Educators focused on community literacy and public engagement have access to a unique critical platform from which larger social issues that impact us both as a whole and on very personal levels are open to exploration. Being particularly situated to have significant impact on community, literacy work in this area may require uncommon pedagogical…

"Koladeras" are women who use call and response in impromptu songs that may contain proverbs, stories about the community, their life experiences, and who and what they see in their world from their own perspective. Via qualitative methods of (auto)ethnography, personal and life story narratives, and interviews, I look at how "koladeras'" as…

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…