Community Literacy Journal

Special Guest Editors: Appalachian Literacies:
Katie Vande Brake and Kim Holloway, King College, Bristol, Tennessee

Articles

Sara Webb-Sunderhaus
“A Family Affair:
Competing Sponsors of Literacy in Appalachian Students’ Lives”

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.

Tracy Hamler Carrick
“Bootlegging Literacy Sponsorship, Brewing Up Institutional Change”

This paper considers how community literacy programs factor into broader economies of literacy development. The author analyzes two Appalachian community literacy projects, Shirley Brice Heath’s ethnographic project in the Carolina Piedmont and Highlander Research and Education Center’s organizing efforts with the Appalachian People’s Movement, to construct an image of sponsors of diverted literacy, people and institutions that employ three interdependent tactics to usefully redirect the means by which literacy travels through the educational marketplace.

Erica Abrams Locklear
“Narrating Socialization: Linda Scott DeRosier’s Memoirs”

Linda Scott DeRosier’s autobiographical accounts of literacy attainment in Creeker: A Woman’s Journey and Songs of Life and Grace reveal that entrance into a secondary discourse community via literacy can bring both pleasure and pain. Analyzing the identity negotiations DeRosier encounters reveals that although she experiences a sense of loss as a result of continued formal education, such schooling also makes possible the creation of her memoirs, which help overturn stereotypes connecting Appalachia with illiteracy.

Jacqueline Preston
“There Again, Common Sense: Rethinking Literacy Through Ethnography”

This article revisits the debate between cultural and critical literacy through ethnography challenging popular academic views in education and literacy. Set in a preschool classroom at the inception of the “No Child Left Behind” initiative, this essay focuses on teaching assistant Marylou Anderson. Her experiences growing up in Appalachia inform a teaching philosophy that differs significantly from her colleagues. Her story invites us to reconsider how “the culture of power” functions as a formidable gatekeeper.

Marcia Ribble
“Developing Teacher Literacy in Appalachian Contexts”

To become literate when we move from one part of the country to another with significant cultural differences, our first task is to learn the new culture, so we can more effectively work with our colleagues and our students. When I moved from Bay City MI to Morehead KY, there were many customs I needed to learn. Fortunately, what I learned helped me to cherish both my new colleagues and my students.

Mark Roberts and Casey Clabough
“Writing for a Place: A Writers Workshop for McDowell County, West Virginia”

This article presents the thoughts and emotional responses of the two authors and the actual text of the Writing Workshop Manual they created for the Caretta Community Center in McDowell County, West Virgina. Their stream-of-consciousness technique shows not only the contrast of their private and public personas but also some of the outsider/insider dialogue that goes on whenever outsiders—well-meaning academics, church workers, or social service providers—decide to fix something that Appalachian insiders would maintain was not broken.

In new literacy studies, theorists talk and write about literacy events and literacy practices. They define a literacy event as a happening around a text; literacy practices are cultural ways of using reading and writing. One instance of a Writers’ Workshop would be a literacy event. A series of such workshops might become a recognized literacy practice in a community. Roberts and Clabough, academics for whom literacy events are commonplace and literacy practices are given, chronicle their attempts to get the a visible literacy cycle going for residents of McDowell County. In the process they discover a powerful literacy practice already in place that surprises them.

Todd Snyder
“The Webster County Blues: An Exploration of the Educational Attitudes of a Poor Appalachian Community”

I conducted a survey in order to determine whether or not the cultural values shared by parents from a poor mountain town in West Virginia discourage high school students from pursuing a college education. The results suggest that the persistence of poverty in rural Webster County can be attributed to the region’s traditional set of cultural values, which discourage the importance of higher education.

Book Reviews

Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference
by Nedra Reynolds
Reviewer: Donelle Dreese, Northern Kentucky University

Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition
by Paula Mathieu
Reviewer: Caroline Gottschalk-Druschke, University of Illinois at Chicago

City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices.
Bruce McComiskey and Cynthia Ryans, Eds.
Reviewer: Candice S. Rai, University of Illinois at Chicago

Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World.
by Zygmunt Bauman
Reviewer: Megan Marie, Malcolm X College

Whistlin’ and Crowin’ Women of Appalachia: Literacy Practices Since College
by Katherine Kelleher Sohn
Reviewer: Robert M. Wallace, West Virginia State University

Beginner’s Guide to Community-Based Art
by Keith Knight, Mat Schwarzman, and Many Others
Reviewer: Ramona Anne Caponegro, University of Florida

Other People’s Words: The Cycle of Low Literacy
by Victoria Purcell-Gates
Reviewer: Ryan Shadle, Urban Appalachian Council Educator

Image from Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USF35-1326]