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

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

Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women edited by Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi; From the Garden Club: Rural Women Writing Community by Charlotte Hogg; Whistlin; Women of Appalachia: Literacy Practices Since College by Katherine Kelleher Sohn

In the research project Literacy Practices in Working Life, the role played by reading and writing in common nonacademic occupations in Sweden was investigated. The results highlight not only some typical ways of using writing to frame units of work but also differences reflecting the main focus of work (“people” or “things”) and overall organizing principles. This article deals with patterns in the use of writing, which may be related to modern ways of organizing work (efficiency and flexibility, personal responsibility, identification with the company, etc.). Case studies show a range of literacy practices—running from extensive and rather complicated uses of writing connected with individual responsibility to very restricted and dependent uses of reading and writing governed by a top-down organization. Examples illustrate how emerging ways of governing work through written discourse, related to the new, knowledge-based work order, create very different roles for workers.

Like other seemingly ordinary materials (cookbooks, street art, scrapbooks, etc.) the subject of our investigation “holy cards or (in Italian) immaginette” often function as rich repositories of personal and cultural memory as well as indicators of popular literacy practices. But to relegate them to the category of ephemera, as is customary with materials of this sort, diverts attention from their significant cultural and pedagogical value.

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

This article explores similarities in literacy learning across various life-span stages and considers what actions must be taken to improve literacy attainment and achievement, whether the delivery site is prekindergarten, elementary, secondary, adult, family, workplace, volunteer, or community literacy. The emphasis here is on what it takes to successfully teach individuals to read and write well separate from any adjustments that must be made for context or learner characteristics. Research is examined for five essential variables in literacy learning, including (1) amount of teaching; (2) content of instruction; (3) quality of instruction; (4) student motivation; and (5) alignment and support.

"Educating Future Public Workers: Can We Make Inquiry Professional?" begins with an observation: students in CIT 300: Communicating in the Helping Professions are preparing for the very human service careers that caused community residents in Ellen Cushman's The Struggle and the Tools such grief. Exploring options from community literacy research for addressing this contradiction, the paper commends a problem-based pedagogy focused on collaborative inquiry and knowledge building designed to represent the agency and expertise of others. The paper dramatizes this model of rhetorical education through the work of a pre-professional named Hillary who interned at a shelter for women and children seeking sanctuary from domestic abuse. The paper follows Hillary conducting a series of "rival readings" on the shelter's no dating policy with theorists, professionals, and, most importantly, those most directly affected by the rule: the shelter's residents. "Educating Future Public Workers" argues that community-based rhetorical research can offer faculty and students outside of English both a theoretical frame and a practical guide to community partnerships.

This article focuses on America's Army Game, the first-person-shooter video game now being peddled by the U.S. Army for classroom use. In my community-based literacy class, where students partner with children and teens at a local youth center, this "game" helps us to grasp and problematize literacy sponsorship and recruitment-the idea that literacy education involves not just learning a new set of practices but also trying out a social identity. Through this class, I argue for a pedagogy of multiliteracies that's committed to counter-recruitment: to enlarging ideological space so that critical questions can be formed and alternatives entertained.

Although conventional academic wisdom discourages young scholars from becoming involved in community-based work, the growing interest in service-learning and community literacy reflected in contemporary scholarship in composition and within the larger academy suggests that these are now viable paths to pursue throughout the trajectory of a scholarly career. Ellen Cushman maintains that by using service-learning and activist research methods to bridge the gap between university-based knowledge and community-based knowledge, “faculty members can have readily apparent accountability, and their intellectual work can have highly visible impact” (“Public Intellectual” 335). The growing visibility of community-based scholarship and practice has allowed emerging scholars to set an agenda that our scholarly work must become legitimized and that the climate of resistance to conducting community-based work early in our professional careers must change. I suggest that we work toward mainstream acceptance of the scholarly value of community-based work to support young scholars’ careers while maintaining the edginess of this type of work by addressing key critiques.

While community literacy and service-learning are now established areas within the larger field of Composition and Rhetoric, I have been in the field long enough to remember when these were new areas – a not so long ago period where what counted as “scholarship” and “appropriate sources” was still very much in flux. During this period, our work wasn’t quite so comfortably situated within the mainstream and our very marginality pushed us to invent (and re-invent) the work our scholarship and, perhaps, ourselves as scholars.

Community is a tricky word: although it often connotes an inclusive and harmonious collaborative space, too often it signifies a site of struggle and negotiation, an attempt to find a common framework for conflicting and seemingly contradictory impulses. One of the marks of those active in "community literacy studies," "service-learning" and '"engaged scholarship" is the desire to place themselves in the struggle to build a common framework for collaboration and, within that architecture, to move forward towards building a shared notion of educational, social, and/or political rights.

Review of Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics by Elenore Long. Parlor Press, 2008.

This paper explores the following questions related to family literacy programs: How is family literacy linked with family literacy programs? What are the theoretical frameworks supporting the various models educators and researchers are using in their pedagogical approaches to family literacy programs? As these questions are explored several tensions and directions in programming family literacy become apparent. By examining the various models in this way, family literacy providers and others interested in family and community literacy may be better equipped to evaluate the underlying principles of the programs they use and thereby make informed choices with regard to programming.

This essay explores the intersection between writing studies and civic engagement through the action projects developed in E465: Prison Literature and Writing. Such literacy activism creates immediate opportunities for advanced undergraduates to more fully understand the work of literacy in contested spaces like jail and extends a call to action for writing teachers to acknowledge the possibility of community-based writing collaborations.

Young children are growing up in a time when literacy practices and textual productions are in flux. Yet literacy curricula, particularly for those deemed “at risk,” are tightly focused on the written language “basics.” What are the potential consequences? In this article, the author considers this question, drawing on an ethnographic study of child writing in an urban school site. Using a sociocultural and dialogic frame, she examines first graders' interpretations and negotiations of official writing practices, detailing how these (a) shaped their written language use, including use of time and space, multimodal tools, and expected voices and modeled ideologies and (b) pushed to the sidelines or left in the unofficial child world aspects of their knowledge and know-how, including a breadth of communicative practices and a diversity of graphological symbols. The author concludes with reflections on instructional links among official writing practices, children's literacy experiences, and the “basics” in contemporary times.

This article examines the role of intergenerational relationships in the lives of experienced poets and writers (“soldiers”) and emerging poets and writers in what the author terms Participatory Literacy Communities (PLCs). Drawing from Wenger’s (1998) concept of communities of practice, the author uses data from two examples of PLCs—Black bookstore author events and spoken-word poetry “open mics”—to complicate notions of reciprocity and mentoring in the out-ofschool literacy practices of people of African descent. Three soldiering traditions are discussed: soldiers as literacy activists and advocates, soldiers as practitioners of the craft, and soldiers as historians of the word.

They ain't gonna do my kid like they done me and his dad!" she protested."They know he can't read, but they're just gonna pass him on.That don't do no good, I know!"These are the words of Jenny, mother of Donny who, despite being able only to read and write his name, had just been promoted to the 2 nd grade.Jenny and husband "Big" Donny possess what Victoria Purcell-Gates calls "low literate ability" and are effectively unable to communicate with the school through print.When Jenny tries to communicate orally with Donny's teachers, they react harshly, as the author recalls a particular interaction in which the instructor exclaims, "I knew she [Jenny] was ignorant as soon as she opened her mouth!"(37).Thus, Jenny turns to the local university literacy center for help, which at the time was run by Purcell-Gates.This scenario reflects a familiar situation in which literacy workers are often faced with assisting community members in adapting to the literacies of mainstream institutions.As this special issue of the Community Literacy Journal commemorates the work of Shirley Brice Heath's Ways With Words (1983) and her work in the Appalachian region, it is fitting here to revisit a similar study concerning a group that shares a similar cultural identity yet does not reside in the actual physical boundaries of Appalachia.Victoria Purcell-Gates' Other People's Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy introduces us to a cultural group named urban Appalachians, which some have labeled an invisible minority.While many tend to think of a space defined by its boundaries as home to Appalachians, one cannot overlook the phenomenon referred to as the Great Migration.From 1940-1970 the Appalachian region witnessed an exodus of nearly seven million residents who migrated to Midwestern cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Columbus,

This paper considers how community literacy programs factor into broader economies of literacy development. The author analyzes two Appalachian community literacy projects, Shirley Brice Heath’s ethnographic project in the Carolina Piedmont and Highlander Research and Education Center’s organizing efforts with the Appalachian People’s Movement, to construct an image of sponsors of diverted literacy, people and institutions that employ three interdependent tactics to usefully redirect the means by which literacy travels through the educational marketplace.

This study examines the factors influencing language and script choice in instant messaging (IM), a form of real-time computer-mediated communication, in a multilingual setting. Grounded in the New Literacy Studies, the study understands IM as a social practice involving texts, encompassing a range of literacy practices, within which a subset called “text-making practices” is highlighted in this article. Drawing on results from an analysis of chat texts, interviews, and logbooks collected from 19 young people, the author suggests that the text-making practices related to language and writing system choice are guided by the perceived affordances of the IM technology and the available linguistic resources. Seven ecological factors influencing these perceptions have been identified: perceived expressiveness of the language, perceived functions of IM , user familiarity with the language, user identification with the language, technical constraints of inputting methods, speed , and perceived practicality of the writing system. The author argues that these factors often co-occur in real use.

This special issue opens a dialogue among scholars from across the disciplines who are grappling with the theoretical, ethical and practical issues inherent in negotiating difference when interacting with the "Other" in their work in community-based literacy programs. The contributors to this issue help shape a conversation long overdue in service-learning. Given its intentionally interdisciplinary scope and the refreshing range of theories, rhetorical styles, methods of analysis, settings and populations considered in its pages, this issue is, well, diverse.

This article examines a community-based writing assignment that invited first-year students to Intervene in controversies surrounding Chicago's Millennium Park. Despite the apparent diversity of student arguments, a single ideology permeated all student texts. Whether self identifying as liberal or conservative, students deployed almost identical rhetoric to assert that the park either embodied or failed to embody "democratic values." We learned that, however threatening it may be to our own Ideological Investments, we must push students to interrogate their foundational assumptions. Given currant orthodoxy about the morality of any action or idea labeled "democratic," it is important that teachers work to stimulate true diversity of opinion by challenging democracy" as a trump argument.

What does it mean for a community writing assistance program to bridge the gap between the university and the community? What makes for a successful alliance between these two worlds usually considered distinct? Our paper addresses these questions by reflecting on the factors that have contributed to the growing success of our CWA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Taking into account the varied alliances forged through our work — between the funding organization, instructors, community leaders, and writers themselves — we hope to offer a multi-faceted picture of local literacy outreach and partnership.

Th is article outlines one potential model for a graduate–level course in community literacy studies. Ellen Cushman and Jeffrey Grabill taught this course for the first time at Michigan State University in the spring of 2007. In this article our colleagues with varying disciplinary backgrounds reflect on the course, its readings, and their theoretical and practical understanding surrounding many of the central questions of this new discipline: what is a community? What is literacy? What is community literacy? And what does it mean to practice “community literacy”—to write, to speak, and so on? After a wide discussion of course experience from several student colleagues in the course, Cushman and Grabill reflect on their course objectives and point toward future incarnations of the course.

Arguing that we fail both parents and students if we continue to think of community literacy as a dichotomy between school and work, this article illustrates Labor Market Intermediaries (LMIs) as sites of community literacy. Th e investigation of LMIs in a particular community (Greater Lafayette, Indiana) allows for a more thorough understanding of community literacy outside of traditional sites such as schools, community centers, and adult education programs; in turn, the article argues that such an understanding may lead to more productive involvement by literacy educators in our communities.

For nineteen years, Mercy Learning Center, a community–based literacy organization, has provided basic literacy instruction to low–income women in Bridgeport, Connecticut. During that time the Center has grown from three students and two tutors to 450 students, 155 tutors, and fi ve full–time teachers. Th is growth has been aff ected by changes in welfare regulations and increased immigration. Using what it describes as a “holistic approach within a compassionate, supportive community,” the Center provides instruction that goes beyond the usual boundaries of basic literacy. With its expansive defi nition of basic literacy, Mercy Learning Center’s experience off ers a model for sustaining a woman–centered community literacy program through nearly two decades of changing political conditions and educational needs.

After reviewing results from the Nation’s Report Card in Writing, this article presents data from a survey of Latino students, the largest ethnic group of students at Northeastern Illinois University. These data suggest that the Hispanic students at Northeastern are similar to their national Hispanic peers in several ways, such as the levels of parental education and the number of texts in their homes, yet different from them in other ways, such as exposure to English at home or level of involvement with parents and friends. Perhaps most significantly, these students report stronger beliefs in and attitudes about literacy than either their national Hispanic peers or national peers. Although more research is needed, these data indicate the need for new literacy theories and research methods to ensure that these experiences and expectations are legitimized not as educational liabilities but as intellectual assets.

This essay describes service learning as a space for civic dialogue. In the project-oriented course discussed below—an oral history of a south-side African American neighborhood in Chicago—civic dialogue took shape when middle class students from a range of backgrounds at the Illinois Institute of Technology interviewed residents of different generations and experiences, transcribed, contextualized, and published these interviews in print and online, and reflected on the process. As a tethering of “community” across the material and discursive boundaries that typically divide us, the project performed a political critique not through issue-oriented advocacy but through a rhetorical activism more locally attuned to the absence of critical exchange, empathy, and understanding in public life.

This paper develops a rhetorically centered model of community literacy in the theoretical and practical context of local publics—those spaces where ordinary people develop public voices to engage in intercultural inquiry and deliberation. Drawing on fifteen years of action research in the Community Literacy Center and beyond, the authors characterize the distinctive features of local publics, the deliberative, intercultural discourses they circulate, and the literate practices that sustain them. They identify four critical practices at the heart of community literacy: assessing the rhetorical situation, creating local publics, developing citizens’ rhetorical capacities, and supporting change through the circulation of alternative texts and practices.

Integrity is commonly conflated with basic literacy in assessments of the skills workers need. This case study of a word-based character education program in Springfield, Missouri examines how business leaders may blame a lack of skills by employees on a lack of moral literacy. The premise of this essay is that the expression of a literacy program by participating institutions will be influenced by the political culture of the region in which the institutions reside. Considering the influence of political culture on community literacy programs is important because such influence is likely to privilege certain sets of socio-political and economic values, and ways of knowing, over others.

Drawing on data gathered during a seven-month study of the literacy practices of a group of White, working-class girls who have successfully navigated their high school’s English curriculum, this ethnography investigates (1) how gender and class influenced the girls’ uses of literacy in the classroom and (2) how the girls used texts from English class to construct gender.

The basics of child writing, as traditionally conceived, involve “neutral” conventions for organizing and encoding language. This “basic” notion of a solid foundation for child writing is itself situated in a fluid world of cultural and linguistic diversity and rapidly changing literacy practices.

This article builds upon the concept of hybridity to affirm the relevance of poetry, music, and other forms of popular culture in the lives of urban youth. Its focus examines the blending of seemingly disparate forms to understand how young people, in particular young people of color, negotiate their multilayered social worlds. One of these worlds is that of Antonio’s, a 17-year old African American male, whose interest and practice of creating poetry within and outside of classrooms offers a lens into a growing community of youth poets in U.S. cities. An analysis of Antonio’s case suggests how intersecting literacy practices served as viable building blocks for realizing and expanding his ability to write. Central to the argument is the notion of hybrid literacy learning and why it is important to recognize youth’s cultural and literacy practices that both excite and engage them while continuing to develop their reading, writing, and other communicative skills.

This article presents findings from case studies of two Latina bilingual high school writers engaged in a year-long research and writing project. Both young women demonstrated unique patterns related to their approaches to inquiry and performance of literacy practices. By using an ecological framework to integrate a multiple literacies perspective into the study, the author argues that both young women engaged in “hidden literacies” that indicated potential toward the development of academic English. The article closes with suggestions for a reframing of common approaches to the study of academic English.

In this essay, I explore the institutional and intellectual resources necessary to develop, revise, and sustain an outreach initiative involving new media composing with community organizations. A retrospective analysis of one course central to this initiative will be offered to illustrate what I term a praxis of new media. A praxis of new media unfolds at the intersection of critical, digital, and community literacies in order to produce transformative knowledge products with all stakeholders. I argue that particular alignments of material and intellectual resources must be in place if such community literacy projects are to sustain the capacity building of stakeholders.

This article connects the author’s practice, Fulkerson’s “map” of composition studies, and insights from critical race studies, specifically whiteness studies, to argue that even though many or even most community-based writing courses fit into a critical/cultural studies-type philosophy, such an orientation is limited. The article argues for “community-engaged procedural rhetorical,” in which students would learn in community-engaged writing courses the meta-skills to analyze what strategies and tactics worked rhetorically and materially to make change in a given situation, and to extrapolate this learning toward the future.

This article underscores the importance of examining community-based writing in practice. It traces the evolution of an "International Connections" service-learning project from a well-intentioned add-on to a thoughtful and critical component of a writing course. Distilling best practices from recent service-learning literature, the article concludes with a call for 1) integration of the service-learning project within the goals and activities of the writing course, 2) critical pedagogy and academic rigor, 3) mutuality/ reciprocity, and 4) diverse discourses (personal, civic, and academic) that invite students to write for, about, and with community partners for a variety of purposes.

The emphasis on the individual in Western culture has blinded us to how social relationships affect literacy acquisition and, conversely, how literacy transforms these relationships. This article deals with the literacy practices, specifically, letter writing, of Lithuanian immigrants who arrived in the United States during the end of the 19th century. For these immigrants, reading and writing were collaborative activities, not the individual, solitary acts that we often assume them naturally to be. Individuals often turned to more literate neighbors for assistance in tasks involving reading and writing, an extension of the concept of talka, the Lithuanian tradition of collective assistance. Parents also frequently engaged the help of sons and, especially, daughters in writing letters to relatives in Lithuania. Letter writing thus not only fostered solidarity between immigrant and their relatives in Lithuania but also between Lithuanian immigrant parents and their increasingly literate, Americanized children.

This article represents stories of eight former composition students, Appalachian working class women, who move from silence in the academy to voice in their communities to a more self–confident identity without destroying the community from which they came. The author argues that compositionists need to consider the two–edged nature of literacy; how literacy serves first generation, nontraditional learners; the intergenerational effects of literacy; the importance of expressivist writing as a transition into academic literacy; and the importance of region and class in multicultural conversations.

In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subject-object, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses.

In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subjectobject, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses. I begin with a scene written by a student in my service learning course, U.S. Literacy Politics. The scene, taken from her final paper for the course, recounts her first night at a downtown community center, where students likeJanis serve as literacy partners and mentors. Shifting back and forth between present and past tense, Janis writes:

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

In early Methodism John Wesley created an extracurricular site of literacy and rhetoric that empowered women and the working classes to read, write, and speak in public. Wesley’s “method” of literacy in community not only transformed religious life in Britain but also redefined the intersections of education, class, and gender.

early Methodism John Wesley created an extracurricular site of literacy and rhetoric that empowered women and the working classes to read, write, and speak in public. Wesley's method of literacy in community not only transformed religious life in Britain but also redefined the intersections of education, class, and gender. an article based on her 1993 CCCC Chair's address, Anne Ruggles Gere critiqued the field of composition: In concentrating upon establishing our position within the academy, we have neglected to recount the history of composition in other contexts; we have neglected composition's extracurriculum (79). Influenced by Shirley Brice Heath's study of community literacy practices, Glenda Hull's work on workplace literacy, Patricia Bizzell's concept of multiple discourse communities, and others, Gere examined the cultural work and literacy practices of writing groups outside the academy, focusing particularly on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American clubwomen, both white and African American. Gere urged us not only to expand our field's history to