This article highlights some of the successes the Humanities Out There (HOT) program at the University of California, Irvine had when partner- ing with progressive institutions, namely with the Chicano/Latino Studies program at the university and with the arts program in a local high school. The first program engaged students in exploring the history underlying their communities, and the second helped students to dramatize their life experi- ences before a local public using their home languages. Analyzing what en- abled HOT’s successes, I urge others sponsoring youth literacy to seek out, and make alliance with, progressive institutions within public education.

This assignment deploys place-based pedagogy in a basic writing course, and enacts it through first-person research in the form of a walking tour of a university campus. Students first read and discuss two texts about their campus: an article analyzing campus architecture and a philosophical treatise about the campus park. Students then marshal evidence gathered through a walking tour to argue with one of these texts. In addition to bolstering students’ confidence for contesting claims advanced by authorities, this assignment encourages students and teachers alike to cultivate a more deliberate awareness of their surroundings. Because this assignment is meant to be grounded in a specific locale, instructors adapting this prompt are encouraged to seek out texts addressing their own institutional settings.

In this interview, Daniel M. Gross argues for an expansive rhetorical approach to emotion studies, one bridging composition, psychology, history, politics, and even theology. Speaking to compositionists, Gross begins by talking about writers’, teachers’, and administrators’ emotions, those possible and prohibited not in the classroom but in co-curricular activities—including tree-hugging. He also elaborates on his critique of the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing for its exclusive focus on positive emotions. The conversation then touches on contemporary political issues such as the putative waning of affect in postmodern society, the revaluing of love in Third Wave feminist scholarship, the angry white male, and the BlackLivesMatter movement. Next, Gross brings his philosophical training to bear in discussing the vocabulary of emotion studies, including “pathos” and “affect,” and he addresses how students’, and prisoners’, writing can serve as a prosthetic for their sponsors’ emotional needs. The interview concludes with a comment about style.

This study follows Mike, a police officer in training, as he runs a Criminal Justice Club at an after-school center in a working-class Mexican@ neighborhood. Employing James Paul Gee’s theories of discourse and identity, the study shows how this club enables the teens to shed the identity of at-risk youths and inhabit the identity of future-cops, a transformation that secures their future within the linked institutions of law enforcement and the public schools. However, because the police and schools help to subordinate community residents, the teens’ new identity sets them against their neighbors. The study describes how Mike and his fellow teacher instruct the teens in how to negotiate this irresolvable structural contradiction through double-consciousness. Drawing on interviews and observations, the author presents the perspectives of Mike and the teens he teaches regarding race, empowerment and justice in literacy education.