Community-based Literacy Research Articles

Artistic expressions about community-based literacy

Every two years, SIL-UND offers a "Literacy Megacourse" focused on development of community-based literacy programs. At one point in the Megacourse, students are asked to express themselves in a creative fashion about what they have been learning. We offer three such expressions here, from students in the 2017 summer session.

Community-Based Family Literacy Program: Comparing Different Durations and Family Characteristics

The current study investigated the influence of the community-based family literacy program on parent’s and children’s engagement in family reading practices and language/literacy activities at home. Parent’s and children’s engagement in family reading practices and language/literacy activities based on different family characteristics and the lengths of program attended were compared. Six-week and four-week Family Storyteller Program for Preschoolers series were taught between 2013 and 2015. Three hundred seventy-five parents completed both presurveys and postsurveys. Parents showed promising results in enhancing parents’ and child’s engagement in family reading practices and language/literacy activities at home after participating in the intervention. It was also found that durations of the program and family characteristics were correlated to different outcomes.

Becoming Literacy Leaders: Teacher Candidates Initiate a Community-Based Literacy Program

This paper presents a case study of a community-based literacy program that was initiated by teacher candidates. Program goals, purposes and opportunities for ongoing learning beyond coursework and practicum are explored. Key themes for discussion include: literacy as social and life-long; moving beyond print literacy; capitalizing on strengths; freedom in planning and freedom from assessment; feedback from the community; and, the opportunity to become literacy leaders. Mentorship roles are explored, along with questions for ongoing reflection and conversation.

Sponsoring True Feeling

This qualitative study traces different articulations of the public, emotional honesty, and economic advantage in the literacy sponsorship of detained writer Lil’ Purp by The Beat Within, a publication for incarcerated youth and adults. Findings are compared to The Beat’s own account of Purp’s progress, revealing a set of practices reminiscent of Socratic parrhêsia that revise understanding of literacy sponsorship by expanding it to a philosophical register. Because The Beat also becomes a site of affective solidarity among detained writers in a way that resists the directional logic of writing toward civic participation, the study supports thinking about affect in public writing not as a process that moves toward political action, but rather as action in the immediate space of its utterance and reception. Such findings have implications both for public writing pedagogy and for community-based literacy scholarship.

Story Nights: an apprenticeship into literacy through bilingual story reading

This article documents an extended Mexican family’s social practices surrounding literacy as they engage with bilingual children’s literature in a unique context that draws from both home and school without the pressures of curriculum mandates. The research is situated within the southeastern United States where English-dominant practices permeate the school and community. Sociocultural and third space theories provide a framework for understanding the complexities surrounding language use and literacy development. Findings indicate the new space, Story Nights, provides for the development of connections to Mexican culture and a notion of community-based literacy learning. The author makes recommendations for classroom teachers, teacher education programs, and educational policy to be more inclusive of Latino/Latina English learners.

Towards an Evidence Base: Exploring the Impact of Community-Based Literacy Programs in Remote Indigenous Communities

THERE ARE VARIOUS COMMUNITY-BASED literacy programs in Australian communities that aim to address educational disadvantage by fostering parental engagement with their young children in literacy activities. Despite the effort and goodwill of many community members, there is little evidence of the impact of these programs on children's literacy progress, school attendance or parental engagement. This paper reports on a pilot study of parents' engagement in their child's literacy development in one remote Indigenous community. Preliminary findings from parent reports indicate elevated progress in literacy by the children in the program. Similarly, parents involved in the program report being more engaged in community leadership and in their children's literacy learning than those who are not. The study suggests aspects of the interrelationship between parent engagement and children's literacy progress that require further investigation. Broader use of the instruments developed will help to establish an evidence base and inform such an investigation.

Cultivating the Spatial Politics of Community-Based Literacy Practices in Hip-Hop

AbstractIn this article, the social imagination of community-based sites of urban resistance enable out-of-school literacy practices in Black popular culture to foreground the contemporary context in which youth empowerment is nurtured in out-of-school learning settings. Second, the author chronicles how youth advocates in hip-hop–based community settings organize culturally relevant life lessons to political empower and facilitate healing of youth. Finally, the author expands insights from his previous work as a youth advocate for local high school rap artists in at-risk conditions of an urban community. As participants at a youth center, the students learned how to use the art of emceeing as a cultural outlet to overcome and heal from difficult life struggles. The students also developed strong mentoring relationships with youth advocates at the center. Finally, the author worked with the center in designing critical hip-hop curriculum texts to challenge gang activity, incarceration, and death. Each of these events demonstrates the cultivation of community-based literacy practices in hip-hop as social justice education.

Adults With Low Literacy Skills: How SLPs Can Help

Adults With Low Literacy Skills: How SLPs Can Help

Speaking Out for Social Justice: The Problems and Possibilities of US Women's Prison and Jail Writing Workshops

Through community-based literacy work, writing teachers can encourage the development of prison narratives that counter social and media-driven stereotypes of prisoner identity. Such work thus situates writing workshops and other literacy-inspired programming for women as part of the emergent US prison abolition movement. This is a complicated equation to work through, however, given the sometimes competing sponsors of such literacy work and its reception within and beyond institutional contexts. This essay suggests that a nuanced reading of prison literacy programmes and their sponsors is necessary for contemporary educators interested in contributing to both educational prison programmes and the abolition movement. In order to explore such challenges and to illustrate individual and public tactics for emergent social justice, this essay offers sample texts and commentaries from the SpeakOut! women's writing workshop in the western US as a starting point for a larger consideration of the complexities that literacy educators confront when designing and facilitating such programmes.

Adult Literacy Education and Community Development

SUMMARY This article responds to the concern that low-literate community residents often are marginalized in community development processes. They are unable to give voice to their concerns, interests and their vision for their community. Perspectives and approaches in the fields of adult literacy education and community development are explored to determine how adult literacy education might be used to further the goals of community development. While there are parallels between these two disciplines, there are also barriers to overcome if an integrated approach to dealing with community issues is realized. This article reflects an interest in advancing a comprehensive approach to community development in communities with limited economic resources, low-level literacy and limited access. It seeks to address the issue of whether adult literacy education programs have a meaningful role to play in community development. The strengths of participatory approaches such as community-based literacy, and community development principles such as collective action, shared values, participation, social justice, political awareness and action, comprehensiveness, empowerment, and learning and reflection, facilitate an interdisciplinary approach.

‘For Some Reason, I'm Just Tired’: Women Domestic Workers Persisting in Community-Based Programmes

A study of women migrant domestic workers in the USA and their reasons for participating and persisting in community-based literacy and ESOL programmes is presented. Case studies and themes were developed about the women's experiences of work life and how it connected to their programme participation. The findings revealed that the women had health problems that were related to their work, and they participated in programmes in order to better understand them. The women also experienced considerable isolation at work, and attended their programmes in order to socialise and meet other women like themselves. Additionally, the women wanted to learn how to better negotiate workplace texts, and, eventually, use their new-found knowledge and education to move into other occupations. The article ends with implications for practice and policy.

Putting Women at the Center: Sustaining a Woman–centered Literacy Program

For nineteen years, Mercy Learning Center, a community-based literacy organization, has provided basic literacy instruction to low-income women in Bridgeport, Connecticut. During that time it has grown from three students and two tutors to 450 students, 155 tutors, and five full-time teachers. This growth has been affected by changes in welfare regulations and increased immigration. Using what it describes as a “holistic approach within a compassionate, supportive community,” the Center provides instruction that goes beyond what is usually considered basic literacy. The Center’s expansive view of basic literacy has helped it respond to the changing needs and demographics of its community.

A Socio-cultural Perspective on School-based Literacy Research: Some Emerging Considerations

Much research on reading and writing in schools continues to focus on individual cognitive skills. In contrast, investigations of literacy-learning in out-of-school settings have often taken a socio-cultural perspective, situating reading and writing in social relations and cultural institutions. The last 20 years have seen a proliferation of studies documenting the ways in which printed texts are taken up in a wide variety of settings from after-school clubs and community-based adult literacy programmes to workplaces, the Internet, and ‘everyday life’. Increasingly, there have been calls for sociocultural literacy researchers to begin directing their attention to mainstream educational contexts. In this paper, we join in and seek to contribute to such calls by drawing out some of the complexities and caveats that also need to be kept in mind. After briefly reviewing what it means to define literacy and learning in relation to socio-cultural context, we explore some recent arguments for conceptual and methodological refinements. We then turn our attention to schools and to what a socio-cultural definition of literacy has to offer in terms of addressing diversity and educational inequity, and we draw out several issues that require closer consideration.

Literacy practices in development: An ethnographic study of women in Northeastern Thailand

This is an ethnographic study of the literacy practices of a group of rural Northeastern Thai women participating in a community-based literacy programme. Field research for the study examined the women's literacy practices and domains of literacy use in daily life, and the strategies they used to negotiate day-to-day life tasks in the context of change and development in their local community. Findings show that the women effectively negotiated life tasks associated with literacy in development by employing individual literacy skills, collaborative literacy practices within family and community networks, and a mix of new technologies and traditional oral and visual communication systems. The author argues that collaboration and the ability to draw on and work within social networks might be considered a form of social capital for development, and collaborative and visual literacy practices forms of new basic skills.

A Community-based Approach to Health Literacy Using Participatory Research

Literacy is considered one of the most important determinants of health among Canadians (Ronson & Rootman, 2004). Engaging communities in identifying the critical connections between literacy and health is an important aspect of addressing health literacy. This article describes how participatory research, undertaken through university-community partnership, resulted in the identification and prioritization of actions to improve practices and policies addressing health literacy needs of largely rural population in Atlantic Canada. The Health Literacy in Rural Nova Scotia Research Project studied links between literacy and health by exploring the experiences of people living in rural northeastern Nova Scotia. A multidisciplinary research team from St. Francis Xavier University (including faculty from the Adult Education, Human Nutrition, and Nursing Departments), partnered with five community-based literacy and health organizations in three counties, within the Guysborough Antigonish Strait Health Authority (GASHA), to a) explore factors that influence ways adults limited in literacy access and act upon health information and services; and b) identify strategies for that build upon existing capacities for achieving health. This collaborative research project explored the lived experiences of people whose daily lives are determined by limited literacy, as well as the insights of professionals who provide education and health-related services to them. Community leaders, with awareness of the socio-economic conditions in the region, also provided their insight on how literacy and health interacted. A Community Participatory Research Approach Community-based research is increasingly being called for to enhance understanding of the complex issues that affect our health (Seifer & Calleson, 2004). More specifically, participatory research can engage community members who have the knowledge, experience, and expertise related to such issues. Participatory research is a systematic inquiry, with the collaboration of those affected by the issue being studied, for purposes of education and taking action or effecting change (Green et al., 1994). This approach is known to take considerable time and commitment from all who are involved. However, efforts can lead to outcomes that are relevant beyond academic boundaries with knowledge transferred to various community stakeholders, resulting in community-led actions addressing important health problems (McCaulay et al., 1999). Community partners involved in the participatory research project, described in this article, were clear from the onset that the aim of the research should be to effect in policies and practices to build capacity for health among residents in their communities. This participatory research project stemmed from local community health board's concern that low literacy could be preventing some residents' access to health resources, services, and information. This problem was brought to the attention of university researchers, who were able to access some preliminary funding to undertake district workshops in the fall of 2000 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (National Literacy Secretariat Valuing Literacy in Canada Strategic Grant Program). The aim of these sessions was to determine if this issue was deemed by community members and practitioners to merit further study, how the research should be undertaken, and who should help guide the process of inquiry, Workshop participants included adult learners in literacy programs, adults with low literacy skills not in programs, as well as practitioners and managers from the fields of community health and literacy Their input confirmed the need to explore the links between health and literacy in their communities; it also informed the design of the study. For example, they recommended that personal interviews should be conducted with individual adults who have experienced literacy difficulties, while focus groups should be used to encourage dialogue among practitioners from literacy and health practice settings. …

Best Practices in Interviewing

In 2003, I conducted a qualitative study that examined the experiences of stakeholders connected to two community-based adult literacy programs. My 70 research participants belonged to seven stakeholder categories as follows: 37 learners (adult literacy students), 2 coordinators/instructors (head practitioners), 11 other staff (instructors and office support workers), 7 parents/significant others (learners' close relatives), 2 administrators (volunteer board members), 8 referral agents (government and community agency workers who refer learners to adult literacy programs), and 3 provincial funding agents (government employees responsible for adult literacy grants). In addition to program documents and long-answer questionnaires, the research data included 75 interviews with 58 individuals representing every stakeholder category Interviews were my richest source of information. They were also the most difficult and the most time consuming, totaling 68 hours of taped conversations, which took 584 hours to transcribe. This personal reflection uses my interviewing experiences as a means to prepare other qualitative researchers for the challenges, and the joys, of interviewing adult education stakeholders. My first challenge was to recruit program stakeholders who were willing to be interviewed. I was fortunate to have an enthusiastic provincial funding agent in my region of the province, and to have cooperative coordinators/instructors as key program informants. Not only did they actively recruit more individuals than I requested from their own programs, according to lists of respondent criteria that I provided, but they also recommended that I interview more than one provincial funding agent; they kindly provided names of agents who were most familiar with their programs. Therefore, instead of interviewing 35 stakeholders as indicated in my research proposal, I interviewed 58 altogether, each who added a new dimension to my understanding of their adult literacy programs. The support that I received from one provincial funding agent and from both coordinators/instructors was essential to my study's success. The first task of every qualitative researcher therefore should be to recruit key informants who endorse the project's means of data collection and who are committed to its research goals. I was afraid to ask respondents for permission to audiotape the interviews. I feared that they would refuse to speak in front of the microphone, or perhaps even seize the opportunity to back out of the study altogether. Thanks, I'm sure, to their preparatory conversations with their programs' coordinators/instructors, only one participant asked that I take handwritten notes instead of taping our conversation. He was a government employee referral agent whom I had expected to feel more comfortable with the interviewing process. Some respondents, of course, were reluctant to speak up at first, and a few others actually whispered throughout their interviews. Several lowered their voices or leaned way back in their chairs away from the microphone whenever they thought they might be making unpopular or unfavorable comments, and one learner periodically slipped papers over the microphone to muffle the conversation. Most respondents, however, were very cooperative and eager to have their stories heard. It is essential to reassure participants that the interviewer is the only person who will later listen to the tapes and that they will have an opportunity to review their transcripts and make any changes they wish. Given my position as a white, middle-aged female university employee, I expected that I would feel more comfortable conversing with some respondents than others and they with me. The interview guides gave me sets of questions to follow in a logical order, but I decided early in the interviewing process to engage in less formal conversations wherein I could gently probe for more detailed data and encourage respondents to share whatever information they wished to convey I therefore tried to find a common ground of experience or interest to ease into each interview, and then I let the conversation take its own course as we discussed the respondent's adult literacy program experiences. …

"And Now That I Know Them": Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course

In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subjectobject, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses. I begin with a scene written by a student in my service learning course, U.S. Literacy Politics. The scene, taken from her final paper for the course, recounts her first night at a downtown community center, where students likeJanis serve as literacy partners and mentors. Shifting back and forth between present and past tense, Janis writes:

“And Now That I Know Them”: Composing Mutuality in a Service Learning Course

In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subject-object, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses.

Commentary: Reflections on Co-operative Inquiry in this Historic Moment

My reading of the six accounts of co-operative inquiry in this volume comes during a historic moment for action research in which the tensions of celebration and caution pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, the recent successes of legitimizing action research as an approach to knowledge creation gives those of us committed to participatory, experiential, action-oriented research much to celebrate. We have pried open the former strangle hold of positivist research, never to turn back. Action research is used in settings ranging from social justice organizations to multinational corporations, from formal schools to community-based literacy efforts, from human services to for-profit businesses, from international development agencies to social services, and from hospitals to prisons. On the other hand, the question nags, is action research being co-opted into a depoliticized tool for “improving practice” devoid of critical understanding of power relations and structures. Improving our practice for whose purposes, whose benefit? The danger of delinking action research from its transformational potential and emancipatory intentions is worrisome. Gaventa and Cornwall (2001, p. 77) analyze the dangers as large-scale international development organizations “scale-up” field-based participatory approaches, while the development organizations themselves are hierarchical, nonparticipatory, and inflexible. Greenwood and Levin raise similar concerns about the teaching of and promotion of action research in institutions of higher education, which are undemocratic, hierarchical, and rigid (1998).

Perspectives of Five Library and Information Studies Students Involved in Service Learning at a Community-Based Literacy Program

Literacy education may be a stronger issue today than ever for public libraries in serving those who lack access to print and electronic sources because of limited literacy skills. Case studies of five library and information studies (LIS) students who participated in an interdisciplinary service learning course on community service and literacy are presented in this article. The students worked closely with adult learners in a community literacy agency and attended class once a week to discuss their experiences and their reactions to the readings and lectures. Their problematic experiences and insights are examined through sources such as their journals, reflection papers, and interviews. Findings and implications about how LIS students learn about the unique learning and communication styles of adult learners who have different backgrounds from themselves, the ways they perceive the roles of the public library in the lives of adult learners, and for integrating literacy education with service learning into LIS education are presented.