Schools across the nation are responding to reading assessment mandates by turning to DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), a program endorsed by the Federal Reading First Grant Office, to assess fluency on a range of reading-related tasks. DIBELS makes strong claims regarding its usefulness in documenting reading progress…

The purpose of this study was to explore both the short-term and long-term value of a summer literacy program on the literacy learning of at-risk seventh- and eighth-grade students. The students who participated in the study were all slotted for grade-level retention. The program brought them from an isolated and impoverished area to a university…

A literacy education professor teams up with a colleague whose specialization is technology and education to analyze students' contributions to a graduate course taught online for the first time. This article explains the modifications that the instructor made to a face-to-face course to adapt it to an online learning environment. The online…

This article reports an analysis of fifth-graders' comprehension strategy use, as it occurred within peer-led literature discussion groups, and the influence of such strategy use on students' post-discussion gains in story comprehension. Data collection occurred across nine weeks. Data sources included transcripts of discussions, transcripts of…

Newspaper media create interpretations of marginalized groups that require rhetorical analysis so that we can better understand these representations. This article focuses on how newspaper articles create interpretations of sex work that affect both the marginalized and mainstream communities. My ethnographic case study argues that the material…

This paper examines one rural school's efforts to recognize and celebrate the multiple literacies of its students, by hosting a LINK Up family night that highlights the varied funds of knowledge of school, community and home. In dialogue with excerpts from Sherman Alexie's novel, "The Absolute True Diaries of a Part Time Indian," the paper…

Hidalgo County, Texas, is one of the poorest in the country. The population in the Lower Rio Grande Valley is 85% Mexican-American. Underprepared for college and juggling full time jobs, their own children, and sometimes dysfunctional extended families, students often do not expect to succeed. I recently taught a Creative Writing course which…

Being prepared with accurate, credible, and timely information during a disaster can help individuals make informed decisions about taking appropriate actions. Unfortunately, many people have difficulty understanding health and risk-related resources. This exploratory, mixed methods study assessed disaster information seeking behaviors and…

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 how the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism, especially Richard Rorty's work on social hope late in his career, could be relevant to community literacy. Pragmatism does not prescribe a particular approach to community literacy but, unlike many kinds of critical pedagogy, affirms a role for patriotism and liberalism…

A recent nine-month field study considered the relationships among school-sponsored and community forms of literacy practices in a migrant-sending area of rural Mexico. While many teachers in rural Mexico argue that students should remain in school rather than migrate to the U.S., this study demonstrates the ways in which schools in rural Mexico…

In this qualitative case study of one tutoring relationship, I present new data on the extracurriculum; investigate tutoring as it occurs in community spaces; and argue that individuals can connect across systematic inequalities through personal conversations around picture books, photographs, and other visual and textual materials. Rather than…

Our dialogue explores the development of community/university publishing partnerships in the United States through the dual lens of the U.S-based "Students' Right To Their Own Language" and the U.K.-based Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, a national alliance of working-class writing groups. At the conclusion of the article,…

We introduce the need for scholars interested in literacy, geography, and cultural studies to examine the role of English language literacy in shaping assimilation experiences of recent immigrant groups. We consider a case study of English language self-efficacy among ethnic Chinese immigrants in the Philadelphia metropolitan area to suggest how…

This essay presents a case study of the modes used in training employees at a munitions plant in Ohio between 1940 and 1945. Theories of multimodal discourse and learning advanced by The New London Group (1996), Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen (2001) and Richard Mayer (2001) inform this analysis. With an unskilled labor force and many workers…