Community Literacy

It is a truism to state that literacy is important to life; it is impossible to escape it. In an age where literacy - even just as written text - is delivered via media as diverse as clothing, signs, bodies, music, rap, screens and paper, it cannot be missed. But it is still common when we speak of literacy to assume that we are thinking simply of words in a limited range of contexts and genres. As well, when we investigate it as a practice, we often do so simply in formal and institutional contexts. It is obvious that literacy is embedded in all of life, and that institutional and formal literacy can never be truly separated from the literacy practices of the world beyond school. This is not a new idea, but in the last 20 years, we have developed a richer understanding of what this might mean for the literacy practices sanctioned, supported, and used within schooling. Earlier discussions of the importance of community literacy by administrators, schools, and teachers, were generally framed by a recognition that the literacy experiences of home and community have a significant impact on literacy success at school. But much of this interest has been in how families and their literacy practices serve school agendas, with interest driven by limited definitions of literacy and at times deficit views of learning. This restricted view of the relationship between literacy practices in and out of school, has constrained attempts to build stronger relationships between schools and their communities. As Schultz and Hull state (see Schultz and Hull 2015, “Literacies in and Out of School in the United States,” Volume 2), our students are never simply in school or out of school, for their identities move with them, and their practices are carried with them across contexts. And yet, we still know far less than we need to know about the way literacy touches lives in surprising contexts and in varied forms. There is so much more to know, and hence we require new ways to help us understand literacy’s varied forms, purposes and uses. As well, we need to widen our contexts and arenas for exploration.

This article reports from five years of qualitative research into the languages and literacies of language brokers during tutoring sessions between emergent bilingual elementary school students, their mothers, and  homework mentors at an after-school program in New York City. My research explores the translanguaging practices (García, 2009; 2012) of participant youth language brokers who simultaneously translated and interpreted homework with adults. I examine translanguaging events during homework tutoring, documenting how practices such as language brokering develop tactical repertoires for youths communicating language arts assignments between their mothers, mentors, and peers. Emergent bilingual youth and their homework mentors at the after-school program involved Spanish dominant mothers in English language activities, permitting mothers increased collaboration in their children's homework assignments. Together, families and mentors worked to pool their bilingual resources in the practices of doing monolingualized homework multilingually and with meaningful involvement.

Community literacy's definition of community is often spatially defined; thus, community literacy programs belong to a particular city, neighborhood, or group of people. The challenge is attending to opt-in communities that are not geographically defined—communities that form in large part because of Internet access and continuous involvement in online, virtual spaces rather than material locations. Centers, then, are replaced by forums, wikis, and avatar-mediated conversations, and in this environment, community center teachers and organizers are replaced by community managers, those people who work at the intersection between IP holders and players, mediating literate practices, mentoring new people, and working with players to effect changes to the system. This paper looks to the video game industry's use of community managers to suggest ways to organize and think about communities in online spaces.

This article conceptualizes a framework for understanding the discourse and literacy practices generated by players of the video game, Fortnite. As a teacher educator interested in studying how multiliteracies cultivated in social settings can be leveraged toward academic success, my two objectives for this theoretical article are to examine how Fortnite players operate within their digital community and to explore what relationships may be established between the game’s social literacy contexts and formal literacy learning. In light of Fortnite’s connections to reading comprehension, discourse systems, and social learning environments, recommendations are made for future research, including considerations of school-based implementation.

This is the presentation access guide created for the 2021 Conference on Community Writing. It's also available in Google Doc format, at the following link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gzaXKBK9xLEj3-ymebW0BBz4A-t7cC5OTT_Io7fZTYM/edit?usp=sharing

Community literacy as a field privileges qualitative research methods,
which are well-suited to helping researchers highlight the social context of
literacy practices. As the editors’ introduction to the Spring 2007 issue of the
Community Literacy Journal notes, one of the challenges of literacy studies
is the methodological quandaries that arise from the work happening in
the field; Moore and Warnock argue in particular that community literacy
work highlights those tensions because it “assumes some measures of
social action, action research, ethnography, shifting notions of ‘community,’
assumptions about the purposes of education, and the not-always-aligned
needs of academics and community members” (9). Thus, while qualitative
methods and methodologies often support community literacy work—both
research and praxis—we understand that we must approach such methods
with an understanding of their complexity, a complexity that is borne out of
their embeddedness in an interpretivist philosophical standpoint concerned
with understanding and interpreting a complex, ever-shifting social world
rich in detailed data. In this synthesis essay, then, I highlight some of the
problems and possibilities inherent in a qualitative methodology as well
as showcase some of the recent publications featuring this interpretive
paradigm.

This article centers disability justice, an ongoing and unfolding project of
LGBTQA disabled BIPOC, to help understand and challenge the work of
community literacy studies. By putting community literacy studies in conversation with disability justice through three themes—"Nothing About Us Without Us,” “Access is Love,” and “Solidarity Not Charity”—this essay moves to unpack how community literacy can resist not only ableism but also the interlocking systems of oppression which support it.

The steady stream of high schoolers, their parents, siblings, and grandparents continued all evening. For the duration of the two-hour event, people filed into the museum to walk past and admire the six large oil paintings displayed on easels throughout the main floor of the museum lobby. Each of the brightly colored panels, created in collaboration between a professional artist and English classes from high schools in the area, illustrated a scene in To Kill a Mockingbird.Throughout the evening, students excitedly walked to the panel that they had helped to create. "See that chair?" one boy asked his mom, pointing to a panel that had, as its chosen scene, a classroom full of students (see Figure 1). "I did that," he said proudly. He went on to describe the scene and when in the novel it took place. It was obvious his mom was not familiar with the novel, but it was also obvious that she was proud of her son and his work."I love seeing all these young people ...

This article highlights how contemporary structural forces--the intertwined systems of racism, xenophobia, gentrification, and capitalism--have material consequences for the nature of community literacy education. As a case study, I interrogate the rhetoric and infrastructure of a San Francisco K-12 literacy nonprofit in the context of tech-boom gentrification, triggering the mass displacement of Latinx residents. I locate the nonprofit in longer histories of settler colonialism and migration in the Bay Area to analyze how the organization's rhetoric-the founder's TED talk, its website, the mural on the building's façade-are structured by racist logics that devalue and homogenize the literacy and agency of the local community, perpetuating white "possessive investments" (Lipsitz) in land, literacy, and education. Drawing on abolitionist and decolonial education theory, I prose a praxis encouraging literacy scholar-practitioners to question and ultimately divest from institutional rhetorics and funding sources that continue to forward racism, xenophobia, imperialism, and raciolinguistic supremacy built upon them.

This essay presents a polyvocal review of the 2019
Conference on Community Writing. It is composed of a
series of vignettes and reflections written by the authors,
community partners, conference organizers, educators,
and others who attended the conference. Together, these
reflections examine a central theme of the conference,
“the work” of community writing, by attending to four
questions: 1) What is the work of the Conference on
Community Writing, and what does it tell us about the
state of the subfield of community-engaged writing?;
2) What spaces does the conference encompass, and who
is included in these spaces?; 3) What are the material
realities that enable and constrain our work, in and
beyond the conference?; and 4) What work is unfinished,
and what will sustain us as we tackle it? The polyvocal
essay presented here examines these questions through
multiple positionalities within community writing studies,
ultimately arguing that attending to the diversity of voices,
stories, and perspectives in community writing must guide
our efforts to understand community writing as a field and
imagine its future work.

This essay presents a semester long partnership between two courses at different institutions-one in a local high school, the other at a four-year public university-as a community form of community engaged pedagogy with the potential to subvert Neoliberal assumptions about our students and their writing. Our project inspects the notions of literacy that our students have internalized about themselves and others, interrogates the "value" Neoliberalism ascribes to different forms of literacy, and seeks out ways to center our students' literacies that foreground the power these often institutionally dismissed literacies can have.

Drawing on interviews with writing teachers, this article highlights some of
the affective responses that may arise for students, community partners, and teachers when we situate our pedagogies in public sites beyond the classroom. I analyze a teacher-narrated moment of student distress to demonstrate how theories of transformative learning might help us productively theorize affect in service-learning and community-based education. To conclude, I offer a reciprocal model of care that employs tenets of feminist pedagogy, such as transparency and decentering of authority, and that acknowledges the valid emotions students, teachers, and community members may experience. I call for community literacy practitioners to see the power of all participants to both give and receive care in transformative education.

Project HOPE or Harnessing Offenders' Personal Empowerment is one the flagship programs of Far Eastern University-Community Extension Services. It caters incarcerated female individuals in Manila City Jail, Sta. Cruz, Manila which reflects the university's response towards inclusiveness in providing community development programs. Through this, the FEU-Institute of Education introduced enhancing reading skills program to 10 selected Persons Deprived of Liberty (PDL) in Manila City Jail-Female Dormitory, Sta. Cruz, Manila. This is in response to the study conducted by [19] where educational needs are one of the primary programs that PDL's need. A purposive sampling method was used for the selection of 10 participants. A post-evaluative program questionnaire was given to respondents to evaluate the program, and collected data were analyzed using descriptive research method. Meanwhile, teacher volunteers were asked to share their experiences during their immersion services to Manila City Jail-Female Dormitory, Sta. Cruz, Manila. Descriptions of their reflexivity paper were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings revealed that community literacy program like this are beneficial to PDL residents as it addresses their educational needs and supports knowledge growth. This paper discusses the impact of enhancing reading skills program of FEU-IE to PDL participants in Manila City Jail-Female Dormitory as it highlights experiences of teacher volunteers in the immersion. Results of this study serves for comprehensive and tailor-fit enhancing reading skills program to future PDL participants.

This essay analyzes the street art project Stop Telling Women to Smile (STWTS) to argue that public art plays an essential, pedagogical role in enhancing literacy education and intercultural communication within our communities. Functioning as both a public pedagogy and community literacy, STWTS demonstrates the power of public art to address injustice and provoke community conversation. To conclude, the essay calls literacy educators to expand the sites of pedagogy to include the everyday literacies students encounter within local public spaces.

Dr. Richardson's talk illuminates the language, literacies, communicative, and rhetorical practices of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The work pays attention to the communication practices of the BLM and Hip Hop generation in its extension of Black and African American language traditions and prior liberation movements in their unapologetic performance of Black chants, Black grammar, phonology, vocabulary, Black fashion and music, to die-ins, hands-up, and the technologization of the movement through social media, Black Twitter, hashtags, and memes. The language and literacies of the Black Lives Matter movement represent diverse identities within Black community, vernacular associated with various economic and educational classes, diaspora, culturally rooted, Hip Hop generations, cisgendered women, men, as well as LGBTQ and gender non-conforming. In this way, the language and literacies of BLM promote the value of ALL Black lives.

Using a translanguaging framework, we examined the language and literacy practices of racialized, emergent bilingual children in a bilingual (English/Spanish), community-based writing program in urban Philadelphia. Located in South Philly’s Italian Market, the program’s target audience was emergent bilingual, Latinx children who were 7 to 17 years old. The center offered an afternoon academy program, week-day evening and Saturday morning workshops, and summer writing camps. When we began research at the center in 2015, we noted that despite its bilingual name, the center operated primarily in English. For instance, teachers and volunteers spoke overwhelmingly in English to the children, and the focal texts of lessons and the children’s writing pieces were produced only in English. We were concerned about the apparent lack of bilingualism, and specifically the lack of active use of Spanish at the center. To address this, we approached the center’s director about offering bilingual writing workshops on Saturdays that would model a critical, translanguaging pedagogy. This chapter reports the findings from these workshops.

This essay considers the difficulty of seeing systems of oppression-a challenging first step of writing for social change. I argue that service-learning faculty and public writing scholars have relied on outdated ways of thinking about racism and oppression, treating social issues as isolated instances of discrimination. Instead, by drawing from Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, I argue that we need to recognize that mass incarceration has created a new a racial caste system and is the root cause uniting many social problems. Mass incarceration and neoliberalism work together to exclude millions of people from economic and civic life, stain them with moral condemnation so that they remain invisible to the majority, and divert public attention from the flaws in our political and economic structures. I use examples from a local nonprofit to illustrate how this framework offers a new approach to servicelearning and public writing.

How writers, activists, and artists without power resist dominant social, cultural, and political structures through the deployment of unconventional means and materials.

In Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, Vanessa Kraemer Sohan applies a translingual and transmodal framework informed by feminist rhetorical practice to three distinct case studies that demonstrate women using unique and effective rhetorical strategies in political, religious, and artistic contexts. These case studies highlight a diverse set of actors uniquely situated by their race, gender, class, or religion, but who are nevertheless connected by their capacity to envision and recontextualize the seemingly ordinary means and materials available to them in order to effectively persuade others.

The Great Depression provides the backdrop for the first case study, a movement whereby thousands of elderly citizens proselytized and fundraised for a monthly pension plan dreamt up by a California doctor in the hopes of lifting themselves out of poverty. Sohan investigates how the Townsend Plan’s elderly supporters—the Townsendites—worked within and across language, genre, mode, and media to enable them for the first time to be recognized by others, and themselves, as a viable political constituency.

Next, Sohan recounts the story of Quaker minister Eliza P. Kirkbride Gurney who met President Abraham Lincoln in 1862. Their subsequent epistolary exchanges concerning conscientious objectors made such an impression on him that one of her letters was rumored to be in his pocket the night of his assassination. Their exchanges and Gurney’s own accounts of her transnational ministry in her memoir provide useful examples of how, throughout history, women rhetors have adopted and transformed typically underappreciated forms of rhetoric—such as the epideictic—for their particular purposes.

The final example focuses on the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers—a group of African American women living in rural Alabama who repurpose discarded work clothes and other cast-off fabrics into the extraordinary quilts for which they are known. By drawing on the means and materials at hand to create celebrated works of art in conditions of extreme poverty, these women show how marginalized artisans can operate both within and outside the bounds of established aesthetic traditions and communicate the particulars of their experience across cultural and economic divides.

Christiane Donahue's use of mobility as a heuristic for understanding disciplinary research frames in interaction offers a new way to think about how we understand current research practices. Mobility allows Donahue to find connections between two seemingly disparate disciplinary areas of study, translingualism and transfer, and show how scholars of both can learn from each other to make new knowledge within their central areas of study and the discipline as a whole. In this response essay, I use Donahue's model of connecting disciplinary frames via mobility to explore intersections between community writing, as presented by Eli Goldblatt, and design thinking, as presented by Scott Wible. Both of these areas of inquiry are receiving strong disciplinary attention at the moment, 1 but by thinking about them together through Donahue's model of disciplinary mobility, we can gain a better understanding of how community writing and design thinking are already connected and how to mobilize those points of connection to transform research practices.

This essay will focus on student campaigns to stop deportations at Krome Detention Center between 2013-2017 in Miami, Florida. This advocacy work shaped a letter writing project between my university writing center and a detention center. Writing in this context, then, is a collective act, challenging a prison industrial complex that impacts both the classroom and community. The work of student organizers can challenge our field to work beyond our disciplinary boundaries and help us find new possibilities for community writing in the classroom and writing centers.

This essay examines technical communication students' perceptions of the literacies and skills they develop and the challenges they experience in team, service-learning contexts. Although studies have addressed teamwork and servicelearning as separate entities, few studies have looked at how they function together. To examine these questions, we collected questionnaires from students in entry-level technical writing courses who had worked in teams to write feasibility reports for local nonprofit organizations. Results demonstrate that students participating in teams with clients had high levels of personal investment regarding the project, team, and client; they also reported increased skills in and strategies for teamwork, communication, project management, and audience analysis. Findings also show, however, that students experienced challenges with their team regarding project management, communication, and scheduling and challenges with their client in terms of accessibility, communication, feedback, and determining the client's wants and needs. This study is important for teachers considering implementing team projects with service-learning components and has implications for the way we teach and structure such projects.

The Drake Community Press is a collaborative publishing project involving students and faculty from a variety of disciplines along with a non-profit community partner with a compelling story to share. Over two years and eight production phases, campus and community participants create the content, format, design, promotion and distribution of a high-quality publication that aims, through sales and advocacy, to advance the partner's mission. In so doing, the Press creates an intentional framework of encounter-education as dialogue-in which participants negotiate across cultural and disciplinary boundaries as equal stakeholders with a shared purpose.

This article reclaims Jane Addams as a community literacy pedagogue, explicating her pedagogical theory through an analysis of her social thought.  Addams’ goal of “socializing democracy” through education led her to both encourage immigrant students to associate across difference and to assimilate into dominant literacies—tensions present in today’s community literacy contexts. The article includes suggestions for rhetorically redeploying Addams’ pedagogy in contemporary writing instruction.

Some research has explored perspectives held by the homeless on technology use (Borchard, 2010; Eyrich-Garg, 2010, 2011; Harpin, Davis, Low, & Gilroy, 2016; Hersberger, 2002/2003; Pollio, Batey, Bender, Ferguson, & Thompson, 2013). Few studies have however focused on understanding this population’s use of technology for literacy purposes (Hendry, 2011; Muggleton & Ruthven, 2012), as distinct from their more general technology use, such as acquiring the skills to improve their station in life or to enhance their health, or utilize social services. Employing symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969) as a conceptual framework and using semi-structured interviews, this qualitative study examines technology use for literacy purposes by the homeless. It also investigates the meanings that these participants direct toward technology. The findings suggest diverse technology uses that enhance the participants’ access to social services. Other responses indicate differences in the conceptions an...

This article explores the literacy lives of students enrolled in English Composition courses at two open-admission universities in Central Appalachia and the complex role of immediate and extended family members as sponsors of literacy in these students’ lives. Some relatives emerged as both sponsors and inhibitors-or perhaps more accurately, sponsors of competing meanings of literacy-and illustrated the larger social forces surrounding literacy in these students’ lives.