In this article, we draw on focus group interviews collected for the Wayfinding Project to explore how university alumni orient themselves as writers while participating in social media after graduation. By looking at alumni's self descriptions of their writing processes across public networks, we are able to trace pathways that recognize the rhetorical and communicative intentions of users, while also acknowledging the roles that serendipity, creativity, and the unexpected play in shaping these literate practices. Specifically, we point to how these alumni describe their experiences as they adapt to addressing audiences across different platforms and confront the “reach” of those platforms for engaging unexpected audiences. Several focus group participants use the term “branding” as a way to describe how they conceive of their writing across multiple social networks. These participants describe their public, networked writing as a form of managing their identities at the same time that they are “branding” themselves to manage the expectations of multiple audiences. In sum, our research shows us how the unexpected audiences generated through social media participation operate in tension with writers’ deliberate shaping of their messages and their self-presentation.

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This article explores how we eliminated—without lowering student success rates—our developmental writing and reading courses (three to seven noncredit hours) and shifted to an all-inclusive, no-placement-necessary, integrated reading and writing course for first-year comp.

Article analysis assignments are common in First Year Writing. This paper argues that animated GIFs are an effective bridge between informal and formal literacies and encourage students to engage in the more critical elements of the genre. This article helps instructors to incorporate low-tech and low stakes multimodal elements into their assignment cycles.

Bullshit, as defined by Frankfurt (2005, p. 10), is language that is “disconnected from a concern for the truth.” Much scholarship shows that bullshit is a prominent feature in organizations that is difficult, if not impossible, to get rid of (e.g., McCarthy et al., 2020; Penny, 2010). Bullshit, by definition and by cultural practice, seems antithetical to business writing orthodoxy. As Thill and Bovée (2020) suggest in a representative textbook, communication should be clear and ethical. However, Spicer (2020) codifies bullshit as a social practice whose outcomes are not always dire. Well-crafted bullshit benefits its users, allowing them to “fit into a speech community, get things done in day-to-day interaction and bolster their image and identity” (Spicer, 2020, p. 20). Contrasting with business writing’s abstinence-only bullshit stance, this suggests that successful writers must adapt to their organization’s speech act practices. In this article, we argue that students must be taught about bullshit. After describing bullshit and its role in organizations, we show how business writing could incorporate a critically informed approach to bullshit in undergraduate courses, internship preparation courses, and other curricular instances in which students work directly with organizations. While bullshitting should not be outright encouraged, continued ignorance will do nothing to solve its associated problems. Promoting bullshit literacy, however, could both minimize bullshit’s harms and maximize its benefits. We close by describing how this approach could foster critical thinking skills, promote more seamless adaptation to organizational cultures and communication practices, and perhaps even improve mental health outcomes.

Concerns about teaching structured authoring, which is the use of software in technical writing to allow automatic textual reuse and reassembly, have been woven into the debate about what role technologies should play in preparing technical writing students for ‘real world’ needs since the late 1990s (see Brumberger & Laurer, 2015; Carnegie & Crane, 2019; Kimball, 2015; Rainey et al., 2018). Vee (2017) and others have argued that fundamental aspects of writing software code, many of which parallel structured authoring, are now required literacies. Indeed, as Gentle (2017) demonstrates, the difference between those writing code and those writing structured authoring continues to shrink. Helping to develop technical writers to understand this overlap remains a significant challenge. This article suggests that this challenge might be met by using an open-source interactive fiction authoring platform called Twine, which provides many of the building blocks of structured authoring while teaching fundamental aspects of coding. However, this approach is not without its perils. Through analyzing the findings of a two-year study, this article identifies potential avenues for success as well as potential pitfalls to be mindfully considered.

This study investigated the effect of a four-week socioscientific issues (SSI)-based intervention on sixth-grade students’ argumentative writing and transferability of argument skills across topics. Students in three treatment classrooms engaged in an SSI unit on space exploration while students in three comparable classrooms continued regular space science lessons. Argumentation skills were assessed by individual decision letters about space exploration. Argument transfer was assessed by an essay to address a novel SSI. Treatment students wrote more elaborated decision letters with stronger arguments, relied less on personal ideas, and transferred argument skills to a novel SSI after the intervention. The implications of using SSI as a promising approach to integrating science and literacy learning for diverse adolescents were discussed.

Drawing on critical theories of labor and commodification, this qualitative embedded case study explores how students experience alienation and intimacy in the work of writing for an English language arts class. Analysis of fieldnotes from 30 observations, student writing products, and reflective interviews with focal students and the teacher illuminated the meaningful assemblages where conditions of intimacy permeated instruction. Two practices supported intimacy in working conditions: knowledge about writing built through a collective process of noticing, and open-ended work time characterized by “managed nonmanagement” (, p. 176), or calculated flexibility in rules and expectations. Findings illustrate how a literacy practice might contribute to students’ experience of alienation or intimacy (or both) while writing, depending on conditions of industrialization and commodification. Even as the teacher strove to deindustrialize work, commodification through grades and standardized assessments heightened alienation in the writing environment. The study provides an example of an educational context governed by an industrial system of assessment where local actors (the teacher and students) disrupted alienation by working in smaller scales and more closely with texts.

Set in one of the least privileged neighborhoods of the US Southeast, this research project took a discourse analysis approach to construct a day-in-the-life case study. It illustrates how, during an after school storybook cooking class, a 7-year-old, multilingual, Mexican American girl navigated local linguistic microaggressions and extended microaffirmations to her peers. At the same time, she contested and critiqued societal power imbalances associated with whiteness. This study widens the corpus of scholarship that has primarily examined children’s sociodramatic play and literacy development in preschool settings. It also broadens the body of research that has predominantly focused on students’ linguistic dexterity and metalinguistic awareness in middle and high school contexts.

This paper highlights the perspectives of first-generation students of color in their first year of college, and the ways in which they exercised agency in their writing. Framed by definitions of agency as mediated action that creates meaning, the paper reports on qualitative data collected from a summer writing program for first-generation students and students of color, and from writing samples and follow-up interviews with six students who participated in the summer program. Findings suggest that students in their first year of college leveraged their social and discoursal identities to offer new ways of understanding an issue. They also wrote using a translingual approach, integrating different discourses and forms of knowledge, and challenging views of academic writing as monolithic. The findings also suggest the link between awareness and action, meaning that what and how students wrote were informed by their awareness of writing and awareness of themselves as writers and cultural beings. The study’s findings have implications for advancing more nuanced views of agency and academic literacies, and redesigning writing instruction at the high school and college level.

The title of this book is concerned with the axis between pedagogy and theory, creating a productive interaction and synthesis of the two, and so this review also focuses on these interrelations. Of all the major figures involved in the advent of theory on the American shores, Robert Scholes was the only one who had a burning concern with connecting the new ideas with teaching. When Jonathan Culler, acclaimed for his Structuralist Poetics (1975), visited my campus shortly after his book was published, I invited him to my graduate pedagogy seminar. He was tactful and gracious in talking to the future teachers, but he made it clear that at that point theory could and should not be applied to pedagogy any more than quantum mechanics should be taught to beginning physics students. Scholes, on the other hand, is in the line of pragmatic thinking that maintains abstract ideas have existence and meaning only when applied to concrete situations, where they can be clarified, tested, and revised. His early tetralogy, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974), Semiotics and Interpretation (1982), Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985b), and Protocols of Reading (1989) all deal with this back and forth movement. At the end of Textual Power, Scholes writes, “My enterprise in this book has been to take the teaching situation as a theoretical position from which to look at other theories that impinge upon the study and teaching of texts. Large sections of my own text were written first to clarify things for myself, my students, and my colleagues” (166). Later he places as his inscription to Protocols this sentence of Roland Barthes: “And no doubt that is what reading is: rewriting the text of the work within the text of our lives” (1). This approach resonates with John Dewey explaining to his wife that he was creating a school for children because the classroom is to philosophy what a laboratory is to scientists. Scholes's later works further entwine critical theories with educational structures and forms: The Rise and Fall of English (1998), The Crafty Reader (2001), English after the Fall: From Literature to Textuality (2011), and Text Book: An Introduction to Literary Language (1988), coedited with Nancy Comley and Gregory Ulmer.One service that Ellen Carillo has performed for us in this well-edited and conceptualized volume is to include—and this is unusual for a Festschrift—generous examples of the subject's best work, not isolating them in an appendix, but strategically placing them among the essays most relevant to Scholes's concerns in his own. In rereading Scholes's pieces in this context, I am somewhat mystified that a writer as clear and persuasive as Scholes was not able to affect any widespread practical change, especially since his own writing outshines everyone else's in the volume. Although Scholes was able to create a new department, Modern Culture and Media at his home institution, Brown University, this department remained separate from the English department, and there seemed to be little interaction or collaboration between the two entities. At the end of After the Fall (2011), Scholes wistfully admits that he does not know of a single university that has adopted his suggestions for reshaping the teaching of English (142). This is partially due to the glacial rate of change in our educational institutions, but more because so many of those in the profession either have biases against his vision or do not fully comprehend it. Put briefly, that vision is what we would now call constructivist, student- and reader-centered, and radically democratic. The last two words are rarely put together but relevant now when too many politicians and Supreme Court justices appear to find universal suffrage obsolete.Scholes's vision is based more on immediate experience and process than definitive formulations and axioms and attempts to transcend or reconcile binaries such as theory/practice, consumption/production, analysis/creativity, concepts/specifics, and writing/reading. In this sense it is wholistic in the tradition of other educational thinkers such as bell hooks, who writes in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994: 85), What forms of passion make us whole? To what passions may we surrender with the assurance that we will expand rather than diminish the promise of our lives? The quest of knowledge that enables us to unify theory and practice is one such passion. To the extent that professors bring this passion, which has to be fundamentally rooted in a love for ideas we are able to inspire, the classroom becomes a dynamic place where transformations in social relations are concretely actualized and the false dichotomy between the world outside and the inside world of the academy disappears.Ironically, Scholes's own commitment to the primacy of teaching is a central reason that his works have not found wide acceptance among many traditional academics, although most of them are teachers themselves. To begin with one of the apparent dichotomies, we can take one that Carillo embeds in her title, Reading and Writing, and quotes from the introductory chapter of an early Scholes book, Semiotics and Interpretation (1982): There is a significant difference between the states of consciousness involved in receiving a text and producing one. Specifically, the text we produce is ours in a deeper and more essential way than any text we receive from the outside. When we read, we do not possess the text we read in any permanent way. But when we make an interpretation, we do add to our store of knowledge—and what we add is not the text itself but our own interpretation of it. In literary interpretation we possess only what we create. (4)Before it is written or spoken, our knowledge remains in our own subjectivity, shadowy and inert. As we shape it into words, it becomes objective, something external to scrutinize, examine, revise. This understanding of the interweaving of reading and writing echoes through Scholes's corpus, reappearing in a later book: “In all of this, I have assumed that reading is a constructive process, a kind of writing. . . . Learning to re-weave the texts we encounter in the texts of our lives is the process I have been trying to describe, and, in particular, I have tried to show how teachers may share the process with students” (2011: 14). This resembles what Dewey meant when he urged the necessity of having any intellectual proposition “reinstated into experience” to be realized.Several of the pieces in Carillo's volume seek to place Scholes's work in its place in the historical contexts of our disciplines. In the best of these, “How Scholes Helped English Departments Confront the Death of the Author, the Loss of Readers, and the Emergence of Intertextual Literacies,” Thomas P. Miller describes Scholes's career-long engagements with introductory textbooks built on his scholarly background in practical criticism and his intellectual commitment to using pedagogy to validate theory in practice. The pragmatic perspective was fundamental to his integrated model of literary and literacy theories. . . . Scholes pointedly critiqued the self-validating binaries that structured the “arche-institutions of English”: the hierarchy of literature over non-literature that positioned consumption over production in ways that divorced academic inquiry from the “real world.” (171)Miller goes on to note, Scholes's engagement with the creative potentials of work with literacy is critical to understanding the distinction between his pragmatic concern with knowledge in the making and the rather disengaged stance that often has been assumed by cultural studies and literary criticism. Scholes's pragmatic engagement with the creative process of reading to write was fundamental to his efforts to reform the discipline to connect with the interactive literacies that have given rise to the maker movement and the active learning pedagogies that have become a mainstay of curricular reforms in the last decade. (175)In other words, Miller's work can lead us to view Scholes as a connecting link between a powerful but often subterranean current in our past educational history running through Transcendentalists like Emerson and Alcott, pragmatists like William James and Dewey, and the Free School movement of the 1960s and 1970s forward to current trends like reader response criticism, constructivism, and active learning strategies such as the “flipped classroom.” In his more extensive earlier study, The Evolution of College English: Literary Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns (2010), Miller elaborates in more detail: The marginal standing of teaching helps to explain why the theoretical challenges of the 1970s were rarely translated into new programs of undergraduate study. One proposal for curricular reform was Scholes's Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. Scholes acknowledged that the “apparatus” of the discipline needed to be rebuilt from the bottom up, because it was founded upon binaries that had broken down—most notably the hierarchies of literature and “non-literature,” consumption and production, and the academic and “real” worlds. According to Scholes, once the autonomy of literature was called into question, the boundaries of the study came to seem contrived. . . . For an alternative framework, Scholes developed a pedagogically engaged vision of the transactional relations of writing and reading. . . . To break out of the “institutional sedimentations that threaten to fossilize” college English, Scholes looked to the classroom as a site of collaborative inquiry, with the model being the stance of the reader as a composer of meaning. (229–30)Although Miller does not make this connection, I see this marginalization of Scholes's viewpoint as similar to what happened to Louise Rosenblatt's progressive early work of reader response criticism, Exploring Literature (1938), which was buried by the increasingly hegemonic acceptance of the New Criticism and its master textbook, Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, published in the same year. Rosenblatt, fortunately, has come back in fashion. The MLA has now republished the fifth edition of her book and a later work of hers adopts the term transaction as the central relation between reader and text. So there are hopes for Scholes's work too, not just as a citation in the history of theory, but as a living force in restructuring our disciplines.To circle back to the first quotation from Miller, I want to underline his comment about Scholes's “career-long engagements with introductory textbooks built on his scholarly background in practical criticism,” an aspect of Scholes's work that has not been given the attention it deserves in Carillo's collection. Text Book gives us the most specific sense of how Scholes applied his vision to the daily work with students and also suggests that this kind of work is best done in collaboration with both student feedback and with colleagues: all three editions were co-edited with Nancy Comley and Gregory Ulmer. Text Book intersperses literary works with creative exercises focusing on the students’ own lives, tracing how their experiences can be transformed into narrative structures and vice-versa. The achievement is elaborated in rich detail in Robin Dizard's “Stranger than Friction: Learning and Teaching Literary Studies Using TEXT BOOK” (2010). The article's extensive use of selections and assignments from the book is supplemented by extended responses of students and Dizards's teacherly work with them in deepening and interpreting these responses. Contrasting this article with Scholes's own writing suggests one fault in the latter; Scholes rarely includes student voices either in the classroom or from their writings to further clarify and support his ideas. He does quote from students in The Crafty Reader to show that they are befuddled by New Critical expectations, but he does not demonstrate the positive reverse of real students encouraged to connect poetry to their own lives. There is some of this in Carillo's volume, but too often we hear more from the somewhat hermetic dialogues of academics conversing with each other in staking out their own positions than an attempt to speak directly to teachers, administrators, parents, and even students. I call this style “Dissertationese,” where this writing is often found, but some critics have yet to outgrow it.To unfairly choose just one example, I find particularly hard to read Kelsey McNiff “From Argument to Invitation: Promoting Empathy and Mutual Understanding in the Composition Classroom” (117–32). The essay is a sound empirical analysis of an essay assignment designed to test Scholes's ideas on using reading and writing to extend empathy. But the writing is clogged by passive constructions and the almost compulsive need to use citations from the academic literature in support of almost every assertion, such as “Like Scholes, many have argued that educators therefore should seek to cultivate students’ empathic imaginations (Von Write 2002; Fleckenstein 2007; Gerdes et al. 2011; Leake 2016; Damianidou and Phtiak 2016; English 2016; Tomlinson and Murphy 2018; Mirra 2018) and that the humanities in particular encourage this habit of mind (Nussbaum 2010; Jurecic 2011, 13–15).” This reminds me of a colleague's spouse who once said, “Howard thinks I should speak for myself.” McNiff has done a solid piece of work, but I must ask, as I do often in dissertation defenses, who is the intended reader and what kind of work is it supposed to do in the world? A good counterexample to this kind of writing is that of Alfie Kohn, whose more professional books appear in mainstream presses but are also offered as articles in the popular press or turned into shorter audio versions that can be played in the car by teachers and parents.In contrast to McNiff's article, I would like to mention Douglas D. Hesse, who wrote an “Afterword” (253–60) using a much more accessible and personal style but just as insightfully rigorous as anything else in the volume. His appreciation of another of Scholes's textbooks, The Practice of Writing (1981), coauthored with Nancy Comley, is articulate and concise: What's remarkable to me about the book is the way it invites students to exercise the full range of language with a creative mélange of texts of all sorts with experiments whimsical and serious and serious, at levels from sentences to self-contained texts. It challenged, already forty years ago, the kind of fractured model driving English departments, not only in literary but also in writing studies. In the name of specialization and expertise, literature and writing kept genres and purposes and historical periods separate, leaving students to figure out (if they wanted, and most didn't) what any of these highly defined courses might have to do with one another—or the nonacademic world beyond. Scholes challenged those divisions and wasn't afraid to use tools of serious play to engage student writers. If students learned anything canonical, it would be an indirect effect of the main enterprise: cultivating textual power through interpretation and production intertwined. (255)In this deft description of only one of Scholes's projects, Hesse suggests how he reconciled all of the dualities discussed in this review and the volume itself. Further, Hesse's penultimate paragraph provides a helpful guide to the best insights of the other contributors to this volume. In his last paragraph, Hesse sees himself tending toward pessimism, “a consequence of having been long enough in the profession to see Scholes's ideas roll in, then out, like waves on Dover Beach,” but is also able to eloquently endorse Scholes for his enabling and constant optimism: “It was an optimism born of plentitude and play, impelled by a multitude of texts to be interpreted and texts to be made, those basic yet inexhaustible activities of reading and writing” (260). It is this optimism that helped sustain Scholes through his long and varied career, elaborating a fairly constant vision through a variety of materials and perspectives.We are at an inflectional point in educational reform now where radical innovators have to face the forces of anti-intellectualism and timidity. In a book that has become “conventional wisdom”—an oxymoron to my mind—Tinkering toward Utopia, the historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) argue that teachers and parents have a basic conception of school—graded classrooms, separated subject matters, high-stakes testing, and so on. And to violate any more than a small number of these elements is to be charged with something other than “education.” I think exactly the opposite approach is called for. For one thing, the authors suppose in their use of utopia that the current system is getting incrementally better, when it is clear that the opposite is true. But more seriously, that it is a “system” and not a historically fossilized set of practices that often do not fit together. We can begin to scrutinize every aspect of what we do in terms of viability, effectiveness, and humane concern and begin to rebuild from the ruins through better thinking in constant dialogue with actual practice.

Hannah Armstrong graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2018.Anna Barattin teaches American literature, world literature, and undergraduate writing classes at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Both her teaching and her scholarship focus on geocentrism, spatial literacy, and language variation. She worked as an editing contributor for the literary journals Studies in Literary Imagination and The Eudora Welty Review.Barclay Barrios is professor of English and the associate dean of undergraduate studies for the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. His work focuses on queer theory, writing program administration, pedagogy, and computers and composition. He is the author of the freshman composition textbooks Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers (2010), now in its fifth edition, and Intelligence (2021).Martin Bickman is professor of English and President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he teaches courses in pedagogy and American literature. His book Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of Active Learning (2003) won the Outstanding Book Award from the American Education Research Association. He has also edited Approaches to Teaching Melville's Moby-Dick (1985) and Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education (1999) and authored American Romantic Psychology (1988) and Walden: Volatile Truths (1992). Next fall he will teach a course in the new Writing and Public Sphere minor, Writing for the Real World: Transforming Education.Mark Bracher is professor of English and director of the Neurocognitive Research Program for the Advancement of the Humanities at Kent State University.Ellen C. Carillo is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the writing coordinator at its Waterbury campus. She is the author of Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (2014); A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading (2017); Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America (2018); The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (2021); and the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy (2019). She is also the editor or coeditor of several textbooks and collections. Ellen is cofounder of the Role of Reading in Composition Studies Special Interest Group of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and has been awarded grants from the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), CCCC, and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA).Owen Farney was an honors student at Central Michigan University (CMU) where he earned a BS in education with teaching credentials in English/history 6–12. During his time as an undergraduate, he worked as a CMU Writing Center consultant and served as president of the CMU affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English. As a CMU honors student, Owen completed a senior honors capstone project addressing the current state of queer young adult literature. Owen completed his student teaching at Allendale Middle School teaching 6th grade English.Kaylee Henderson is a doctoral candidate in English at Texas Christian University, where she teaches courses in the Department of English and the Department of Women and Gender Studies. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century literature, women writers, and transatlantic political movements. Her previous courses include The Victorian Novel: Crossing and Patrolling Borders with Linda K. Hughes and From Work to Werk: The Politics of Women's Writing. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Words of Mass Destruction: Verbal Militancy in Nineteenth-Century Women's Political Writing.”Andy Hines is associate director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. He researches models of the university posed by Black writers and Black social movements. His book Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (2022), recounts how mid-twentieth-century Black writers defined literature and critical thought through and against the institutionalization of literary studies in predominantly white universities. His writing has appeared in American Quarterly (2020), Public Books (2018, 2015), Criticism (2017), Blind Field (2016) and other venues. Hannah Armstrong and Kassie Moore attended the University of Southern Indiana and assisted with the production of “On Being Brought In.”Sofia Prado Huggins, a PhD candidate in English literature at Texas Christian University, has taught courses such as Bestsellers and the Business of Books, Women's Writing, and a composition course, Adapting Austen, which she discusses in her essay, “Teaching POC Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice at a PWI in 2020,” in Persuasions OnLine. Sofia's research and teaching interests include late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century global anglophone literatures, periodical studies, and the geohumanities. Her dissertation, “Blank Spaces: Global Geographies of Moral Capitalism in The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1831–1833,” historizes the geographic and conceptual centering of whiteness in liberal progressivism in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antislavery archives. Sofia is the editor-in-chief of Teaching Transatlantacism and the transatlantic Digital Anthology.Jason Maxwell is associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of The Two Cultures of English: Literature, Composition, and the Moment of Rhetoric (2019) and coauthor, with Claire Colebrook, of Agamben (2016). His articles and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and Rhetorica.Kassie Moore graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2019. She currently teaches English in Evansville, Indiana.Clare Mullaney is assistant professor of English at Clemson University where she teaches courses on American literature, histories of editing, and disability theory. Her current book project, “American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text,” argues that acknowledging texts as made objects brings into focus how turn-of-the-century authors grapple with physical and mental impairments at the level of textual form. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, J19, Disability Studies Quarterly, and the Atlantic.Jacob Stratman is in the middle of his twenty-third year as a teacher, at both the high school and university levels. He learned under a “teacher-centered” pedagogy, and he was trained, mostly, under a “student-centered” pedagogy. But it was on an airport shuttle in Pittsburgh at the beginning of his university teaching career, after a College English Association conference, where a fellow conference goer said that he learned long ago to resist those binaries and focus more on “truth-centered” pedagogy. Those insights during that fifteen minutes on the shuttle with that teacher, whose name Stratman never knew, haunt him each semester. Whether he's lecturing or conducting a class conversation, he asks how he is demonstrating virtues that lead all of us nearer to truth, instead of further away.Amish Trivedi is the author of three books of poetry, most recently FuturePanic (2021), as well as numerous chapbooks. His poems also appear in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, and other places. His critical work on poetry and music appear in the Iowa Review and The Rumpus. Trivedi has a PhD from Illinois State University and an MFA from Brown University.Angela J. Zito is teaching faculty with the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Programs, where she currently serves as associate director of WAC and Madison Writing Assistance. She earned her PhD in English literary studies, which continues to inform her scholarship of teaching and learning. Her recent research has investigated the teaching and learning of close reading practices in composition courses and the design of writing assignments across disciplines to assess non-writing competencies.

Instruction in cartographic or map literacy in technical communication courses can support pedagogies promoting social change. Students must develop an ability to read, understand, interpret, use, and critique maps in technical communication contexts. This article argues that attention to cartographic literacy can build on existing visual literacies to promote critical understanding of how to use and create maps that engage with issues related to social change. A description of a sample assignment is included to introduce cartographic literacy in undergraduate technical communication courses. Student map examples support the conclusion that students benefit from instruction in cartographic literacy and that cartographic literacy can be an important component of technical communication pedagogies that work toward social justice.

Drawing on discussions of (de)coloniality and translanguaging, this article reports findings from a classroom-based ethnographic study, focusing on how a self-identified Latina bilingual student resists colonial constructs of language and literacies in her multimodal project. Based on an analysis of the student’s multimodal composition, other classroom writings, and a semistructured interview, I examine how she creatively and critically draws on her entire language and literacy repertoire in her multimodal composing. More specifically, I demonstrate how she draws from and builds on her lived experiences of linguistic injustices and racialization and transforms such experiences into embodied knowledge making and sharing through her multimodal composing. I argue that students’ engagement with multimodality can and should be cultivated, sustained, and amplified as a site of translingual activism and justice with decolonial potential, and I suggest, further, that such a shift requires a change in approaching, reading, and valuing students’ multimodal meaning making.

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Writing centers, as communities of practice, often fail to question their own praxis since it is work reinforced by shared ways of knowing and being within a community. However, change cannot occur without examining and challenging assumptions and commonplaces individually and collectively. During a three-year action research study focused on training mostly monolingual tutors to engage in scaffolding and multidirectional learning with ELL, international student writers, commonplaces emerged related to contextual nature of writing, and the role of sentence-level language in tutoring and writing. Using the theoretical constructivist frameworks that inform writing center work, this article examines those commonplaces and connects them to existing interdisciplinary scholarship. While the work of examining and eliminating assumptions is an ongoing endeavor, the action research and consideration of commonplaces have led to tutor education aimed at equipping tutors to empower multilingual writers by encouraging discussions of objectives, options, outcomes, and ownership. Keywords : ELL writers, writing center, writing tutor, commonplaces Although writing centers exist in the overlap of literacy, learning, and language, we have yet to understand this positioning or resolve what it means to support learners who share this intersectional space. In fact, writing center history with ELL writers has been notably problematic. As a larger community, we have othered such writers through tutor education (Moussu, 2013; Nakumara, 2010; Thonus, 2014), non-directive pedagogies, policies restricting or refusing to assist with sentence-level language concerns, and policing of contextual language and literacy practices (García, 2017; Green, 2016; Greenfield, 2019). At the local level, as a writing center administrator, I have spent the better part of two decades fielding repeated tutor and faculty requests for more tutor training for working with ELL writers, as if the writers were the challenge rather than the systems they navigate. In 2019, as part of a doctoral program at Arizona State University, I completed an interdisciplinary three-year, cyclical action research study to improve the ways Brigham Young University’s mostly monolingual, native English-speaking tutors facilitated learning with ELL, international student writers in tutoring sessions. Initial rounds of this IRB-approved study revealed that the tutors felt comfortable instructing and motivating ELL writers, but scaffolding remained a space of uncertainty. This was notable, since scaffolding involves tailoring “the learning process to the individual needs and developmental level of the learner. Scaffolding provides the structure and support necessary to progressively build knowledge” (Kolb et al., 2014, p. 218).  Since scaffolding is central to the experiential, co-constructed learning that occurs in tutorials, I focused my study on a training intervention designed to help tutors improve scaffolding with ELL writers. As part of the training intervention, tutors participated in classroom instruction on the contextual nature of writing, scaffolding, and sentence-level language. Tutors also completed peer and administrator observations and post-observation reflective discussions. The effectiveness of the intervention and improvement with scaffolding was measured by tutor surveys, pre- and post-intervention tutor interviews, tutorial observations, and surveys and focus groups with ELL writers (Bell, 2019). Research results indicated that scaffolding and multidirectional learning and participation improved within tutorials; however, as the semesters and research cycles progressed, it became clear that the disconnect between the mostly monolingual tutors and ELL writers was less about scaffolding and more about unpacking systems and psyches. Scaffolding was a tool to facilitate multidirectional learning, but dismantling deficit thinking and systems of silos was the larger work. In communities of practice, such as writing centers, we often fail to question our own praxis since it is work reinforced by shared ways of knowing and being within a community. However, as Nancy Grimm (2009) noted in an address to the writing center community, “significant change in any workplace occurs when unconscious conceptual models are brought to the surface and replaced with conscious ones” (p. 16). The multiyear action research study resulted in a bound dissertation on a library shelf, but the work of addressing the disconnects between writing tutors and ELL writers continues because it is the work of rattling and revising our commonplaces. Although ELL writers’ and writing tutors’ questions, explanations, and asides were not measured alongside the effectiveness of the training intervention, the commonplaces they exposed revealed the need for ongoing cognitive and affective attention and sent me back to the scholarship where patterns and relationships continued to emerge and inform the work. While the focus of the initial IRB study was a training intervention within a specific writing center, this article focuses on the commonplaces and assumptions about tutors and ELL writers uncovered during the iterative, interdisciplinary research process, including how writing center work involves issues of identity and power dynamics, communities and systems, the contextual nature of writing, and the layers of sentence-level language. This examination of commonplaces offers no concrete solutions but reinforces the importance of objectives, options, outcomes, and ownership as tutors and ELL writers interact in tutoring and learning exchanges.

This program profile focuses on the collective work and beginning stages of moving a very large writing program from default orientations of predominantly white institutions (PWI) to practices responsive to Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) opportunities over a five-year period. Throughout this profile, I narrate how faculty of all ranks within the first-year composition program at the University of Central Florida worked together to turn the belief that all students’ language and literacy practices are worth sustaining and expanding into an action-oriented sociocultural literacy model. For other programs interested in or needing to undergo similar redressing, this profile offers a story of change that culminates in outcomes development, and that includes examples of our community’s collective actions to localize curricula towards students’ languages, literacies, and rhetorics. Specific emphasis of each phase of work (from 2017-2022) might be useful as programs embark on large-scale change; or the spirit of each movement might be more useful.

Much of the research in composition about Hispanic-serving institutions focuses on the tripartite of writing program administrators, faculty, and students and the complexities of multilingual learner pedagogies. This article draws on conversational interview methods and data to analyze the servingness of three Floridian HSIs through critical race theory’s interest convergence thesis. The interest convergence thesis advances that institutional efforts toward racial equality will persist only so far as those efforts also preserve the interests of racial dominance in social institutions. Guided by an institutional critique and racial methodological approach, this interest convergence analysis examines the impact of culturally White institutional ideologies on general education writing curriculum choices, professional development, and the ethnic-racial cultural composition of institutional governance. Interviews with WPAs from the three institutions detail how the institutional epistemologies of literacy affect their decisions and opportunities for Latinx-centric programmatic servingness at their HSIs.

This program profile describes the establishment and development of the English Language Learner Writing Center (ELLWC) at Miami University. The Center’s mission is to help multilingual (ML) students whose first language (L1) is other than English build writing skills while improving their academic English proficiency. The ELLWC’s profile details peer consultants’ professional training for supporting ML writers’ academic literacy development. Finally, the profile shares ELLWC assistance for faculty members who are interested in making their pedagogy more accessible and inclusive for linguistically and culturally diverse students.

Over the past several decades, writing center scholarship has evolved to include multiple theories and pedagogies that led to widely used best practices. As is the case in many disciplines, often writing centers at large, research PWIs are most often cited and highlighted within the scholarship. While many of those readings do offer helpful strategies for working with students at all levels, often they do not account for the unique contexts and diverse student populations that make up many HBCUs. As a result, more research from a variety of writing centers is needed so practitioners see there are multiple ways to operate a successful center and facilitate effective sessions. These authors begin by describing their student population and the HBCU learning environment. They then articulate three specific strategies, many of which directly oppose current mainstream practices, implemented in their writing center that influenced their policies and procedures. Lastly, they explore larger implications for these findings, for they believe aspects of these practices, all with traditions deeply rooted in the often-undervalued affective components of literacy instruction at HBCUs, will advance ideas in the field and ultimately be helpful for staff and students in all writing center contexts.

This article explores the emergence and development of writing centers in Brazil, using the author’s experience founding the Centro de Assessoria de Publicação Acadêmica (CAPA) at the Universidade Federal do Paraná as a case study. The author provides some historical context about Brazilian education and its traditional “banking model” of education (Paulo Freire) that did not value individual expression—including through writing. This model persisted even as composition studies evolved elsewhere. Academic literacy development in Brazil is thus a relatively recent phenomenon, and the effects of that paucity are felt among scholars in higher education settings. This motivated the author’s research into publication challenges faced by Brazilian faculty and graduate students, which revealed a need for more institutional support. This inspired the idea for CAPA, conceived as a space promoting dialogue around writing, not just language editing. In establishing CAPA, critical considerations were the use of a public call mechanism familiar to Brazilians (“o edital”) to make consultations part of the writing process, offering translation to draw more people from around campus, and conducting outreach that stressed writing over “English.” CAPA’s mission to foster academic identities and combat epistemicide makes it unique, but also gives it a very Brazilian flavor. Unlike some writing centers in other global contexts, CAPA was not an imported idea but emerged from local needs, fully integrated with Brazilian higher education culture, compatible with Brazilian understandings like critical pedagogy. CAPA represents a Brazilian innovation contributing original knowledge to international writing center conversations.

Literacy support in an EMI university in Central Asia (CA) helps students with the challenging linguistic demands of tertiary study in a second (foreign) language (L2). As Kazakhstan's post-Soviet education system (Yassukova, 2020) lacks significant first-language (L1) reading-to-write education (Keck, 2014; Friedman, 2019), English L2-literacy development has become even more difficult when compared to other regions of the world. Students’ literacy capabilities need to be investigated by L2-literacy tutors in order to scaffold learning better. Questions emerge as to whether it would help that the tutor had developed her L1 literacy through the same (but chronologically-earlier) system. To unpack this question, research can draw on perspectives in language socialisation (LS) (Duff, 2012), which sees learning environments as dynamic socially/culturally situated processes. To this end, this study looks at one L2-English literacy tutor's (author 2) experiences in a tertiary Foundation writing course. The goal was to see how the tutor’s interpretations of classroom literacy problems could inform the teaching of low L1-literacy students’ writing and metalanguage. For this purpose, we studied the reflective journaling (Burton, 2005) of the tutor who wrote reflective journals during a semester-long course in early 2020. The findings indicate that reflexivity can help a tutor find solutions, and that a similarity of background seems to help a local literacy tutor understand, and respond to, many of their students’ needs.

This is a book review of Creating Digital Literacy Spaces for Multilingual Writers by Meghan Bowling-Johnson.

This paper builds on a discussion launched by the EATAW 2021 conference panel, ‘Writing Tutor Development: Challenges and Opportunities in the Current State of the Art’. As a critical discussion of the panel’s themes, the paper engages with academic writing in times of crises by zooming in on infrastructures of writing support, namely the complex system in which Academic Writing Tutoring takes place, contextualised within the Centre for Academic Writing (CAW) at Coventry University, UK. Beginning with a consideration of what constitutes a ‘writing tutor’ in contemporary contexts and at CAW, the paper outlines a range of academic writing support identities and roles, unravels the institutional drivers that shape them, and offers perspectives on reconciling apparently disparate roles. Next, the paper addresses the issue of agency in terms of the challenges of enculturating writing tutors into communities of practice, discourse communities, and research networks. This is done with a view to reflecting on the practices in CAW and beyond, thus demonstrating the need for varied development and support pathways to facilitate the move towards online delivery amid, and after, a time of global crisis, namely, the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion centres on how challenges can be overcome through sustained professional development, focusing on the role of technology in not only refashioning academic writing support, but also the roles and practices of Academic Writing Tutors at CAW. Issues of digital pedagogies, technologies, and digital literacies permeate this discussion of the online pivot and crisis pedagogies, offering analysis, reflections, and questions to guide future directions in (online) Academic Writing Tutor development and Academic Writing (crisis) Pedagogies research.

The authors of the book present a broad survey of technologies and applications of AI as they particularly impact technical and professional communications. This book presents a broad treatment of its subjects, particularly given the framework of social implications, necessary literacy, and civic engagement that the authors use to explore the three facets of writing futures: collaboration, algorithms, and autonomous agents. The work is a survey of many technologies, applications, and developments, any of which may or may not play a substantial future role in the future of writing. Some of the authors’ examples may seem tangential to the TPC profession, but one cannot always predict future effects. The authors situate the book as “positioning scholars, instructors, and practitioners to plan for rapidly evolving technological and social contexts.” With its broad coverage of emerging technologies, rich citations, and wealth of backing resources, Writing Futures provides a launching point for deeper, focused study in the myriad areas of collaborative technologies, autonomous agents, and AI as they profoundly impact the TPC profession and the human experience.

This article explores the Reading Apprenticeship framework as a support for instructors to orchestrate dynamic, contextualized literacy instruction that supports both student engagement and deeper learning about the discipline of writing studies.

Antiracist education practices have gained increasing attention. Oftentimes, however, descriptions of this work fail to explicate the role of reading skills in students’ critical engagement with diverse texts. I explore the potential of metacognitive reading strategy instruction as a form of foundational literacy skills development for engaging in antiracist reading. Drawing from my experiences as a female of color and a coordinator and instructor of integrated reading and writing, I expand upon the concept of raciolinguistically just reading instruction, describing how students can document their application of multiple foundational reading strategies through the meta-strategy of annotation and other metacognitive practices. In particular, I focus on how students’ annotations can reflect their work in making text-based connections. Such annotation practice enacts a culturally sustaining pedagogy that amplifies student voices and their role as knowledge producers. I conclude by considering the larger role of decentering the instructor to foster students’ antiracist reading.

Even as education is always a high-stakes endeavor, the stakes of prison education contexts are even higher. Given the ongoing violences of surveillance, censorship, and obfuscation in prisons, these environments are neither conducive to literacy practices nor do they support the flourishing of human life or growth. Simultaneously, however, prison educators working with incarcerated students navigate and push back against these oppressions to support students learning in everyday contexts. In exploring these tensions through qualitative research, I argue that prison educators mobilize complex and highly situated literacy practices to subtly and quietly bend the rules in carceral environments. In deploying subversive acts of “creative maladjustment” (King Jr., Kohl), these instructors circumnavigate state power to sustain educational commitments to incarcerated students in the face of state violence. Through such explorations, I contend that literacy educators can better comprehend what it means to resist the state: for research, praxis, and survival.

Although literacy narratives have been a popular assignment in college composition classrooms, the role of context and interaction in students’ writing and understanding of literacy is one of the least explored areas. This article reports the findings of a qualitative case study conducted in a regular first year composition class (English 101) of a public research university in the Southwest. The data is comprised of fifteen literacy narratives accompanied by reflective letters written by a group of English monolingual and bi- and multilingual students; transcripts of nine personal interviews; and twelve one-on-one conferences that were coded and analyzed using a combination of inductive, deductive, and literal or verbatim coding methods mostly informed by grounded theory. The findings show that a literacy narrative assignment in college writing can foster a complex understanding of literacies among student writers. When we adopt a translingual orientation to literacy, encourage cross-cultural conversations through various collaborative activities and diverse readings, and emphasize the role of little narratives to resist the master narrative of literacy, both English monolingual and bi- and multilingual students mutually enrich their understanding of literacies. In this process, the writing classroom becomes borderland and the instructor and students become border crossers.

This paper seeks to offer a constructive critique of the idea that in order to align US writing instruction with the learning needs of a globalized, linguistically diverse population, writing studies should challenge the notion that the English language needs to play a central role in college composition courses. I point out rhetorical and pedagogical fallacies in a language rights discourse that warns against “ceding rhetorical ground to monolingual ideologies” (Flowers 33) by affirming writing studies’ commitment to ensuring access to English while promoting linguistic diversity within writing instruction. I then discuss a translingual writing program I started at a Hispanic Serving Institution that links ESL and Spanish writing courses within a learning community. I discuss how the implementation of this program relied on finding a common ground with “English only” ideology and show how this program disrupted “unilateral monolingualism” (Horner and Trimbur 595), in spite of the fact that it foregrounded the need to facilitate English academic literacy acquisition.

Failure is a significant issue for researchers conducting community-engaged work. This article responds to calls to share research failures more transparently and to create reflective spaces for students to examine moments of failure. We offer our experience adapting three problem-solving strategies from a community literacy course (adaptive problem-solving, rivaling, and critical incident interviewing) to help each other revisit our own “failed” attempts at community-engaged work. By applying these problem-solving strategies to reflect on our experiences—advocating for graduate student parents, working with a summer literacy program, and collaborating with parents of disabled children—we show how these strategies can transform an initial sense of stigmatized failure into a longer process of inquiry and growth. Our approach, we believe, represents an important literate practice for community-based scholars, not only for those seeking to create more collaborative reflective space within university-community partnership, but also for novice scholars navigating the challenges of community-engaged work for the first time.

With this issue, we welcome you to nearly a decade of Literacy in Composition Studies!We plan to recount and honor the work that has brought us this far in our spring issue, but for now we are delighted to welcome Al Harahap to our Editorial Team, as well as to express our appreciation to Kara Poe Alexander for stepping into the role of Submissions Editor.We send our heartfelt thanks to Chris Warnick for his ten years (so far!) of partnership with LiCS and wish him productivity and rest on

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This article reports findings from a qualitative study in a third-grade classroom in the Southwest in the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration. In response to students’ concerns about Trump’s rhetoric around immigration and border-wall construction, the teacher provided curricular space for students to study immigration policy and write letters to their congressional representative expressing their positions. Drawing on field notes, interviews, and student writing, this study asks, (a) What sources of knowledge did students draw on in their talk and writing? and (b) How did students respond to such curricular design? Analysis suggests that students drew on border thinking () and politicized funds of knowledge (), positioned themselves as change agents, and developed and displayed knowledge of academic genres and conventions.

An equitable education for linguistically minoritized and racialized-Othered youth fosters their biliteracy and critical consciousness about racial ideologies. Yet little is known about how or whether secondary-level dual-language bilingual-education programs and teachers seek to enhance students’ critical consciousness—especially as a means of grappling with racist ideologies. Drawing together literacy and race studies in education, I theorize a continuum of racial literacies, then employ it to examine dual-language curriculum and instruction practices. I use interview and classroom-observation data to reveal that a racially diverse dual-language program offered more racial-literacy practices on the hegemonic end of the continuum than the counterhegemonic end. Using teachers’ practices as an index of their program’s stance on racial literacy, I argue that the program provided a whitestream bilingual education: it offered biliteracy schooling through hegemonic racial-literacy practices that perpetuate white supremacy. The teachers’ successes and challenges speak to the need for structural attention to resources, training, and program-wide support for critical-racial-literacy practices. I conclude the article by joining calls for bilingual education to enhance youths’ critical-racial consciousness, adding racial to signal the need to be intentional in teaching about and countering racism, colonialism, and imperialism.

Literacy learning is an ideological proposition, one that privileges certain forms of language and those who speak them above others. This qualitative study utilizes critical metaphor analysis () to examine the literacy ideologies at work in a secondary remedial reading class. By analyzing the speech of Mr. Baker, a seasoned remedial reading teacher, and his ninth-grade student Angelica, three dominant metaphors in the corpus are explored: READING CLASS IS A RACE, LEARNING TO READ is a journey, and STUDENTS ARE MACHINES. Findings suggest both the limitations of the metaphors employed by participants as well as the utility of critical metaphor analysis in uncovering the ideological underpinnings of school-based literacy practices.

The impact of written communication in ancient Athens, particularly the social consequences of literacy on an oral culture, has been a subject of keen interest among rhetoricians. This essay synthesizes current research on the impact of literacy in ancient Athens from a rhetorical vector. One of the principal observations discussed in this review of current research is that the alphabetic writing of oral discourse better enabled rhetors to invent and compose complex modes of oral argument and persuasion than the heuristics of orality alone.

Integrated tasks are increasing in popularity, either replacing or complementing writing-only independent tasks in writing assessments. This shift has generated many research interests to investigate the underlying construct and features of integrated writing (IW) performances. However, due to the complexity of the IW construct, there are conflicting findings about whether and the extent to which various language skills and IW text features correlate to IW scores. To understand the construct of IW, we conducted a meta-analysis to synthesize correlation coefficients between scores of IW performances and (1) other language skills and (2) text quality features of IW. We also examined factors that may moderate the correlation of IW scores with these two groups of correlates. Consequently, (1) reading and writing skills showed stronger correlations than listening to IW scores; and (2) text length had a strongest correlation, followed by source integration, organization and syntactic complexity, with a smallest correlation of lexical complexity. Several IW task features affected the magnitude of correlations. The results supported the view that IW is an independent construct, albeit related, from other language skills and IW task features may affect the construct of IW.

The women’s talking group featured in this article theorizes the community literacy practice of thanduk—“setting something aside”—that members practice together. Sanduk—with an s and translated as Arabic for “box”— has a long, well documented history involving informal, rotary credit and savings associations practiced among people in Africa and of African descent. Rather than using the s, the group’s spelling is distinctively Nuer— thanduk—harkening back to indigenous versions of the practice documented throughout areas of East Africa and beyond. Thanduk invokes nommo, a distinctly African spiritual and philosophical value that strives for harmony and balance among interdependent members of a community. This article aims to make legible how the women in this study employ thanduk to thwart the transnational, intergenerational impacts of indirect colonial rule and neoliberal economics in pursuit of individual and collective thriving.

This article situates the practice of composing CCCC Accessibility Guides in critical access studies (Hamraie) and introduces the concept of critical access literacies. I argue that CCCC access guides cultivate critical access literacies amongst the guide writers and disabled and nondisabled conference participants, empowering them to better observe access barriers and advocate for expansive access. To make this argument, I triangulate interviews I conducted with the authors of the first six years of the guides (2011-2016) with textual analysis of the guides themselves. The interviews illustrate how the guide’s early authors re-imagined access to include expansive and intersectional access needs.

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.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 refers not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

In this guest editors' introduction to Community Literacy Journal's special issue on access, the guest editors call for greater attention to access work as community literacy, pushing for the field to tend to issues of intersectionality, reciprocity,

This article is an ethnographic case study of the work of two activist groups in Kansas City, Missouri. It discusses how unhoused activists with the Kansas City Homeless Union, through their 13-month on-and-off occupation of city property, worked to reframe access in ways that moved toward what disability justice activists call collective access, prioritized marginalized lived experience, and asserted their right to control over the resources that impacted their lives. This article ties these interventions explicitly to community writing work through a discussion of how citizen journalists from Independent Media Association, with whom the author has collaborated, documented and crafted narratives around the union’s work in ways that demonstrate ways community literacy work can function as rhetorical solidarity practices.

Skills, knowledge, time, ability, access, and cultural and societal norms all sponsor and constrain food literacies. Measuring the effects of class, race, cultural identity, knowledge, and ability on food access requires an understanding of how communities and institutions sponsor food literacy. Nutritionists have developed a framework for researching and measuring food literacy; however, the focus falls on measuring individual food literacy, which I argue is a form of epistemic whiteness that refuses to acknowledge the outsized responsibility of institutions in creating systems of food access and flattens the role community plays in mitigating barriers to access. A critical understanding of disability and the reciprocity intrinsic to community literacy research are offered as a way to move from measurement to sponsorship of community food literacies.