Literacy Partnerships Research Articles

Cultivating nonviolent relationships within global literacy education partnerships

AbstractGlobal literacy partnerships between the Global North and Global South inevitably reside in the expansive waters of neoliberal reforms and coloniality. Global North and Global South literacy educators within global literacy partnerships must decolonize life through a liberatory praxis whereby they are convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce and to announce. Nonviolent Communication, with its focus on speaking honestly and listening empathetically, provides a framework for cultivating the criticality, awareness, and connection needed to disrupt neoliberal reforms and coloniality within partnerships. Through NVC, the everyday dialogic experiences of Global North and Global South educators can generate a “power with” relationship instead of a “power over” relationship of oppression and coloniality.

Establishing a university-partnership model to #EliminateBookDeserts in urban communities

ABSTRACT The purpose of this theory-to-practice paper on community engagement within education is to focus on developing a new collaborative model within a university-school partnership to address book deserts. Drawing on the historical work of previous scholars regarding equity, policy, and community engagement, this article adds to the existing research regarding long-term initiatives to eliminate book deserts. The focus of this work includes details of an ongoing community engagement initiative with a community development literacy partnership model to build school and classroom libraries in underserved communities of color. Implications for scholars, activists, and community advocates who focus on social action surrounding community development are discussed and delineated.

International Paper recommits to childhood literacy partnership

Corporate Philanthropy ReportVolume 38, Issue 3 p. 3-3 News Briefs International Paper recommits to childhood literacy partnership First published: 08 February 2023 https://doi.org/10.1002/cprt.31527Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume38, Issue3March 2023Pages 3-3 RelatedInformation

Access to Multicultural Children's Literature During COVID-19.

Amid the COVID‐19 pandemic, students, families, and educators have faced unprecedented challenges. These challenges have disproportionately impacted racially/ethnically diverse, low‐income communities because of long‐standing health system, socioeconomic, and educational inequities. With closures of schools, libraries, and childcare centers, many students were disconnected from their community and did not have access to books. Parents’ and educators’ concerns centered around students falling behind academically and socially. In this article, we explain the motivation and rationale for a social justice initiative to provide students of color from low‐poverty areas with access to high‐quality multicultural children’s literature at home. We describe our literacy partnership with a local after‐school program serving participant students and families, research underpinning the initiative, and our process for selecting high‐quality multicultural literature book sets and offer suggestions about how to facilitate comprehension and motivational support for home‐based reading. We also offer a list of recommended literature and discuss outcomes and implications of this project.

Indigenous student literacy outcomes in Australia: a systematic review of literacy programmes

ABSTRACT Improving Indigenous students’ literacy is a major priority area for the Australian Government, receiving significant funding to address below benchmark English literacy standardised test results. Despite this, recent benchmark tests suggest Indigenous students continue to achieve well below the national average. This systematic review discusses peer-reviewed and evidence-based publications that report on significant literacy programmes to investigate which aspects of literacy are their focus, which are identified as successful, conditions needed for success, barriers to success and measures of success. While most programs reported significant literacy improvements, all identified barriers to success and/or sustainability as outlined in this paper. This review also utilises the four resources literacy model and multiliteracies theories to map literacy gaps. When considering decades of literacy research, there were significant gaps in the represented literacy skills, with the dominant focus on codebreaking, and very few programs addressing critical literacies, multiliteracies or creativity skills. The review of the papers highlighted the need for consideration of ways to design balanced and place-based literacy programs; school-community literacy partnerships; access to training and resources for schools and communities around literacy and school/community research projects and agency for teacher and school leaders to be professional context-based decision-makers.

A University-Based Literacy Service-Learning Program for Youthful Offenders on Probation: A Preliminary Study of the Program’s Development, Implementation and Feasibility

This article reports on the development, implementation and feasibility of a mid-Atlantic university-community service-learning literacy program for youth on probation. Undergraduate teacher candidates served as literacy instructors for the youth. We focus on benefits and administrative challenges of developing and implementing a preliminary service-learning program for probated youth living in the community. We analyzed focus group data collected from special education undergraduate instructors, interview data collected from probated youth and their case managers, pre-post literacy assessments administered to the youth, the youths’ court files and data maintained by the community-based agency. We conclude that our model of a university-community literacy partnership has the potential to raise reading performance of youth, motivation, and promote prosocial behaviors. Addressing the educational needs of youth on probation, however, is complex and multifaceted. We find that success requires consistent communication among all stakeholders, adequate funding for leadership, organization and curricula, and ongoing assessment and evaluation.

Building Literacy Partnerships Across District and Institutional Boundaries

AbstractOften coauthored by university‐ and school‐based educators, preservice teachers, and youths, this department column considers how literacies are best developed through context‐crossing partnerships among university, school, and community constituents.

Effective Partnership in Community-Based Health Promotion: Lessons from the Health Literacy Partnership.

This paper aims to explore key elements needed to successfully develop healthy partnerships and collaborative working in community-based health promotion. It draws upon the lessons learned from a case study with the Health Literacy Partnership in Stoke-on-Trent, UK in developing the health literacy strategy in the area. The process was underpinned by respect for diverse yet complementary perspectives and skills from the grassroots up. This involved engagement with key stakeholders, development and support for community projects, and sharing of good practice with other national and local organizations. Stakeholders involved in developing the strategy also had a keen interest in health literacy and a strong commitment to promoting health and well-being in the area. Through patience, perseverance, and continuous open communication and learning, the health literacy strategy in Stoke-on-Trent, UK is beginning to have a ripple effect into local practice, and will potentially influence policy in the future.

The Digital Literacy Partnership Website: Promoting Interdisciplinary Scholarship Between Faculty, Students, and Librarians

ABSTRACTIn 2013, the Center for Digital Scholarship at Miami University was established and coincided with the redesign of the Children's Picture Book Database, which had a successful web presence for nearly 20 years. We developed the Digital Literacy Partnership (DLP) website project in order to upgrade the project to Omeka as a new digital management tool and to establish a second resource called the Health Literacy Database. Over time, the project grew to include three databases with the mission to promote the contributions of literacy, health, and technology on learning. In this case study, we describe the role of academic libraries in supporting faculty and student design projects; share the history and mission of the DLP project; and explain the digital team of faculty, librarians, and undergraduate students. We also outline the production of public health eBooks targeted to children and adults with low literacy skills; the social marketing decisions we made from web usage statistics; and the technical lessons learned throughout this collaborative digital project.

Campus Community Literacy Initiatives as Preparation for Civic Life

Abstract Like many U.S. universities with service learning and community engagement programs, the University of San Francisco (USF) works to serve the literacy needs of young people in local public schools. Through its Engage San Francisco initiative, USF meets community identified needs, while it also prepares university students for civic life in democratic communities. Faculty and administrators engaged in university school literacy partnerships have a responsibility not only to prepare college students for success as tutors, but for a lifetime of thoughtful, socially just and equity-minded decision making. University-school partnerships focused on literacy provide ideal contexts for questioning assumptions about the purpose and methods of public schools and educating university students about education for the common good.

Filling in the Gaps: Lessons Learned From Preservice Teachers’ Partnerships With First Nations Students

In this paper, I report on a school-university collaborative research project that examined ways to merge the out-of-school literacy resources with school literacy practices for First Nations students in a small city in Western Canada. The project involved three interconnected groups of research participants: (a) a teacher researcher study group; (b) students from the participating teachers’ classes; (c) preservice teachers who were partnered with the students in literacy partnerships. Grounded in a “funds of knowledge” perspective, and utilizing ethnographic research methods, this qualitative study explored how students’ linguistic and cultural resources from home and community networks were utilized to reshape school literacy practices through their involvement in the Heritage Fair Program. This paper focuses on select lessons the preservice teachers learned through their partnerships with the First Nations students. Study findings suggest that the collaboration increased preservice teachers’ understanding of how Aboriginal culture could contribute to more successful teaching practices.

Assessment-based curriculum: globalising and enterprising culture, human capital and teacher–technicians in Aotearoa New Zealand

This policy chronology traces the institution of globalised school curriculum and assessment discourses, as a vernacular and specific form of public rationalisation and educational governmentality in Aotearoa New Zealand. Without functional national standards or national testing, official discourses constructed an assessment-driven framework as a public measurement and performance regime. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ‘toolkit’, this genealogy traces attempts by the government’s review and audit agency (the ERO), to lift achievement through establishing national standards, normalising assessment and strengthening market-managerial accountabilities. Therapeutic technologies of personal re/development supplemented the above through managed literacy partnerships. This was the basis for the managed reprofessionalisation of techno-entrepreneurial teachers around stipulated, data-driven and measured performances. The paper examines the centrality of the New Zealand Curriculum Framework to the reconstruction of an Enterprise Culture and the psycho-cognitive re/making and re/moralisation of individuals as responsibilised, self-managing and calculative. It posits that within a busnocratic rationality (merging business, entrepreneurial and technical-management), a calculative governmentality required educational data-systems for future population knowledge and control. The genealogy demonstrates the inextricable connection between ‘public’ rationalities, technologies of control and the re/construction of ‘private’ identity, subjectivity and ethics, under neoliberal governmentality.

Community Food Literacies: An Introduction

Community Food Literacies: An Introduction Michael Pennell, Special Guest Editor Because food sovereignty and food justice are some of the most important issues of our time, issues that tie to topics of ecological collapse, peak oil, racism, poverty, corporate capitalism, overpopulation, disease, and hunger, service-learning practitioners are well-positioned to help launch initiatives in colleges and universities across the country, in partnership with our local communities, to address community-centered food literacy (4). Veronica House This special issue of the Community Literacy Journal, focused on community food literacies, presents six responses to and extensions of Veronica House’s call for service-learning practitioners and, more generally, literacy workers across communities and educational institutions. This journal provides an ideal venue within which to grapple with the overlapping and intertwined relationship between food and literacy, especially as it relates to communities. Both food and literacy find themselves in equally “revolutionary” stages of their development. While the literacy revolution may be found in discussions of a rise in social media, mobile communication devices, and ubiquitous network technologies, the food revolution is witnessed in a re-localization of food systems, including farmers markets, community-supported agriculture, and community gardens. Moreover, both “revolutionary” moments present challenges, concerns, and inequalities, captured in discussions of digital divides, cyber-security, labor, food deserts, hunger, and sustainability. The recent local food movements are tied to and reflective of local communities. In particular, these local communities represent the people, places, and literacies behind our food system. Furthermore, they occupy a key context for investigating and exploring the intertwining of food and community literacy. The growing overlaps and complicated relationships between food and literacy warrant a special issue devoted to these expanding relationships. The following articles present a variety of perspectives on community food literacies, ranging from inside and outside educational institutions. All of the authors echo House’s call for investigating and acting on community food literacies, as well as highlight her positioning of service-learning, rhetoric and composition instructors, and literacy workers in general, as key allies and advocates for such a focus on community food literacies. Ideally, this collection will strengthen and/or encourage fellow literacy workers to unpack and explore the complicated pairing of food and literacy in our communities, workplaces, and classrooms. In literacy and food discussions, how we label and define practices and products is a key window into the evolving food movement. For example, discussions surround such questions as: What is “local”? What is the difference between organic and [End Page 1] natural? What does it mean for an animal to be “cage free”? Erin Trauth, in her article, “Nutritional Noise: Community Literacies and the Movement Against Foods Labeled as ‘Natural’," explores the ubiquity of “natural” as a label for food and food production practices. She examines how the label is deployed in an expanding market of “natural foods,” along with a growing grassroots movement challenging the use of “natural.” Trauth supplements her discussion by presenting survey data capturing participants’ understandings of “natural” and natural foods. Moving into the spaces within which we connect food and literacy education, Lucia Dura, Consuelo Salas, William Medina-Jerez, and Virginia Hill offer an overview of an interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, after-school literacy partnership on the U.S.-Mexico border. Their article, “De aquí y de allá: Changing Perceptions of Literacy through Food Pedagogy, Asset-Based Narratives, and Hybrid Spaces,” shares how the Escuelita Program uses food pedagogy to tap into funds of knowledge, bridging “home” and “school” literacies. Similarly investigating the spaces within which community food literacies develop and impact our lives, Christina Santana, Stacey Kuznetsov, Sheri Schmeckpeper, Linda Curry, Elenore Long, Lauren Davis, Heidi Koerner, and Kimberly McQuarrie, show how “mindful persistence” is central to a team of scholars’ and community members’ exposure to and interest in fermentation-based food projects. As the article, “Mindful Persistence: Literacies for Taking up and Sustaining Fermented-Food Projects,” highlights, an interest in fermentation does not require or assume identical understandings of the science of fermentation or similar positions in the probiotic debate surrounding contemporary fermentation practices. In continuing to explore our understanding of key concepts in the development of community food literacies, Marcy Galbreath examines oral histories and...

De aquí y de allá : Changing Perceptions of Literacy through Food Pedagogy, Asset-Based Narratives, and Hybrid Spaces

In this article we describe La Escuelita Afterschool Program, an interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, after-school literacy partnership on the U.S.–Mexico border. The Escuelita Program used food pedagogy to tap into funds of knowledge, bridging home and school literacies. In doing so, the program challenged deficit thinking and enhanced K-6 students’ curiosity and engagement around traditional subjects: science, math, reading, and writing. Through a process of experimental curriculum design and a variety of qualitative data collection methods, we discuss how food pedagogy can help to change deficit-based narratives and how it helps expand the scope of literacy acquisition.

Translingual Communities: Teaching and Learning Where You Don’t Know the Language

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 forward the translingual approach. Here I reflect on my first conscious attempt to teach translingually in a college course with a community-based learning component. I present an overview of the translingual orientation, reflect on the decisions I made as I prepared a college community-based learning course with translingual intentions but not overt translingual objectives, and examine some the students’ reflections that reveal their language attitudes at the end of the course. I argue that small, intentional decisions made towards a broader translingual orientation towards language and literacy make an immediate difference in how students think about language, and that those engaged in community literacy partnerships are in need of a theory of communication that the translingual approach can provide.

Translingual Communities: Teaching and Learning Where You Don’t Know the Language

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 forward the translingual approach. Here I reflect on my first conscious attempt to teach translingually in a college course with a community-based learning component. I present an overview of the translingual orientation, reflect on the decisions I made as I prepared a college community-based learning course with translingual intentions but not overt translingual objectives, and examine some the students’ reflections that reveal their language attitudes at the end of the course. I argue that small, intentional decisions made towards a broader translingual orientation towards language and literacy make an immediate difference in how students think about language, and that those engaged in community literacy partnerships are in need of a theory of communication that the translingual approach can provide.

Crowdsourcing the curriculum

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to describe the rationale, process and results of an integrated curricular intervention for information literacy instruction in a first-year writing program. Design/methodology/approach – The information literacy coordinator collaborated with writing instructors and the Writing Program Administrator on the initial design of information literacy outcomes. The librarian and instructors created a modular curriculum with multiple lessons and activities aligned to each outcome. The curriculum was housed in the course management system for easy updating and distribution. Finally, instructors taught the embedded information literacy activities for two semesters and measured student improvement through a pre-/post-survey and a rubric-based assessment of students’ citation and documentation. Findings – Students saw significant gains over the course of the semester in their ability to use Boolean operators, identify the purpose of sources and understand citation styles. As a related and valuable measure, writing program assessment results showed an improvement in students’ performance in citation and documentation in researched writing assignments after a one-year implementation of the intervention. Writing instructors reported an increased awareness of information literacy pedagogy and intentionality in their teaching. Finally, the librarian was able to leverage this collaboration to highlight the teaching roles of librarians beyond the one-shot. Originality/value – Well-known temporal and logistical limits exist in regard to embedded, one-shot and multi-shot approaches to information literacy. The latter two are especially unsustainable when implemented at scale, such as within a first-year writing program that serves hundreds or thousands of students each semester. This study documents a faculty development approach in which writing instructors integrate information literacy (IL) into their own instruction. This offers a model that makes explicit IL processes and skills to writing instructors, results in high student performance and allows especially the small college librarian to manage his/her other strategic information literacy partnerships.

Health literacy and social capital: what role for adult literacy partnerships and pedagogy?

This paper makes the case for adult literacy (including numeracy) practitioners to play a greater role in health literacy initiatives in Australia. The paper draws on data from a national research project that investigated adult literacy partnerships and pedagogy viewed from a social capital perspective. The primary purpose of the project was to produce guidelines on how to deliver integrated adult literacy and numeracy programmes using a social capital approach. Prior experience of partnerships was explored through a review of the literature and an environmental scan of adult literacy providers using an email survey and follow-up interviews. An in-depth case study of a health literacy partnership was trialled using action research. Partnerships between adult literacy and health organisations in Australia were found to be largely ad hoc and rarely documented. To enable sustainable health literacy programmes, partnerships are needed across the three interlinked organisational levels – micro, meso and macro, and in particular the latter, which is currently almost completely absent. The conceptual frameworks outlined for health literacy partnerships and social capital pedagogy in this paper are new and potentially of value to policy makers, researchers and practitioners in the fields of health and literacy.

Methadone, Counselling and Literacy: A health literacy partnership for Aboriginal clients

This paper describes a literacy program delivered at the Kirketon Road Centre (KRC), a primary health centre located in Kings Cross, Sydney. KRC was established to meet the health needs of ‘at risk’ young people, sex workers, and people who inject drugs. The literacy program was initiated from within an Aboriginal health group at KRC, following a request from clients in the group. A teacher from Tranby Aboriginal College delivered the literacy program one afternoon every fortnight over a period of approximately one year. This paper is based on recorded and transcribed ‘reflection’ discussions undertaken over several months between the literacy teacher, a KRC counsellor and the researcher immediately following the literacy sessions. Of particular interest is the nature of the literacy program and its pedagogical approach which is based largely on the delivery of popularly themed worksheet exercises. These activities represent in some ways an approach to adult literacy education that we term ‘autonomous’, that is, as a single set of skills generalisable to other life contexts. This pedagogical approach, however, needs to be understood in relation to the social capital outcomes of the course which take into account the complex and varying relationships and networks of the client group. The real value of the course can be seen largely in terms of the social capital outcomes for individual participants.

Creating information literacy partnerships in Higher Education

This piece of research focuses upon the area of information literacy and its effective embedding within the curriculum in Higher Education. In particular, it investigates the promotion of partnerships between academic librarians and faculty staff members, with a view to improving information literacy.
 
 Using the work of Wenger (1998) in relation to communities of practice as a theoretical influence, and an action research methodology, the views of academics within one subject area at York St John University have been canvassed via semi-structured interviews, followed up with questionnaires after interventions from the Academic Support Librarian. 
 
 The initial interviews showed that the view of the librarian was varied across the participants, but that, in the main, it was viewed as a support post (rather than reactive or a partner). The questionnaires suggested that the group approach was more effective in promoting partnership, but that both group and one-to-one interventions had some positive effects in this.