students’ literacies as more body-centered than techno-centered, and evince tensions between institutionalized learning environments and adolescents’ affective, cultural histories of being mobile while engaged in literacy. Further, findings describe how the feeling of tools and semiotic material influenced the trajectories of students’ bodies and narratives. Theories of digital composition should continue expanding to account for connections between mobility and affect, and the pedagogical importance of motility. The changing nature of literacy in the milieu of mobile computing compels researchers to consider the role of the moving, feeling body in literacy with more scrutiny.

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.

Community literacy often engages with literacy practices-written, oral, visual, technological, social, and so forth-that occur and are scaffolded outside of traditional educational institutions. The writing done in community literacy projects, according to Peck, Flower, and Higgins, works to promote action and reflection while enabling people to work collaboratively and productively. In recognition of the multiple forms of literate practices and the types of community support that are needed and developed, a number of universities in the US have created community literacy programs. Carnegie Mellon University's Community Literacy Center, a notable example of this type of program, organizes the purposes and structural collaboration thusly: "At the Community Literacy Center (CLC) urban teens and adults, with the support of their Carnegie Mellon student mentors, use writing and public dialogue to take action and to address the dreams and problems of our urban neighborhoods. CLC writers produce powerful texts-petitions, plans, proposals, and newsletters" ("Hands On"). The benefit to both university students and community members is a collaborative workgroup dedicated to place-specific social action. Non-profit organizations have also formed, providing literacy support to particular communities, from Community Literacy Centers, Inc, which teaches adults to read, to Chicago's Open Books, which runs a volunteer bookstore and provides reading and writing programs.

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

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

The 2013 Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year's award recipients, Maureen Kendrick, Margaret Early, and Walter Chemjor, for their article Integrated Literacies in a Rural Kenyan Girls' Secondary School Journalism Club, which appeared in the May 2013 issue of RTE (Vol. 47, No. 4). This qualita- tive study examines an after-school journalism club held at an all-girls school in Kenya and reveals the ways that literacy practices can foster professionalization and identity formation for students. Kendrick et al. apply Turner's (1967) notion of liminality the realm of pure possibility (qtd. p. 395) to understand the transformation they witnessed in the students, especially in relation to the pres- ence of such materials as digital voice recorders and press passes. These items, in terms of Blommaert's (2003) theorizing of placed resources, assume a particular, local, situated meaning within the context of the club: they empower the students to do investigative journalism in their school and community. The intersection of a liminal space with placed resources allowed the girls to move from performance to competence in their journalistic roles, resulting in transformed identities. This study pushes all educators to consider the classroom as liminal space in order to locate and support such transformative literacy practices and opportunities.We applaud the authors' self-reported shift from a sole emphasis on the po- tential of the donated digital communication to facilitate students' acquisi- tion of digital literacies (p. 393) to the wider exploration of the journalism club as a resource-infused place that afforded the development of integrated literacy practices and experimentation along with new writer identities of empowerment (p. 394). Such a move celebrates the persistent agency of students and teachers who, together in their given space, make sense of the tools available-be they digital recorders, press passes, books, or standardized tests. Further, Kendrick et al. suggest that in making sense of those tools and how they might authentically be put to use, the teacher and his students also make sense of themselves as users of these ideologically rich tools.We particularly appreciate Kendrick et al.'s description of the students' meaning-making process as play; they take interest in students' experimentation with the resources made available to them and with the identities associated with those tools. In this conceptualization of what happens in the journalism club, the students and their play are ultimately more important than the particular tools with which they play. …

Contributing to everyday writing research, this article reports on an interview study of retired women who use writing in the context of the household. Supported by an analysis of participants’ writing artifacts, it describes the social and material gains the women effect via mundane writing forms including menus and grocery lists. Such practices are acquired from the women’s workplaces and families, and an extensive analysis of one case in particular highlights the convergence of literacy practices, ethnic heritage, and material conditions to consider the impact and significance of writing practices handed down through family knowledge, or “rhetorical heirlooms.”

This essay explores Black male literacy practices as institutional critique at a large Midwestern land grant university. Through documenting a student’s process of reinstatement at his university, I demonstrate how vernacular perspectives, language, and networking strategies are used for developing self-efficacy and critical literacies. Black college males can use critical literacies to effectively navigate asymmetrical power structures at predominately White universities.

This article suggests ways digital tools and platforms can help researchers capture the local and global forces that interanimate local literacy scenes. As a concrete example, we offer Remixing Rural Texas (RRT), describing the way this digital tool works to capture a targeted literacy scene: the civil rights efforts of two African American students on a recently desegregated campus in 1967–68. RRT features an eighteen-minute documentary about these efforts, remixed almost entirely from existing archival materials, and a data-source annotation tool that connects the local literacy scene to global events. We conclude with an extended treatment of local stakeholders and the way RRT enables more sustainable, reciprocal, and participatory partnerships with the local community.

y copy of the first issue of Literacy in Composition Studies is thoroughly marked up.It engages issues, questions, and even anxieties I have carried with me over my roughly twenty years as a teacher and literacy researcher.In an effort to continue the conversation I am going to take up two themes that thread through many of the initial articles and their responses.The first theme regards the conceptual tropes we use to describe our work.The second relates to transformative potential and, equally as important, limitations of scholarship that is directed to providing access and opportunity to historically disenfranchised students and communities.This interest in equity is something I believe many share across the areas of Literacy Education and Composition and Rhetoric.In his opening essay, Bruce Horner argues for a shift from spatial to temporal metaphors in the conceptualization of literacies.Spatial metaphors risk essentializing literacy practices-exoticizing or romanticizing them-and even reproducing the very autonomous ideologies the field has worked so hard to deconstruct.A methodological focus on temporality may help researchers work through some of these contradictions (Horner 4-5).In a similar vein, many of the subsequent authors invoke the terms "purpose, " "labor, " "intentionality, " "process, " "circulation, " "work, " and "movement, " a historicizing direction that I for the most part endorse, and which seems to be in line with the empirical realities of global migrations and transnationalism.My qualification is because phrases like "emergent dynamism" shade into the discourse of neoliberal incursions into education, which valorize innovation, as there will always be new literacies, and literate identities, to market.A renewed emphasis on temporality may also exist in tension with another acknowledgement made by several of the contributors: that there is often, following Pierre Bourdieu, significant social inertia and reproduction in the field of education, even as we work within and against the system to try to expand what constitutes academic knowledge and practice.This tension can induce some self-reflection and soul searching for scholars who try to balance an analytical disposition, the pressures to generate new terms and ideas for the academic market, and the desire to make a difference in students' lives.My own contribution engages these themes from the vantage point of having taught and conducted research with elementary school students and their families in predominantly under-

In 2010, we received a nationally competitive grant from the Ford Foundation to undertake cross-disciplinary, community-engaged work to shift public conversations around youth sexuality, health, and rights (YSHR). We came to the projects from our positions as a humanities scholar (Licona) and as a social science scholar (Russell). According to the Ford Foundation, “a deeper understanding of human sexuality is an essential element of human rights and healthy social relationships.” Beginning with this assumption, we seek to be informed by and to inform policies and local practices; to initiate broad conversations that address sexual health and healthy sexualities for youth; and ultimately to develop innovative collaborations, programs, and research.