This article reports on lessons learned from the first phase of an ongoing multimodal project aimed at promoting digital and environmental literacy in concert with access and accessibility on our university's main campus. We discuss an emerging, student-led locative media project, built to increase engagement with the North Woods, an approximately 300 acre parcel of unmanaged forests and wetlands on the north part of our campus. By layering together deep mapping and accessibility, this project intervenes in the binaries between art and science and nature and technology, with a strong focus on how digital, environmental, and community literacy can contribute to more accessible experiences.

This article confronts challenges faced by users of technical information with hearing impairments. The increase in digital documents since 2000 has led to multimodal technical multimedia that features aural information (i.e., meaningful sound). However, there is little effort to train technical communication professionals to make audio more accessible. Herein, we share how to use descriptions, captions and subtitles, transcription, and sign language to make sound an accessible part of today's digital life. We explain using four accessible design elements to address challenges faced by users of digital documentation who cannot hear the information. Ultimately, we support technical communicators seeking aural information justice for all.

This article explores the challenge of implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion literacies in popular buyer persona platforms such as HubSpot and FlowMapp. Drawing on a practitioner interview with a public relations and marketing director, Dr. Danielle Feldman Karr, this article contextualizes Feldman Karr's efforts to revise her design team's internal buyer persona construction process to better engage DEI issues. This article considers the successes and challenges of applying an ethics of care informed by Graham's Black feminist ethics in order to analyze how designers think about "the good life" (flourishing) in persona redesign.

This paper examines ChatGPT's use of evaluative language and engagement strategies while addressing information-seeking queries. It assesses the chatbot's role as a virtual teaching assistant (VTA) across various educational settings. By employing Appraisal theory, the analysis contrasts responses generated by ChatGPT and those added by humans, focusing on the interactants’ attitude, deployment of interpersonal metaphors and evaluations of entities, revealing their views on Australian cultural practice. Two datasets were analysed: the first sample (15,909 words) was retrieved from the subreddit r/AskAnAustralian and the second (10,696 words) was obtained by prompting ChatGPT with the same questions. The findings show that, while human experts mainly opt for subjective explicit formulations to express personal viewpoints, the chatbot's preference goes out to incongruent ‘it is’-constructions to share pre-programmed perspectives, which may reflect ideological bias. Even though ChatGPT displays promising socio-communicative capabilities (SCs), its lack of contextual awareness, required to function cross-culturally as a VTA, may lead to considerable ethical issues. The study's novel contribution lies in the in-depth investigation of how the chatbot's SCs and lexicogrammatical selections may impact its role as a VTA, highlighting the need to develop students’ critical digital literacy skills while using AI learning tools.

Composition studies seems relatively unified in the belief that “active,” “rhetorical,” and “conversational” modes of reading are students’ best hope for facing the challenges of college reading and writing tasks. As commonplaces, however, these descriptors mask both reading outcomes and the specific practices presumed to support them. Through an analysis of three popular composition textbooks, we disentangle and reveal some of the reading axiologies most fundamental to the field and which we contend these commonplaces gesture toward but leave vastly undertheorized. We argue that more precise explications of these distinct reading axiologies ultimately provide a contextualist framework for reading, helping students approach their reading-writing tasks with greater clarity, flexibility, and purpose.

Although research illustrates the benefits of biliteracy, most bilingual students will not have access to a bilingual education program in which they receive official instruction in all their languages. However, the English language arts can become a space where any teacher can support students’ biliteracy through purposeful curricular, instructional, and family engagement choices. This case study of two early childhood educators illustrates specific actions teachers took in their language arts instruction to support home language literacy development, along with English, even with languages they did not speak. Specifically, results illustrate that three key general ideas allowed them to support students’ biliteracy: gathering information about the students and their languages, incorporating the home languages into their classroom, and most notably, developing strong family partnerships for caregivers to play an active role in home language literacy instruction. In this article, we share their specific actions that other ELA educators can take and the response from two students from low-incidence languages: an Arabic-heritage speaker and a newcomer Russian speaker from Ukraine. This study illustrates humanizing, rather than standardizing, language arts instruction that disrupts monolingual norms in order to provide bilingual students (from emergent bilinguals to heritage speakers) a more equitable education.

Instructors have used Wikipedia to teach information literacy, composition, and as a supplement to the study of a specific topic. This webtext aims to lower the barriers-to-entry for using Wikipedia in advanced editing courses by providing an extensive overview and documentation through examples of the issues involved and a series of educational materials for both instructors and students.

Metacognitive reading awareness, involving cognitive process control and reading strategies, is linked to better comprehension and performance, but its relationship with intertextual integration strategies and the quality of argumentative essays remains unexplored. This study aimed to investigate the role of metacognition in employing integration strategies when reading conflicting texts. 69 undergraduate students participated in an online reading-writing activity, where they wrote argumentative essays based on conflicting texts about red meat consumption. We examined the students' use of intertextual integration strategies (refutation, weighing, synthesizing) and assessed their metacognitive awareness through their reflections on these strategies. The quality of the argumentative essays served as a measure of multiple text comprehension. The results indicated a lack of metacognitive awareness regarding integration strategies, with students overestimating their ability to employ these strategies. However, they demonstrated better understanding of refutational strategies based on the examples provided in their essays. Interestingly, students who were aware of and utilized these strategies in their essays performed better in the multiple-text comprehension task.

The Sloyd Training School, an early twentieth-century private school for teachers in Boston, attempted to legitimize the Sloyd method of handiwork. Specifically, its Alumni Association's publication Sloyd Record brought together educators across the country to make a case for Sloyd's relevancy and impact on the academic and professional development of students, particularly students who were working poor or receiving educations in non-traditional settings. Its contributors painted Sloyd as a form of knowledge and a resource, as a literacy, and their rhetorical effectiveness was predicated upon Sloyd's ability to be painted as such in its far-reaching effects and comprehensiveness.

The ability to work with data is an important skill for students enrolled in technical and professional communication programs, but students with limited mathematical and computer programming literacies might find it difficult to do basic data analysis or customize data visualizations. This article examines the extent to which ChatGPT can make data analysis and visualization more accessible for students with limited technical proficiency. The results suggest that although the tool is poised to have a substantial impact in helping students create effective data visualizations, its efficacy as a data analysis tool is more limited.

Preparing students to communicate in business has often been an overlooked area within literacy studies. With current calls by Cardon et al. (2024) to focus on core competencies in the business communication classroom with the emergence of generative AI, it is more important than ever to remember Berkenkotter and Huckin’s (1994) explanation that students will always learn in a form of “situated cognition embedded in disciplinary activities” (p. 3). This project, as a result, provides a framework to explore student experiences with business communication before students arrive on a college campus to better inform higher education stakeholders.

This article is the introduction to the Communication Design Quarterly special issue on digital life. It explains the exigency for this issue and details how digital literacies in technical and professional communication are complicated by emerging technologies. It also demonstrates the potential for moving toward a model of digital life as a flexible way of foregrounding and talking about the work we are all already doing to understand and improve our post-human lives.

In this article, we propose (re)designing privacy literacy as an essential component of our digital lives in an age of Generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI). Our study emphasizes the layered digital, technical, rhetorical, and algorithmic literacies associated with design thinking and genAI to support theorizing privacy literacy. We introduce Design as an analytical element complementary to Woods and Wason's (2021) multi-pronged framework for analyzing Terms of Service (ToS) documents. Using a cluster of Adobe Generative AI ToS, we illustrate the necessity of including Design , which allows those invested in Communication Design (CD) and Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) to interrogate how or if design supports or undermines values related to user privacy, data ownership, and informed consent. We conclude by detailing how collective surveillance apathy regarding emergent data infrastructures signal a Post-Surveillance era in our global society and digital lives.

This article examines the technological literacies reflected by participants in the transnational "White Paper Movement"/"A4 Revolution" in the Chinese diaspora, against the Chinese government's stringent "dynamic zero-COVID" policy. The analysis reveals how protestors engaged with the technological literacy framework of Hovde and Renguette (2017): functional and conceptual; critical and evaluative, in layered and interconnected ways. But these literacy skills are also extended tactically where they must not only know how to use technologies well, but also understand how a technology works enough in order to use it subversively. Thus, this article proposes a tactical technological literacy to contribute to the theorization of a "post-digital" life-especially in transnational activism contexts-where not only do people have to consider how (not) to use technologies (in the broadest sense) in both online and offline spaces but also how technologies may impose constraints and oppression on their daily life. The article ends with some pedagogical implications on how to foster a tactical technological literacy in TPC classrooms.

This article reports on lessons learned from the first phase of an ongoing multimodal project aimed at promoting digital and environmental literacy in concert with access and accessibility on our university's main campus. We discuss an emerging, student-led locative media project, built to increase engagement with the North Woods, an approximately 300 acre parcel of unmanaged forests and wetlands on the north part of our campus. By layering together deep mapping and accessibility, this project intervenes in the binaries between art and science and nature and technology, with a strong focus on how digital, environmental, and community literacy can contribute to more accessible experiences.

The FemTech industry, a booming segment of the health technology market, trades in feminist empowerment largely by data tracking and collection. As issues of privacy and surveillance related to users' data collection have grown, scholars in health, design, and communication have explored how health-related technologies complicate the liberatory potential of self-tracking and self-monitoring health, signaling digitally collected, intimate data as concerning and gesturing toward critical digital literacy as a requirement for technology users. By analyzing user comments about pelvic floor training devices, this article reframes intimate data to understand the ways that people create and use it to learn about themselves. This move demonstrates a new kind of literacy: biodigital literacy, which I offer as a concept and framework that highlights the unique competencies of embodied digital life.

This article confronts challenges faced by users of technical information with hearing impairments. The increase in digital documents since 2000 has led to multimodal technical multimedia that features aural information (i.e., meaningful sound). However, there is little effort to train technical communication professionals to make audio more accessible. Herein, we share how to use descriptions, captions and subtitles, transcription, and sign language to make sound an accessible part of today's digital life. We explain using four accessible design elements to address challenges faced by users of digital documentation who cannot hear the information. Ultimately, we support technical communicators seeking aural information justice for all.

Digital life for older women seeking employment includes several hurdles. Their stories and experiences illuminate the range of pressures they're experiencing (e.g., societal, economic) and the negative emotions that accompany those. Their challenges illustrate why some of their digital tools are hard to work with and how they can have a negative impact on them. Two women also named internal dialogues that may also influence their experience with digital tools and may prevent them from having the confidence or desire to develop their digital literacies further.

This research used a participant observer method to describe and analyze the digital literacy practices of one grassroots community group that organized around the issue of municipal city council redistricting. The group proposed and advocated for city council district lines that reflected the minority-majority makeup of the city's population. The group effectively crafted different genres, including informational Google Docs, maps, form letters, petitions, social media graphics, press releases, and public speeches to advocate for their position. This research argues for the study of activists' digital literacy practices and the role of digital technology in activist efforts.

This article explores the challenge of implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion literacies in popular buyer persona platforms such as HubSpot and FlowMapp. Drawing on a practitioner interview with a public relations and marketing director, Dr. Danielle Feldman Karr, this article contextualizes Feldman Karr's efforts to revise her design team's internal buyer persona construction process to better engage DEI issues. This article considers the successes and challenges of applying an ethics of care informed by Graham's Black feminist ethics in order to analyze how designers think about "the good life" (flourishing) in persona redesign.

The predictive relationship between handwriting automaticity and children's writing performance is well documented. However, less is known about the relationship between keyboarding automaticity and children's keyboard-based writing performance. In this exploratory study, we examined the unique contributions of automaticity in both writing modalities in predicting Grade 2 students (N = 49) paper-based and keyboard-based writing performance (i.e., compositional quality and fluency) after controlling for students’ literacy skills (i.e., spelling, word reading, and reading comprehension), attitudes toward writing, gender, and nesting due to classroom. Multilevel modelling results showed that automaticity predicted students’ paper-based compositional quality and keyboard-based compositional quality and fluency. Findings further suggested that the relationship between automaticity and writing performance was stronger in keyboard-based text composing than in paper-based text composing. These results reinforce the role of automaticity of transcription skills in predicating the writing performance of beginning writers across modalities and stress the significance of explicit pedagogy and frequent instances of practice to promote the mastery of transcription skills across modalities in the early years of schooling.

Drawing from a qualitative study, this article advocates for challenging myths about the traditional graduate student. We discuss how these myths create a sense of unbelonging for graduate students, and we call attention to the exigency for transforming graduate programs to validate and sustain students’ diverse literacies and linguistic resources.

Research in feedback literacy (Carless & Boud, 2018; Molloy, Boud, & Henderson, 2020; Yu & Liu, 2021; Zhang & Mao, 2023) explores student use of written feedback and barriers to feedback uptake; the role of faculty in designing contextually appropriate feedback has been termed teacher feedback literacy (Carless & Winstone, 2023). When feedback does not achieve desired results, faculty must evaluate their feedback practices; they may be unaware of underlying features that hinder feedback effectiveness. In this paper, a long-time instructor of first-year college composition (FYC) interrogates her own feedback practices using tools from the specialization dimension of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT, Maton 2014; Maton 2016a; Maton 2016b). A translation device (Maton & Chen, 2016) connecting feedback data to LCT concepts was constructed to code responses to 105 student drafts. Subsequent analysis reveals that knowledge codes, which legitimate student achievement through demonstration of specialized knowledge and skills, predominate in the feedback. Comments foregrounding the dispositions, intentions, and agency of the student writers occur much less frequently. From these results, the instructor identifies potential barriers to student feedback uptake, including code mismatches and code confusion, which may be mitigated through adjustments to written responses and classroom instruction.

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Research into the contribution of multimodality to language learning is gaining momentum. While most studies pave the way for new understandings of language teaching and learning, there is an increasing demand for comprehensive assessment practices, particularly within higher education contexts. A few studies have emphasized the importance of reflecting on and establishing criteria for the assessment of multimodal literacy. This is necessary to understand students’ contributions in detail and to provide them with effective support in developing their multimodal skills. This study discusses the assessment of multimodal writing in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) contexts. It presents the design of an analytical tool for assessing multimodal texts and provided an example of its application. This tool covers assessment categories such as language use, content expression, interpersonal meaning, multimodality, and creativity and originality. As an example, we focus on the multimodal writing of a video game narrative, a genre that requires the integration of multiple modes of communication to convey meaning more effectively. Finally, this study offers pedagogical insights into the assessment of multimodal literacy in ESP.

Abstract This article addresses a pervasive but undertheorized literacy practice: ghostwriting. Drawing on a five-year interview study with undergraduate students, I describe the many ghostwriting tasks that participants were asked to perform for their co-op jobs and how they perceived those tasks. Overall, students were bewildered by ghostwriting and found it very different from, and in some ways at odds with, their academic writing. Given the ubiquity of ghostwriting and the likelihood that much of it will be offloaded to artificial intelligence in coming years, I call for and begin to outline a critical pedagogical approach to ghostwriting grounded in critical language awareness.

Zachary C. Beare is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University. His work, which studies how identity and emotion mediate rhetorical activity, appears in College Composition and Communication, College English, Composition Studies, the Journal of Cultural Research, Reflections, Writing on the Edge, and in edited collections.Miriam Chirico specializes in dramatic literature and comedy studies at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she is professor of English. She is the author of The Theatre of Christopher Durang (2020) and coeditor of How to Teach a Play: Essential Exercises for Popular Plays (2020). She has written articles about humor for Studies in American Humor, Text & Presentation, and Shaw: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies.Chris W. Gallagher is professor of English and vice provost for curriculum initiatives at Northeastern University. He has published widely on the teaching and assessment of writing and on educational innovation in K–12 and higher education. He is author or coauthor of five books, most recently College Made Whole: Integrative Learning for a Divided World (2019).Bev Hogue serves as McCoy Professor of English at Marietta College in southeastern Ohio, where she teaches courses in American literature and writing. She recently edited Teaching Comedy (2023), a collection of essays published by the Modern Language Association.Erika Luckert is a PhD candidate in composition and rhetoric at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her research focuses on writing pedagogies at the intersection of composition and creative writing, with an emphasis on social and collaborative practice. Erika's recent work includes articles in JAEPL, the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and Writing on the Edge, as well as poems in Room Magazine, South Carolina Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.Nancy Mack is a professor emeritus of English at Wright State University and author of Engaging Writers with Multigenre Research Projects and two volumes about teaching grammar with poetry. She has published articles and chapters about teaching memoir, emotional labor, and working-class and first-generation students. She has won state and university teaching awards. Her community service projects include partnerships with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, Dayton Public Television, and the Ohio Department of Education.Jessica Masterson is an assistant professor of teaching and learning at Washington State University Vancouver, where her work examines youth literacies and democratic possibilities in K–12 school settings. Her work appears in Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, and Democracy and Education.Peter Wayne Moe is an associate professor of English and the director of the University Writing Program at Whitworth University. He teaches first-year writing, creative nonfiction, composition pedagogy, rhetorical theory, and a course on the sentence. He is the author of Touching This Leviathan, a Seattle Times favorite book of 2021.Shari J. Stenberg is professor of English and women's and gender studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her most recent book is Persuasive Acts: Women's Rhetorics in the Twenty-First Century (with Charlotte Hogg). Her work appears in CCC, College English, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Composition Studies, and in edited collections.Luke Thominet is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric in the English Department at Florida International University. His work examines rhetorics of health and medicine, user experience in video game development, and applications of design thinking to pedagogy and academic program development. His research has appeared in Patient Education and Counseling, Technical Communication Quarterly, Communication Design Quarterly, and the Journal of Technical and Business Communication, as well as in the edited collections Effective Teaching of Technical Communication, Keywords in Design Thinking, and User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice.

Integrated writing (i.e., writing from sources) being a complex process, requires various linguistic and cognitive skills interacting with each other in a dynamic way. While recent studies have increasingly documented that writing processes are driven by a suite of cognitive abilities named executive function (EF), their roles in a literacy activity as complex as integrated writing remain underexplored. To address this core issue, the present study aimed to examine the direct and indirect effects of EF skills on students’ performance of a Chinese listening-reading-writing task. A total of 135 Chinese undergraduates were involved, completing a battery of tests, including a computerized Chinese integrated writing task measuring their writing performance and five EF tasks measuring inhibition, cognitive flexibility, working memory (auditory-verbal and visual-spatial), and planning skills respectively. Students’ integration activities were also recorded using a writing webpage. The path model indicated that inhibition, visual-spatial working memory, and planning skills could significantly and directly predict students’ writing performance and the visual-spatial working memory could indirectly predict writing performance via the mediation of source-text switches while listening. This study offers new preliminary insights into the association between EF and integrated writing among Chinese undergraduates; pedagogical implications for the teaching of integrated writing are also discussed.

This study captured the perspectives of 887 working adults to explore views of professionalism, authenticity, and effectiveness of AI-generated messages. With a 3 (message type) × 2 (disclosed vs. undisclosed) × 2 (ChatGPT-generated vs. Google-generated AI messages) design, professionals generally view AI-generated content favorably in all conditions. Across all messages, professionals consistently rated the AI-generated messages as professional, effective, efficient, confident, and direct. They rate sincerity and caring slightly lower in some disclosed conditions, particularly for ChatGPT-generated messages, suggesting the importance of tool selection when using generative AI for workplace writing. Those professionals who use AI more frequently for work are more likely to view AI-assisted writing as authentic, effective, and confidence-building. Implications for teaching business communication, including the need to address AI literacy, and suggestions for future research are provided.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Introduction:</b> This teaching case provides readers with a fully articulated teaching case that prepares students in engineering to communicate with and about standards. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> We use the ASTM standards database to train students to read and engage with research in regulatory documents. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case:</b> By situating this standards research within an emergent case study, students are introduced to additional constraints for writing as an engineer, including budgetary constraints, slide decks, and summary documents. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methods:</b> We assess the case study through student self-report data and provide readers with recommendations for applying this case study in their own programs and classrooms. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> Students who engaged in the standards project reported that they were able to connect their assigned work to their futures as engineers. They also reported an increase in their understanding of how to read and research using standards. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> Standards and other forms of regulatory writing are an important part of daily literacy practices for working engineers; introducing them as a part of required engineering communication courses can augment our current practices in STEM communication.

This essay seeks to add to existing conversations about the role of first-year composition (FYC) in relation to students’ subsequent literacy experiences. Using data from an open-ended survey of former students five years after they completed FYC, in which they describe their current reading and writing practices and reflect on how these practices connect (or fail to connect) to what they recall from FYC, this article positions the findings within the context of scholarship on WAW and TFT and ultimately calls for increased attention to the situated nature of writing as part of the FYC curriculum at two-year colleges.

In this timely book, Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women's Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Coretta M. Pittman skillfully reveals how the “hidden voices” of the Women's Era and the New Negro Era found agency through creative expression. Pittman covers a diverse array of texts (essays, speeches, plays, blues songs, novellas, etc.) and carefully traces the literary techniques utilized by Black women to demonstrate the importance of literacy for the advancement of Black people during this time. Unlike other scholars of this period, who have primarily focused on middle-class and elite Black women, Pittman instead concentrates on the Black women “hidden in plain sight.” According to Pittman, the Black women hidden in plain sight were “struggling to reconcile the promises offered by literacy and education over the stark realities of their racialized experiences” (xix). For these Black women, literacy was an important political act. In chronological order, Pittman synthesizes the literary contributions of Black women across genre as well as the theoretical contributions of their work.In order to control the influx of immigrants, mass public education at the turn of the twentieth century was implemented as a form of social control. Drawing on Harvey J. Graff's work, Pittman brilliantly explicates the entanglement of literature and citizenship during this period. Literacy helped enact moral codes intended to unify a heterogenous nation. However, the circulating literature contained harmful and stereotypical messages about Black Americans. While white middle-class mothers used literature to impart morals to their children, Black mothers were concerned about representations of Black people in popular literature. Advocates during the Woman's Era, such as Cooper and Matthews, believed literacy was integral to Black Americans’ social advancement and their perception of society.Pittman begins by analyzing Anna Julia Cooper's essay “The Negro as Presented in American Literature” and Victoria Earle Matthew's speech “The Value of Race Literature,” both exhorting Black people to pick up the pen to respond discursively to the circulating public discourse of Black Americans as inferior. Cooper makes the compelling argument that for American literature to encompass all facets of the nation, it must prominently feature Black subjects in a truthful light. Cooper mocks white authors for their negative portrayals of Black Americans and explains how they fail to capture Blackness. As a corrective, Cooper urges Black Americans to write about their own experiences to demonstrate the multifaceted nature of the Black experience. While Cooper admonished white authors, Victoria Earle Matthews attempted to expand the prominent understanding of race literature. In her speech, Matthews includes “histories, biographies, scientific treatises, sermons, addresses, novels, poems, books of travel, miscellaneous essays and the contributions to magazines and newspapers” (23). Furthermore, Matthews argued that any work created by a Black American ought to be included in the category of race literature instead of merely works by white people written about Black Americans. Matthews believed broadening the scope of what constituted race literature was essential for Black Americans to write through the trauma of enslavement. And, as Pittman demonstrates, Cooper and Matthews believed that literature about Black Americans could exercise transformational power in the “hope to transform [readers'] state of being personally, communally, and materially” (xxi). This message was primarily disseminated to Black clubwomen, whose transformative literary practices enabled Black women to craft new realities outside of their oppressive conditions.Katherine D. C. Tillman and Pauline E. Hopkins published novellas showcasing how education could transform the status of Black Americans with the proper context. Tillman's novella Beryl Weston's Ambition: The Story of an Afro-American Girl's Life imagines the life of Beryl Weston, whose endless pursuit of education elevates her status and uplifts her entire community. Tillman's novella participates in the idealization of Black Americans, forming “a middle-class cultural ethos,” more contemporaneously “respectability politics” (47). In contrast, Tillman's novel Clancy Street presents an alternative perspective on how the lack of education of formerly enslaved persons made them “underprepared for citizenship” (49). The Waters family in Clancy Street is a working-class Black family who financially struggles post-emancipation and engages in immoral behavior. Throughout the novel, the Waters family gains literacy and education that helps them embody the civic ideal of the time. Even though Tillman's novellas dramatize the lives of Black families of different class backgrounds, both publications ultimately reinforce the aim to achieve a Black middle-class ethos. Literacy would increase knowledge of the community and the self and family to transform society.Similarly, in Hopkins's Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self, Ruel Briggs, a white-passing Harvard medical student, draws on his mystical powers to revive the dead. Ruel embarks on an expedition to Ethiopia, where he finds that his royal roots enable his powers and creates an ideal society wherein Black people rule themselves. The novel's overall theme is how Black people must not only use education to improve their social status but also to achieve self-actualization. Tillman and Hopkins's works participate in the idea of the transformative power of literacy, which yearns for Black people to achieve middle-class status while also serving as a rejection of the circulating retrogression theories that post-emancipation Black men would return to their “naturally bestial selves” (45). Authors in the New Negro Era would change the general approach to dispel these racist theories through literature.As Pittman chronicles, the New Negro Era saw a marked shift in Black women's perception of the capacity of literacy to address oppression in the United States. Unlike transformational literacy advocates of the Woman's Era, who sought validation from white people, the literature produced during the New Negro Era recognized the limitations of Black Americans’ literacy. Pittman argues that creative expression no longer focused on “domesticity and sentimentalism” but instead explored “despair and realism” (74). She attributes the New Negro Era's emergence to Angelina Weld Grimké’s play Rachel. In Rachel, the Loving family moves North to escape the rampant threat of lynching in the South, only to realize that despite their educated status, they struggle to secure employment and remain vulnerable to racial violence. This play highlights the struggles of the emerging Black professional class, who realized that education was insufficient to overcome the systemic racism enshrined into law post-Reconstruction via Jim Crow legislation. Pittman argues that Grimké’s play illustrates how racism leaves a long-lasting psychological effect on individuals and communities. Grimké challenged the belief that Black women engaging in middle-class domesticity would resolve racism and railed against the racist white forces keeping Black Americans in a second-class status. Jessie Redmont Fauset's novel Comedy: American Style is a satirical novel criticizing the idea that racial uplift was a “zero-sum game” (113). The novel's protagonist Olivia only increases her status in society through the denial of her Blackness by embracing her ability to pass as white. According to Pittman, Olivia's insistence on passing is the “result of a nation unwilling to let go of its racist ideals” (135). Fauset's novel is a form of what Pittman terms “transactional” literacy, as the characters do not interrogate the looming societal conditions from which their oppression originates. Transactional literacy is defined as gaining “advanced literacy skills to accrue social and material capital sometimes intraracially and/or other times interracially” (xxi). In contrast, Pittman analyzes Zora Neale Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, to showcase how Hurston gave Black working-class souls “form as fully realized characters” (150). Hurston's novel grapples with competing theories of the best avenue for formerly enslaved people to participate in society: vocational school or higher education. Through the characters of John and Lucy, Hurston works through the critical debate of the time between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington about the value of education. Overall, these literary forms depart from notions of respectability and investigate Black life in all its complexities in an era of significant racial violence.Pittman expands on existing scholarship discussing Black women in Blues by arguing that Blues offered an opportunity for Black women to divest from middle-class ideals (such as motherhood and domesticity) and move along a path towards liberation. Even though Blues has been widely studied by musicologists, historians, anthropologists, and so on, Pittman demonstrates the necessity for its incorporation into literary and rhetorical studies. Most notably, Pittman argues that Blues participates in a specular form of literacy. Specular literacy “is the practice of reflecting back properties (e.g., writing conventions and styles, dialects, values, traditions) of one's racial and class community” (xxii). Pittman examines Mamie Smith's song “Crazy Blues,” which describes the life of a jilted female lover and how she reacts to the betrayal. Smith's hit led to a drastic increase in Black women Blues singers being recorded. These works reflect alternative perspectives on Black women's options for endurance during this period: “turn inward and forsake desire and family obligations” or “turn outward and seek revenge” (xii). Similarly, Ma Rainey's songs demonstrated that the “love and sensual lives of Black people also needed to be attended to” (143). In Ma Rainey's songs, a rejection of white normativity was connected to sexual queerness, expressed publicly through art. Steve Goodson argues that Ma Rainey “would assert her dignity, her autonomy, and her humanity through her music and lyrics, all while tactically encouraging her listeners to do the same” (146). Blues, Pittman argues, gave singers the agency to address taboo subjects, articulate Black experience, and validate working-class Black American life.A notable strength of Pittman's work is the careful tracing of concepts over time. For example, Pittman makes evident Anna Julia Cooper's influence on the creation of the term intersectionality when she covers the lineage of the concept (xxii–xxvii). Cooper repeatedly discussed how race and gender influence the plight of Black women, which inspired Pauli Murray to create the term “Jane Crow.” Kimberlé Crenshaw later expanded on Murray's Jane Crow to develop a legal framework for intersectionality as a lens and resource for intervention. While this book has many strengths, one weakness is that Pittman does not truly define agency. Pittman mentions the concept with repeated reference to how literature and music could increase Black women's agency but does not provide an in-depth discussion of Black women's relationship to agency. Given the popularity of the term agency in the field, future scholars could use Pittman's work to craft an account of Black women's agency across time.This book is an excellent read for those interested in the intersection of African American literature and feminist public address. Tracing the theoretical importance of Black women's literary productions, Pittman expertly demonstrates how scholars can use close textual analysis to understand more fully the past lives of Black women. For example, students could examine how Anna Julia Cooper's public addresses incorporated “parable, analogy, derision, and humor” to communicate to nationwide audiences (14). Students could also conduct a rhetorical analysis of how the form of Blues “relies on verbal play, repetition, indirection, and subversion as vernacular modes of expression” (95). The summaries included by Pittman not only assist the reader's comprehension but also make apparent the injustices against which the authors were writing. This book contributes to the ongoing project of tracing Black women's literary contributions, who, to varying degrees, believed that literature could remedy racial tension and violence.

Because algorithms form the audiences that reach us online, students need algorithmic literacy as well as rhetorical awareness when learning to write online. This article examines student writing to explore how students can use theorycrafting to systematically test an algorithm to gain more critical awareness of how the algorithm functions and forms publics online. Finally, this article explores how students can use the algorithmic knowledge they learned from theorycrafting to reflect on the ethics their algorithm constructs for users and how it constructs ad hoc publics. The article then explores how students can create multimodal intersectional counternarratives in response that they can also more effectively circulate online to more deliberately construct inclusive online publics.

This essay reconsiders the role of the “self-sponsored” writer in the attention economy by suggesting that contemporary do-it-yourself publishers have not only attempted to negotiate a public sphere which has linked "self-sponsored" to "entrepreneurial," but contend with a digital environment that makes it difficult to parse authorial desire from neoliberal rationality. Ultimately, this essay suggests that materialist models of circulation should be accounted for in studies of extracurricular literacies, specifically by drawing from the literacy narratives of public writers such as zine authors. It thus provides a method of analysis for understanding how these writers, who must necessarily exist within a broader political economy, have developed publishing strategies to negotiate an alternative position — a stance which can benefit not only our disciplinary research on literacy and public writing, but our publicly-oriented composition classrooms as well.

The book Writing and reading connections: Bridging research and practise, edited by Zoi A. Philippakos and Steve Graham (2023) is a collection of works concerning writing–reading relationships and suggestions for instructional practices that can support the synergetic development of writing and reading. The editors commence by pointing out that an instructional divide that promotes separate instruction of reading and writing exists. With this book, they argue that this divide is unfortunate and that bringing together writing and reading in research and in the classroom can yield positive effects.

Dignity is an important construct for all students, especially those whose voices and perspectives have been historically relegated to the margins because of their racial, ethnic, and linguistic identities. With recent legislation that stands to further calcify the systemic oppression and racial violence that remains so deeply entrenched in US schools, it is urgent to understand how minoritized students broker dignity—or feelings of self-worth, value, and well-being—while navigating multiple and oftentimes intersectional keloids of dehumanization. Currently, we know very little about how dignity is developed and enacted by students within educational settings, and even less attention is paid to how literacy factors into these engagements. To address this gap, my paper is guided by the following inquiry, explored within the context of a yearlong youth participatory action research class: How do BIPOC, middle school youth leverage critical literacies and epistemologies to negotiate dignity? Data for this paper, which were drawn from a larger, critical ethnographic study, were analyzed using what I name as a literacies of dignity framework that utilized theories of critical literacies (Freire, 1970/2000; Janks, 2013), felt dignity (Gallagher, 2004; Stephens & Kanov, 2017), and youth epistemologies (Filipiak, 2020; Green et al., 2020; Kelly, 2023) to explore how middle school youth examined and critiqued three sites of devaluation: media, schooling, and adult/youth relationships. Findings reveal important ways youth were able to reimagine ways of being together and caring for one another in social, educational, and even global contexts that rendered them disposable, leveraging critical literacy engagements to broker moments of collective intimacy and vulnerability. This, in turn, fueled their sense of dignity, offering important implications for justice-centered literacy education.

Yonas Mesfun Asfaha is an associate professor at Asmara College of Education in Eritrea, and recently he accepted the role of acting dean of the College of Education. He is a well-known literacy scholar specializing in African literacies as well as multilingual language policy as it relates to education. Lydiah Kiramba is an associate professor at the University of Nebraska and is originally from Kenya. Her areas of expertise include multilingual and ESL education, language and literacy teaching and assessment, and bi/multiliteracy development. Lydiah Kiramba talked with Yonas Asfaha via Zoom during the spring/summer months of 2023 about epistemologies and ontologies that have significantly influenced his work.

The recent speculative turn in literacy, English education, and other ELA-related fields has brought renewed energy for redesigning English teaching and learning through genre awareness. However, extant work on speculative genres of reading, writing, and literary study assumes that ELA teachers are prepared or, more fundamentally, aware of these genres and their unique features. Addressing this gap, this article presents a single intrinsic case of Carlos, a queer man of Color and bilingual elementary teacher, as he cultivated genre awareness through an interactive approach to genre pedagogy through restorying. Based on a rhetorical genre studies approach, Carlos’s case demonstrates how English teachers might expand their genre repertoire to include speculative genres and integrate them into their classrooms. This article concludes by advocating for the integration of speculative literacies into English teacher education, doing so to disrupt normative realities tied to white supremacy and homophobia within the field.

Reviewed by: Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Small Histories during World War II, Letter Writing, and Family History Methodology by Suzanne Kesler Rumsey Pamela VanHaitsma Suzanne Kesler Rumsey, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Small Histories during World War II, Letter Writing, and Family History Methodology, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2021. 220 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2090-4. Blessed Are the Peacemakers began with literacy scholar Suzanne Kesler Rumsey's inheritance of her grandmother Miriam's papers, which included a surprising number of letters exchanged with her first husband, Benjamin Kesler, between 1941 and 1946. Rumsey "was shocked to discover what their lives were like … in the midst of World War II" (2). As "one might expect of war-era letters," they were "filled with love and longing, anguish at being apart, uncertainty and anxiety about the war and the country's future." But, in Miriam and Ben's case, the newlyweds were separated because Ben was a member of a historic peace church and conscientious objector. As an alternative to serving in the United States military, he was conscripted into unpaid labor in Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps, leaving Miriam to support the family while she too avoided better-paying jobs that contributed to the War. Working with their letters, Rumsey reconstructs the story, or small-h history, of her grandparents, weaving their narrative into the large-H History of conscientious objectors during WWII. Rumsey demonstrates the importance of small-h histories to the history of rhetoric, models how to develop them through family history methodology (FHM), and illuminates the role of love letters in both this historiographic work and the relationships they record. Rumsey's introduction sets out "three salient themes" that are woven throughout the book: "the value of small histories, the methodology of FHM, and the study of conduit and platform within letter writing" (7). Situating it within the tradition of ars dictaminis, Chapter 1 theorizes these two concepts—conduit and platform—as characterizing the nature of Miriam and Ben's letters. The letters were a conduit, "a vehicle or a means by which they could transmit the intangible," such as love (15). Through "the physical, tangible materiality of the letters," they also "functioned as a platform upon which they built their relationship" (15). The remaining chapters are organized chronologically and can be understood in two parts. The first part tells the story of the couple's early courtship and letter writing leading up to marriage (Chapter 2) and then during their separation only months later as Ben's first CPS placement [End Page 93] began at Sideling Hill in Pennsylvania (Chapters 3–8). Illustrating the FHM she developed, Rumsey moves from "extensive archival digging and secondary source reading" (33) on the broader context of historic peace churches and faith-based nonresistance (Chapter 3), to the specific story recorded in Miriam and Ben's letters. These letters document their "epistolary nesting" when first separated (Chapter 4), the details of Ben's labor at the CPS camp (Chapter 5), and Miriam's work as a young wife left responsible for supporting them (Chapter 6). Here Rumsey demonstrates the power of small-h histories, not only to show what the life of an individual conscientious objector was like, but also to uncover the lesser-known story of CPS women. Subsequent chapters nuance Miriam and Ben's story by identifying moments when the conduit and platform of their letter writing fell short: when dealing with family conflicts about time-sensitive financial matters (Chapter 7) and when coping with separation during their first Thanksgiving and Christmas as newlyweds (Chapter 8). Throughout this part of the book, Rumsey's analysis might be developed further in conversation with scholars who investigate the rhetoric of the specifically romantic subgenre.1 They offer approaches to exploring how norms of gender and sexuality get embedded in and challenged through epistolary rhetoric. Regardless, Rumsey's theory and analysis of conduit and platform will prove useful for any rhetoricians and/or historians working with love letters. The second part of Blessed Are the Peacemakers turns to Ben's next CPS placement at the Rhode Island State Hospital for Mental Diseases, where Miriam was able to join him...