This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard,…

This article presents findings from a case study of an adult literacy program. The author conducted this IRB-approved study as part of a three-year, research-based, community-engagement project that partnered the literacy program with a writing center at a large public research university. The author argues that the participatory methods afforded…

This ethnographic study argues that reciprocity--the attempt to equalize the power dynamics that occur in working relationships--is a way to counteract the widely-used but rarely-critiqued deficit models that dominate the nonprofit landscape. If community work is not done with a near constant attention to power dynamics, programming that is…

In fields such as sociolinguistics and composition and rhetoric, communication is increasingly understood as translingual, that is, as negotiated socially across languages. Those of us engaged in community literacy can and should recognize the deeply multilingual nature of the communities in which we work, and we should understand, embrace, and…

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact that a community literacy project had on the reading habits of young children and their families. This year-long study focuses on a public library-run program titled Books in Motion, in which community members read children's chapter book and meet monthly to watch the book's film translation.…