We’re very happy as this first issue goes to press to be able to list the inaugural issue’s abstracts and titles:
Community Literacy: A Rhetorical Model for Personal and Public Inquiry
Lorraine Higgins
Elenore Long
Linda Flower
This paper develops a rhetorically-centered model of community literacy in the theoretical and practical context of local publics—those spaces where ordinary people develop public voices to engage in intercultural inquiry and deliberation. Drawing on fifteen years of action research in the Community Literacy Center and beyond, the authors characterize the distinctive features of local publics, the deliberative, intercultural discourses they circulate, and the literate practices that sustain them. They identify four critical practices at the heart of community literacy: assessing the rhetorical situation; creating local publics; developing citizens’ rhetorical capacities; and supporting change through the circulation of alternative texts and practices.
Writing Programs as Distributed Networks: A Materialist Approach to University-Community Digital Media Literacy
Michelle Comstock
This article addresses how community-university digital media literacy projects are redefining literacy, literate practices, and institutions. Using Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which emphasizes the organizing process itself, I analyze the shifting definitions of literacy within one particular university-community collaboration. My analysis demonstrates the importance of creating writer and producer identities for all project participants and developing networks of responsibility and sustainability through the distribution of expertise among university and community institutions. In order to sustain such collaborations and university-community networks, literacy workers and writing programs must challenge static forms of participation and expertise, as well as monolithic notions of literacy, and become more responsive to concrete literacy needs within our communities.
The Limits of Institutionalized Literacies: Minority Community Literacies and One U.S. University
Christopher Schroeder
After reviewing results from the Nation’s Report Card in Writing, this article presents data from a survey of Latino students, the largest ethnic group of students at Northeastern Illinois University. These data suggest that the Hispanic students at Northeastern are similar to their national Hispanic peers in several ways, such as the levels of parental education and the number of texts in their homes, yet different from them in other ways, such as exposure to English at home or level of involvement with parents and friends. Perhaps most significantly, these students report stronger beliefs in and attitudes about literacy than either their national Hispanic peers or national peers. Although more research is needed, these data indicate the need for new literacy theories and research methods to ensure that these experiences and expectations are legitimized not as educational liabilities but as intellectual assets.
Political Culture and Moral Literacy: Using Words to Create Better Workers
Andrew R. Cline
Integrity is commonly conflated with basic literacy in assessments of the skills workers need. This case study of a word-based character education program in Springfield, Missouri examines how business leaders may blame a lack of skills by employees on a lack of moral literacy. The premise of this essay is that the expression of a literacy program by participating institutions will be influenced by the political culture of the region in which the institutions reside. Considering the influence of political culture on community literacy programs is important because such influence is likely to privilege certain sets of socio-political and economic values, and ways of knowing, over others.
Community Literacy as Civic Dialogue
David Coogan
This essay describes service learning as a space for civic dialogue. In the project-oriented course discussed below—an oral history of a south-side African-American neighborhood in Chicago—civic dialogue took shape when middle class students from a range of backgrounds at the Illinois Institute of Technology interviewed residents of different generations and experiences, transcribed, contextualized, and published these interviews in print and online, and reflected on the process. As a tethering of “community” across the material and discursive boundaries that typically divide us, the project performed a political critique not through issue-oriented advocacy but through a rhetorical activism more locally attuned to the absence of critical exchange, empathy, and understanding in public life.
Review Essays
Our Stories Told By Us: The Books of the Neighborhood Story Project (New Orleans)
A Review Essay by Susan Weinstein
Ebony Bolding, Before and After N. Dorgenois.
Arlet Wylie and Sam Wylie, Between Piety and Desire.
Ashley Nelson, The Combination.
Dennis Jana, Palmyra Street.
Waukesha Jackson, What Would the World Be Without Women: Stories from the Ninth Ward.
Research Methodologies in Community LiteracyA Review Essay by Jill Arola
Vine Deloria Jr. & Daniel R. Wildcat. Power and Place: Indian Education in America.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples.
Brent Faber: Community Action and Organizational Change: Image, Narrative, Identity.
Sandy Grande: Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought.
Book & Media Reviews
Shirley Brice Heath and Laura Smyth, ArtShow: Youth and Community Development and ArtShow 2 Grow DVD.
Jabari Mahiri, Shooting for Excellence: African American and Youth Culture in New Century Schools.
“The International Network of Street Papers (INSP) unites street papers sold by homeless and people living in poverty from all over the world. INSP is an umbrella organisation, which provides a consultancy service for its partner papers and advises on the setting up of new street papers and support initiatives for marginalised people.”