Community Literacy Journal

Articles:

Kim Lenters
Programming Family Literacy: Tensions and Directions

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

Eli Goldblatt, with Manuel Portillo and Mark Lyons
Story to Action: A Conversation about Literacy and Organizing

This is the first in a series of talks with community activists and educators I work with in Philadelphia. In each case, I hope to discover from my interlocutors how they think literacy figures in their work with people in under-resourced or marginalized neighborhoods. I’m also interested in what they think about their personal literacy histories and how their experiences may have affected their own life choices or modes of working. I have chosen to act largely as an interested interviewer in these conversations, prompting responses and asking further questions when I wanted to hear more. At the same time, I do have a point of view that may help academic readers understand more about the context for the following remarks. Although I have misgivings about adding my own voice to the voices of those I interview, I have appended some thoughts of my own to the interview in a way that seems the least intrusive.

Elizabeth A. Flynn and Rudiger Escobar Wolf
Rhetorical Witnessing: Recognizing Genocide in Guatemala

The article explores the rhetorical dimensions of witnessing. We concentrate, in particular, on two groups: university students at the University of San Carlos, Quetzaltenango, whose murals are dramatic reminders of the massacres that resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 indigenous people in the 1980s and early 90s and of the corrupt governmental leaders responsible for them; and U.S. accompaniers sponsored by an organization within my own community, the Copper Country Guatemala Accompaniment Project (CCGAP).

Lauren Rosenberg
Rewriting Ideologies of Literacy: A Study of Writing by Newly Literate Adults

This article is part of a project that involves case studies of four adults who attend an informal literacy center. I examine people’s motivations to write when their main purpose is not to gain a degree or other credentials. Here I focus on one study member and how she uses writing to gain textual agency. By composing narratives that investigate her social positioning, this woman rewrites her own story. I demonstrate how her texts and interview comments reveal a strong desire to connect with public audiences so that other people might follow her model of speaking out to change culture.

Shannon Carter
Repairing Inmates Through H.O.P.E.: Incarcerated Literacy and the Myth of Progressivism

This article analyzes one prison literacy program in Texas that trains inmate participants to teach other, likewise incarcerated and often dyslexic, men and women to read and write in English. Noting the regular recurrence of the words “repair” and “hope” in participant’s descriptions H.O.P.E. and associated activities, Carter makes extensive use of feminist epistemologist Elizabeth Spellman’s theory of “repair” and Paula Mathieu’s articulation of “hope” in her attempt to understand the nuances of “repair” and the “hope” it enables/generates behind these prison walls. Finally, given HOPE’s configuration as a “faith-based” program with Christian origins and Carter’s own position as a secular academic, the article ends with an extended discussion of the tensions between Bible-based discourses and the academy and, one hopes, locates a productive position amongst these tensions–where she neither resolves these tensions nor “overcomes” them (a “strategic orientation”) but merely tries to maintain involvement as researcher, activist, and teacher in reflective and critically aware ways (a “tactical orientation”).

Tobi Jacobi
Slipping Pages through Razor Wire: Literacy Action Projects in Jail

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

Book & Media Reviews:

Stephanie Vie, Fort Lewis College, Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy From the United States (Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004)

Elizabeth Campbell, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere (Christian R. Weisser, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002)

Alex Ilyasova, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age (Allsion Fine, Jossey-Bass, 2006)

Angela Rounsaville, The Language Of Experience: Literate Practices And Social Change. (Gwen Gorzelsky, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005)