Welcome back to the Community Literacy Network Newsletter. For those of you tuning in for the first time, this is the second volume of an informal on-line newsletter designed to keep educators--sharing interests in the general areas of social action, community-university partnerships, mentoring as mutual learning, and intercultural communication--in touch with one another.
After a call for submissions for Volume 3 and a brief update, this volume continues where the first left off, with a series of pencil portraits. The portraits describe several educators' areas of interest within this wide-ranging terrain we're calling "community literacy."
Please note that (unlike the first set you may have received) the newsletter will be organized as single "volumes." So this is Volume 2. Lengthy volumes will be divided into "files."
Many people have voiced the desire to share readings with one another (e.g., see Amy Goodburn's portrait below). The third volume of the newsletter will be a bibliography compiled by members of the network. Would you please send us 3 or 4 references to include in the bibliography.
We'll be using topic headings to organize the bibliography. Here are four headings you might consider: social action, community-university connections, mentoring as mutual learning, intercultural collaboration. Please indicate the categories under which your citations fall. If one of your citations fits best under some other category, please provide that heading. Finally, please include full citations (according to either APA or MLA guidelines). Send us your recommendations by JUNE 15. Early submissions are immensely appreciated.
If you haven't yet submitted a pencil portrait describing your area of interest, please let us include it in June's newsletter.
In the middle of March of this year, the first volume of the newsletter distributed 31 portraits to more than 40 readers. (If you haven't yet received Volume 1 and would like to do so, please contact Kathy Meinzer; address provided below.)
Educators interested in the Community Literacy Network also met for a Special Interest Session at the College Composition and Communication Convention in D.C. As well as giving many of us the chance to meet face to face, the session let us discuss some of the issues that we, as educators, confront as our various interests in literacy move outside the borders of the traditional classroom.
I'm in the very early stages of creating a multi-disciplinary tutorial center at Loyola College in Baltimore, MD, where community service is valued as an important part of education. Courses across the disciplines incorporate service in inner-city Baltimore. My interests in service learning and community literacy projects are broad, but right now my research is in mentor and tutor training programs or courses.
I'd like to be part of this network of people interested in issues of community literacy and mentoring, even though I'm not at this moment involved in any community literacy / mentoring project. I do regularly teach a course on literacy that graduate students in our program, including MAT students, often take. And I also direct OSU's Center for Writing and Learning, where I work with Jon Olson to train and supervise undergraduate and graduate writing assistants. I've seen first-hand the power that peer tutoring / mentoring sessions can have. And particularly since OSU recently decided to expand its extended education mission (so that each unit on campus is expected to engage in extended education) I'm interested in ways we might extend the CWL's programs to the community.
Thanks for your invitation to participate. Here's a brief rundown on what I do:
I currently teach a course entitled "Literacy Practicum" in which students tutor inmates at Graterford Prison in reading and writing. We work with learners at quite a range of levels--from beginning readers to college level students--but the particular institutional setting of a maximum security prison has some significant effects on our experience there. I do not tutor myself because I need to roam the room and act as a resource for the tutoring, but I work with a group of lifers who organize things on the prison end. I may do a long-term project with this group of lifers about their experience with literacy and training programs in prison.
I am finishing my first year as an assistant professor at UNL where I teach rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies. My interests lie in multicultural and critical pedagogies (particularly in terms of constructions of race and class within student writing), writing instruction and curricula in secondary and post secondary institutions, and ethnographic and teacher-research studies of literacy. Currently a colleague (Joy Ritchie) and I are developing an undergraduate literacy seminar which would be accompanied by a community-based internship project. We recently received a grant to design this course and are looking for successful models already in place at other institutions. We would appreciate any advice or bibliographies of resources that others might have. I also work with a S.E.E.D. multicultural reading group for primary and secondary teachers in the Lincoln area and will be teaching in the Nebraska Writing Project this summer.
My research interests currently lie in the area of literacy practices in Out-of-School settings. I am examining literacy sources and practices in sociocultural contexts beyond schooling, in homes, community groups, neighborhood-based organizations, clubs, special interest and reader's groups, and in the workplace. I would also be assessing how these practices may facilitate or work against literacy learning in schools.
I'm in the process of developing a project which will be operating in the autumn of this year. Student enrolled in my seminar will be working in public schools that are affiliated with a state-financed "partnership" program intended to assist minority and immigrant elementary, middle school and high school students. This will be the first course-based community mentoring project to be undertaken by our English department and one of the only such programs to be offered by the college.
Honors students who are enrolled in this special section of Advanced Composition will:
who are in need of help with their writing.**
The class will be run as a writer's workshop with primary emphasis placed on writing thoughtful, creative essays and on acquiring a polished, professional style. To develop a more sophisticated perspective on their work as writers, students will read and analyze published texts. Students will also have one-on-one editorial meetings with the instructor. Of the three major pieces of writing to be assigned, students will choose one to continue revising toward the goal of producing an essay of professional quality.
Writings will grow out of a semester-long special project: Investigating American Education: The Social, Cultural, and Historical Factors behind Achievement and Failure. As a logical complement to their investigations, students will go into an elementary or middle school for at least one hour per week to work with public school students as writing partners, helping them to express their ideas as writers and to discover the pleasures of writing.*** Some of the writing assigned in the course will come out of this hands-on effort to understand the challenge of modern education. Students will be given training to prepare them for the community assignments.
The three major writing assignments will be modeled after one of the assigned readings, Mike Rose's award-winning Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educational Underclass (Penguin Books, 1989). Like Rose does in his book, students will write as their first essay an autobiography of their own educations in literacy. Once students have begun their work in the public schools, their second major essay will be a profile of schoolchildren--with the object of exploring the social, cultural, and historical factors which lead to achievement or failure. Thus, the tutoring work will also serve as a kind of investigative research. The final essay of the semester will challenge students to argue for their own particular views of education and for changing some elements of the status quo.
During the final weeks of the course, students will work intensively on revising one essay and will be encouraged to publish it.
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**Students enrolled in this special Honors section of English 200 will volunteer for at least one hour per week in a community setting, a local school.
***Working with public schools as writing partners, English 200H students will not merely be acting as "tutors." Their roles will be 1) to invent creative ideas for short paragraphs that the kids can write during the one-hour meetings; 2) to serve not as "grammar police," but as partners who engage the kids in discussions about ideas and about expressing ideas as writers; 3) to encourage the kids to write for pleasure, for learning, and for self-expression.
ABOUT THE COMMUNITY LITERACY NETWORK NEWSLETTER: Across colleges and universities, many of us are developing university courses and lines of inquiry to address issues of community literacy. And it seems that we are asking many of the same questions: how might literacy, social institutions, and education work together to define and support social action? Our university courses that address community literacy typically share a commitment to innovative, hands-on learning through socially relevant experiences. Yet each of us teaching such a course must shape these commitments according to specific constraints and opportunities. Because of this shared dynamic, we, as educators, have much to learn from one another; conversely, we stand to lose if working in isolation. The aim of the Community Literacy Network Newsletter is to put educators interested in issues of community literacy in touch with one another. The network is sponsored by the Community Literacy Center, a collaborative between the Community House and Carnegie Mellon University, both in Pittsburgh, PA. For information, please contact Kathy Meinzer [km39+@andrew.cmu.edu].