Considering the situated complexities and competing interest of exploitation and hope inherent in community literacy work, this article examines the ways that the Community Arts Program (CAP) at California State Prison-Sacramento complicates and also reifies archetypal grand literacy narratives and considers the place of such narratives within a…

This article suggests that the methodology of community-based action research provides concrete strategies for fostering effective community problem solving. To argue for a community research pedagogy, the author draws upon past and present scholarship in action research and participatory action research, experiences teaching an undergraduate…

In this essay, we explain the development, implementation, and preliminary findings of an innovative writing program that drew upon a peer collaborative model and a community literacy perspective. Developed as an after school program, this project represented a community-university partnership designed to provide an enjoyable forum for teaching…

This interview-based study suggests that the home schooling movement represents another literacy crisis. Home-schooled students may define their commitments to the public sphere in ways that conflict with the assumptions of community literacy and other pedagogical projects. Home schoolers may adopt the values of the "literacy frontier,"…

This essay explores the intersection between 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 work of literacy in contested spaces like jail and extends a call to action…

This article explores similarities in literacy learning across various life-span stages and considers what actions must be taken to improve literacy attainment and achievement, whether the delivery site is prekindergarten, elementary, secondary, adult, family, workplace, volunteer, or community literacy. The emphasis here is on what it takes to…

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,…

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…