Editors' Interview with Founding Editors

Abstract

Editors' Interview with Founding Editors Michael Moore (bio) and John Warnock (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Veronica: Michael and John, we have a photograph that you sent us of the day that you decided to found the Community Literacy Journal, and I'm wondering if you could tell us a little about where you were and how the conversation came about to launch this journal. John: It was Michael who proposed it, so Michael you should tell the story. Michael: We were at the 2005 Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Francisco. It was a great conference, and John and I took the opportunity, since we were both there, to catch up on things, just talk. I think we had both been maybe not at the same session but a related session where people were doing service-learning presentations. One of the things we started talking about, just conversationally, there really was no plan or agenda here, we talked about whether people were using the terms service learning and community literacy synonymously, as though they were the same thing. I don't know if anyone has written about this, but apparently in the mid 90's, … campus administrators had begun asking service-learning [End Page 5] community literacy journal practitioners and programs for some sort of assessment data and explanations of their methodology. … Apparently, there wasn't a lot of it available. So simultaneously people started using "community literacy" for their work, possibly as a way to not get caught up in that other conversation. John: Michael, could I take us back to 1997 even? Michael: Please. John: That's the year that at the University of Arizona in Rhetoric and Composition in the Teaching of English, we founded a course called the "Practicum in Community Literacy." The premise of that course was the distinction that Michael is talking about and another distinction, as well. I'd begun to feel that in discussions of literacy, there was a kind of a tendency to think in an uncomplicated way of literacy as academic literacy. Or rather the other way around, thinking of academic literacy as some kind of fulfillment of the idea of literacy. And, I didn't think that was the case. I thought that was parochial and so forth. So, we established this course that invited our graduate students to go out into the community, into Tucson. … We knew there were a lot of different associations doing what was obviously literacy work, but it was not academic literacy work. It was all kinds of things that we now recognize as being part of community literacy. I see professional writing in those terms too. We had the strong sense that we wanted to get our graduate students out into the community and to develop an outside perspective on academic literacy. And so, that's what we did. We didn't set up any situations for them. We began to develop relationships with people who were doing community literacy with refugees and with reentry populations, and so forth, foster families. And, we wanted [students] to go out and develop a kind of critical perspective on academic literacy through this experience. It also turned out to be, and this was a benefit of the course that I thought was quite lovely, for our first-year graduate students who came from elsewhere, it was a terrific opportunity to get to know Tucson because they got out amongst the different communities. And, I just wanted to say that when we were on the sidewalk in that picture, this came, as far as I was concerned, out of the blue. We were standing on the sidewalk. And, Michael turned to me and said, "You want to start a journal?" It was kind of like that. And, after I caught my breath, I said, "Hey, that sounds kind of fun." And, we started to do it. And, in the mission statement we very consciously installed this distinction that Michael was just talking about between community literacy and service learning. Veronica: If I'm understanding then, it sounds like initially the idea was to see how academic literacies functioned in community sites...