Issues 4.1 and 4.2 available for download (PDF)

Full-text PDFs of issues 4.1 (Special Issue on Community Literacy & Sustainability) and 4.2 are available as free downloads:

Issue 4.1 PDF (4.2MB)

Issue 4.2 PDF (3.3MB)

Position Available: Director, University of Michigan Dearborn Academic Service Learning Center

Working Title: Director, University of Michigan Dearborn Academic Service Learning Center
Job Classification Title:  Lecturer III – discipline open
Department: Academic Affairs
Salary Range: Competitive
Posting Dates: March 22, 2010 to May 1, 2010
Anticipated start date will be June/July 2010 or September 2010

The University of Michigan – Dearborn (UM-D) is one of the three campuses of the University of Michigan.  UM-D is a comprehensive university offering high quality undergraduate, graduate, professional, and continuing education to residents of southeastern Michigan and attracts more than 8,600 students.  The campus is strategically located on 200 suburban acres of the original Henry Ford Estate in the Greater Detroit Metropolitan region.

The director assumes leadership of the new UM-Dearborn Academic Service Learning Center (formerly the Civic Engagement Project) and reports directly to the provost.  In addition to teaching two courses per academic year in his/her discipline, this Lecturer III will serve as the primary resource for service learning across the campus and administer academic programming around community-based teaching/learning. 

While this is a new position, civic engagement/academic service learning has been a formal component of the undergraduate experience for five years. With the hiring of a director, the scope and depth of these efforts will be broadened.
 
To apply, please send a letter of interest and your curriculum vitae to William DeGenaro, Search Committee Chair, Department of Language, Culture, and Communication, CASL, 4901 Evergreen Rd, Dearborn, Michigan 48128. [Read full description]

If You're in Chicago in October ...

Call for Book Chapters: Circulating Communities: The Tactics and Strategies of Community Publishing

Issue 3.2 (Spring 2009) is in the mail

New CLJ Book & New Media Review Editor

Jennifer deWinter, Assistant Professor and Co-Director Professional Writing at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, joins us as Book & New Media Review Editor. Among Jennifer's goals for the Book & New Media Review section: " I will be instituting a "Keywords" essay in the book review section. Currently, there is more literature available than we are able to review in a semi-annual publication. As such, we at the journal have decided to include a thematic synthesis essay organized under key themes in the field of community literacy: community literacy (obviously), methodology, service learning, international service, youth programs, and so forth.

"These essays will serve the purpose of collecting the sources and putting them in conversation with one another in order to appreciate where we have been as a field of study and where we will go."

If you are interested in writing one of these essays -- or submitting book & media reviews -- please contact Jennifer at jdewinter@wpi.edu.

National Faith, Justice, and Civic Learning Conference

"This conference advances the understanding that our teaching, learning, scholarship, and service are enriched when we integrate the often fragmented dimensions of our institutions and greater society."

Visit the conference site.

The Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives

The DALN invites people of all ages, races, communities, backgrounds, and interests to contribute stories about how they learned to read, write, and compose meaning and how they continue to do so. We welcome all kinds of texts, both formal and informal: diaries, blogs, poetry, music and musical lyrics, fan zines, school papers, videos, sermons, gaming profiles, speeches, chatroom exchanges, text messages, letters, stories, photographs, etc. We also invite contributors to provide samples of their own writing (papers, letters, zines, speeches, etc.) and compositions (music, photographs, videos, sound recordings, etc.).

Visit the (DALN) site to learn more about using this valuable resource.

Issue 3.2 Published

Issue 3.2 has been published in our Online Journal System. Visitors can review the Table of Contents  and abstracts, and subscribers may download and read articles via PDF.

Subscription instructions.

Visualizing 3.2

Cover Us

The Community Literacy Journal invites your photo art for future covers. We especially would like to feature cover photos that evoke diverse communities, the complexities of communities, the visuals, text, and rhetoric of communities, and the importance of communities.

Submission requirements:

Prints should be no larger than 9.5"x 12.5"
300 DPI or higher
Digital files should be saved as .JPG or .TIF.
Larger files can also be submitted via snail mail, on a CD-ROM, flash drive, etc..

We offer five complimentary copies of the journal and publish your Artist's Statement; your copyright remains with you.

Webb-Sunderhaus's "A Family Affair" Anthologized

Sara Webb-Sunderhaus's "A Family Affair: Competing Sponsors of Literacy in Appalachian Students' Lives"
(CLJ issue 2.1) is included in the upcoming Norton Book of Composition Studies.

Webb-Sunderhaus's article was part of a special issue on Appalachian Literacies, edited by Katherine Vande Brake and Kimberley Holloway. Congratulations, Sara!

CLJ Awarded Best New Journal at MLA Conference

The Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) awarded the CLJ the Best New Journal Award at MLA Conference in December in San Francisco. The journal is published collaboratively between Michigan Technological University's Department of Humanities and the University of Arizona's Department of English.

In her remarks at the awards ceremony, Joycelyn Moody, Vice President, Council of Editors of Learned Journals and Editor of African American Review noted that judges "expressed admiration for the far reaching scope and visually pleasing design of Community Literacy Journal as well as its democratic approach to literacy studies. About its focus on the important but under-rated aspect of literacy studies, the judges found that Community Literacy Journal makes an original contribution using a compelling presentation."

Finally, the judges remarked CLJ’s fearless reach beyond “the usual boundaries of academia to topics of interest out in the wider world.”

OJS: Online Submissions and Online Content

Documentary: agua miel: secrets of the agave

New Community Literacy Title

Elenore Long's Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics is available from from Parlor Press. From the description: the book "traces common values in diverse accounts of 'ordinary people going public.' Long offers a five-point theoretical framework used to review major community-literacy projects that have emerged in recent years:

1) the guiding metaphor behind such projects;
2) the context that defines a 'local' public, shaping what is an effective, even possible performance,
3) the tenor and affective register of the discourse;
4) the literate practices that shape the discourse; and, most signficantly,
5) the nature of rhetorical invention or the generative process by which people in these accounts respond to exigencies, such as getting around gatekeepers, affirming identities, and speaking out with others across difference.

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics also examines pedagogies that educators can use to help students to go public in the course of their rhetorical education at college. the concluding chapter adapts local-public literacies to college curricula and examines how these literate moves elicit different kinds of engagement from students and require different kinds of scaffolding from teachers and community educators. A glossary and annotated bibliography provide the basis for further inquiry and research."

The Conscious Classroom

From the February 25, 2008 issue of The Nation magazine: "Positioned among smoky factories and aging row houses on Chicago's West Side, the immaculate Little Village Lawndale High School (LVLHS) serves as a constant reminder to community residents of what collective action can produce. Concerned that 70 percent of neighborhood students traveled to different parts of the city for high school, parents organized vigorously for the construction of a new facility in their backyard.

After initially approving the plans, city officials stalled construction, claiming that funds had to be diverted to other projects. In response, the community redoubled its efforts, culminating in a nineteen-day hunger strike at the site of the proposed building, referred to by supporters as Camp Cesar Chavez."

Literacies

"Smithsonian in Your Classroom"

A Literacy Road Map: Columbia Basin

New City Community Press: Community Voices

"Failure to thrive?: Additive Bilingual Project ..."

Highlander Center's 75th Anniversary

The Highlander Center was founded in 1932 to serve as an adult education center for community workers involved in social and economic justice movements. The goal of Highlander was and is to provide education and support to poor and working people fighting economic injustice, poverty, prejudice, and environmental destruction. We help grassroots leaders create the tools necessary for building broad-based movements for change.

The founding principle and guiding philosophy of Highlander is that the answers to the problems facing society lie in the experiences of ordinary people. Those experiences, so often belittled and denigrated in our society, are the keys to grassroots power.

National Public Radio story. (September 2, 2007)

CL Panel at Feminism/Rhetoric Conference

"Issues in Community Literacy" Panel at the 6th Biennial Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference, Little Rock, October 4 - 6:

Laurie Gries "Representation Issues in Literacy Campaigns: Enacting Civic Discourse with a Transnational Gaze"

Kathryn Johnson " A Survivor Comes Forward: Arguing for Personal Stories of Gender and Power in the Headlines"

Michael Moore," What Would a Feminist Community Literacy Look Like?"

Montreal: ALCC Digital Literacy Project