initiatives are community-based literacy projects that support mutual learning among participants and writing that “makes a difference” (Stock and Swenson 157). These projects are part of a long history of university-outreach programs that attempt to respond to the social and economic conditions of neighborhoods beyond the borders of (especially urban) universities (Hull and Zacher). Community-literacy initiatives, however, have introduced a distinctive focus on transactional writing that draws upon learners’ local knowledge and supports the rhetorical action of participants. Exemplars include the following:
ArtShow (1989–1999). Youth-based arts programs in New York, Boston, rural California, and Kentucky engaged young people through the arts in social entrepreneurship and community-building. For example, in a project called TeenTalk, youth worked with subject area experts to develop knowledge-rich scripts which the youth performed to draw audiences into focused discussions on such topics as illegal drug use, parental neglect, and sexual abuse (Heath and Smyth; McLaughlin, Irby, and Langman).13
CLC Projects and Derivatives (1989- ). Affiliated with Pittsburgh’s CLC, the Community House Learning and Technology Center, and CMU’s Center for Community Outreach, these projects build intercultural working relationships and use writing to support personal and public inquiry and deliberation (Flower “Intercultural Knowledge”; Flower “Negotiating”; Flower “Talking Across Difference”; Long “Community Literacy”; Long, Peck, and Baskins; Peck, Flower, and Higgins). Such projects include the following:
Argue: an inquiry-driven project using problem-solving strategies to address controversial open questions around such issues as landlord-tenant relations, drugs, and school suspension.
Digital Storytelling: a group of computer-supported initiatives (e.g., Struggle and Voices from the GLBT Community) helping youth, adults, and faith-based organizations to use digital tools to tell their own stories on their own terms.
Hands-On Productions: a literacy project using video and multimedia tools to dramatize teens’ perspectives on a broad range of issues, including school reform, teen stress, and risk and respect.
Inform: a literacy project bringing urban teens and college students together to take action on urban issues. Over the course of each 10-week project, teen-mentor pairs draft articles for a newsletter and host a problem-solving dialogue with other stakeholders, including city officials and other members of the community.
Carnegie Mellon’s Community-University Think Tank: a culturally diverse body of problem solvers committed to bringing wider perspectives and collaborative action to urban issues. The think tank creates a structured dialogue in which people from Pittsburgh’s urban community—representing community residents, business, regional development, social service, and education—meet to construct and to evaluate workable solutions to workplace and worklife problems.
Write for Your Life (1994- ). Housed in Michigan State University’s Writing Center, the Write For Your Life (WFYL) project supports a consortium of teachers in Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, Georgia, Texas, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania as they develop curriculum that students use to examine local issues that influence student health, literacy, and learning. Though the program started several years earlier, WFYL began to flourish in 1994 when its curriculum started asking students not only to research local issues that mattered to them, but to write and to implement proposals for social action that addressed these issues. Over more than a decade and around the country, students have implemented numerous proposals to improve the quality of life in their communities—for instance, by testing regional water quality, instituting cross-generational mentoring programs, and implementing recycling campaigns. Like DUSTY (below), WFYL has roots in the National Writing Project (NWP), a nationwide professional development program for teachers.14 Within the history of the NWP, WFYL represents the effort—under Dixie Goswami’s leadership with the Bread Loaf Teacher Network—to move classroom instruction from expressivist objectives to transactional ones through which “students’ writing can accomplish beneficial social work” (Stock and Swenson 155; see also Benson and Christian).
New City Writing Institute (1998- ). New City Writing supports a collaborative network among Philadelphia schools and community organizations. With support from Temple University, the institute “focus[es . . . ] on community-based writing and reading programs that lead to publications as well as educational ventures whereby schoolteachers, neighborhood people, and university-related people can learn together” (Goldblatt, “Alinsky’s Reveille” 283). The institute supports New City Press which publishes documents, including a magazine called Open City, that feature local writers and the perspectives and interests of specific communities in the area, ranging from disabilities activists to rural farm workers who work just west of the city. The institute also supports arts initiatives throughout the city, particularly with African American and Asian communities (Parks and Goldblatt).
Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth, or DUSTY, (2001- ). DUSTY is University of California at Berkeley’s computer-based outreach project. It began in the basement of a community center in West Oakland and now operates in several public schools. With partners worldwide—from Norway to India—DUSTY connects youth through their digital work across racial, linguistic, cultural, geographic, and political borders. Using digital technologies, youth produce stories in which they position “themselves as agents in and authors of their lives locally and globally” (Hull, “Transforming Literacy” 40). The program takes as its central question, “how [should educators] transform schooling and its principle activity and means—literacy—so as to engage young people and sustain their participation?” (Hull and Zacher par. 16). DUSTY responds to this question by offering youth the opportunity to communicate via multiple modalities (Hull and James; Hull and Katz).
Such initiatives stake claims about how vernacular discourse contributes to public discourse—but not the same claim. Take the WFYL curriculum, for instance. It has learners start with what they know and how they would typically talk about issues among their peers. Over time, the curriculum directs them toward wider funds of knowledge and more formal textual expectations to produce competitive proposals that meet professional standards (Stock and Swenson 159).
The CLC projects take a different tack by making room for the rhetorical power that urban teens bring to the table. Flower poses this goal as a question that turns on the meaning of literacy:
How can a literacy program that works with black youth, for instance, balance this presumption [what is it?] with an awareness of the indirect but analytical tradition of African-American vernacular, the logical structures embedded in street talk (Labov 1972), or the rich expressive literate practices such as signifying (Gates 1988; Lee 1993), in which white volunteers find they are illiterate (Flower 1996)? (Flower, “Partners” 97)15
DUSTY also emphasizes communicating across borders. But here, learners not only draw from vernacular discourses to describe their social worlds, but they also trade in a wide spectrum of geographic, spatial, and multi-modal genres through which they construct “tellable” selves (Hull, “Transforming Literacy” 33). In fact, youth often trade among these genres and discourses much more skillfully than the participating academics. Through such initiatives, vernacular discourses infuse situated-public literacies, and learners themselves instantiate legitimate public alternatives to rational-critical models of deliberation.16
Pedagogical Practices. Pedagogical practices refers to interventions designed to help college students participate in local public life. When Thomas Deans published Writing Partnerships in 2000, what distinguished community-literacy pedagogy was the emphasis on “writing with the community” in contrast to other service-learning pedagogies supporting college students writing in or for the community. Years later, it is possible to distinguish at least five distinct kinds of pedagogies that fall under the category. (For an extended discussion, see chapter 9.)
Interpretative pedagogies: students venture somewhere new, building relationships to
