This dissertation is a critical ethnography about the power that storytelling offers in creating sustainable community literacy programs. The research for this dissertation was conducted at a ten year-old grassroots community literacy organization, VOICES: Community Stories Past and Present, Inc., which is based in Tucson, Arizona. Interviews for this project were conducted over a period of two years and includes feedback from thirty-three board members, staff members, volunteers, and youth participants at the organization. The dissertation begins with the assertion that gaps in understanding between theory and practice lead to damaging assumptions about difference and inequality, especially in the realm of community-based programming. I argue that an expanded understanding of storytelling as reciprocal and transformative can bridge these misunderstandings.In order to bridge the divide between theory and practice, this project offers the concept of reciprocity, fleshed out by the work of Ellen Cushman and Pierre Bourdieu, to encourage both participants in community literacy programs, as well as administrators, to be more transparent about their goals by sharing individual experience. This concept of reciprocity is the foundation on which storytelling as an agent of transformation rests. The process of storytelling that this project proposes establishes advocacy journalism and witnessing as a precedent. In the stories about interviewing and storytelling that the narrators from VOICES share, reciprocity is performative in that it can be manipulated to fit the needs of specific rhetorical situations. But this performance is dependent on the audience. I suggest that contrary to many discussions in composition and rhetoric, the tension between "addressed" and "invoked" audiences is an accurate one, and can be used to generate conversation about the assumptions and expectations of low-income youth and community literacy participants. An addressed audience is necessary in order for stories to be transformative; which is ultimately the way that they create large-scale social change. The conclusion of this project argues that administrators and literacy workers must foster an ethic of sustainability, which can be achieved through storytelling in order to both honor difference and challenge inequality in ways that are meaningful to the participants in these programs.

Adult education has often been described as a start and stop process for second chance learners. Hierarchical, decontextualized, and scripted materials remain prevalent in adult education programs. Differences in and among programs often present barriers to participation that profoundly affect adult learners' lives and literacies. Albertini (2009), Hull, Jury, and Sacher (2012), and Street (2004) call for more innovative, tailor-made programs to support adult learners. The Women's Literacy Network (WLN), a literacy and empowerment program for women, is an innovative, tailor-made program that trains adult women with GEDs as literacy tutors and matches them with women working on their GEDs. In this narrative inquiry, I examine the literacy identities of five WLN tutors through the lens of social practice theory. I conceptualize literacy identities as lived in and through participants' storied lives. Constructions of literacy identity are revealed in participants' histories, stories, and practices and the ways in which they enact and express their literacy identities. Participants' stories are told using a braiding of memoir with narrative ethnography. Each woman's narrative centers on a prominent thread that weaves throughout the fabric of her literacy identity. These threads are then connected across the narratives to reveal how the women were positioned by others, their internalization of or resistance to this positioning, and their own positioning in historical time and space. Findings indicate that participants' literacy identities were rooted in a metaphor of "identity-as-difference" (Moje & Luke, 2009, p.421). Isolation was a common theme, as was the need to affiliate and belong. Participants reported gaining confidence and experiencing a sense of community and belonging. Gender mattered; participants stated that "women understand women." Mothers revealed that their learning influenced and shaped their family literacy practices. According to participants, the WLN offered opportunities to build relationships that helped expand their social networks. Frequent, intense interactions were important in keeping participants connected to the WLN, its coordinators, and each other. Participants framed and reframed their literacy identities, re-positioned themselves in their life roles, and came to revalue themselves as literate beings (K. Goodman, 1996b).

<p>Sustainability and reciprocity are critical and persistent obstacles in community-engaged projects. While deeply theorized at a local level, they are rarely compared in large-scale analysis—leaving sustainability and reciprocity as assumed staple points in community literacy work but difficult in transfer since written accounts are contextually and culturally specific to a local community.  Methodology becomes an essential component to how researchers negotiate knowledge practices, the intent of their research, and their relational stake in the community contexts they work within. </p> <p><br></p> <p>In order to understand how researchers name and frame methodologies in community literacy work, I synthesize fifteen years of scholarship in <em>Community Literacy Journal</em> (<em>CLJ</em>), accounting for 128 published pieces by employing qualitative meta analysis. Three questions are central to this dissertation: 1) What methodologies allow for sustainable and reciprocal work in the varied contextual circumstances of community literacy projects? 2) What might these methodological lessons mean for the larger field of Writing Studies and in turn, for writing centers? 3) How do scholars challenge academic boundaries and grand narratives so our methodological decisions in community literacy projects are grounded in cultural humility?</p> <p><br></p> <p>As most <em>CLJ</em> publications describe small-scale projects and case studies, I uncover methodological grand narratives, or lore, that become easily unseen without persistent large-scale comparisons. On the surface, grand narratives are useful for general conception. In practice, grand narratives overgeneralize the methodologies needed for working with location-specific and culturally-unique community members. What works in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago’s Northside functions differently in the South Side of the city, but the grand narratives found in accessible scholarship blur those borders.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Through analysis, I discovered surround three dominant dilemmas that <em>CLJ</em> researchers face: 1) positionality—who we are as academics within non-academic communities; 2) approach—how academics work with communities outside of academia; and 3) representation—what academics do with that work and who takes credit. </p>

This thesis explores the nature of service learning projects that are structured to make interventions in rhetorical spheres and seek to achieve social change on a smaller scale rather striving for grander, or even systemic, change. In structuring community projects that include inherently limited interventions and equally limited goals, I argue that such projects should be open to immediate adjustments within themselves –to abandon any particular form or goal—to satisfy the immediate needs of the individuals served. I draw upon my work with a reintegration program for ex-offenders in Richmond, Virginia called Working with Conviction to help demonstrate that service learning constituents who create community projects need to be acutely attuned to the temporal and spatial constraints of any project, the ideological commitments of the relevant community, and the various locations of agency that can be affirmed and explored regarding the individuals served.

In this dissertation, I use ethnographic observations, interviews, personal narrative, and analysis of youth slam poetry in conversation with theories of identification to demonstrate how members of the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam (TYPS) perform, inhabit, and develop a consciousness indicative of coalition and critical inquiry. TYPS poets demonstrate evidence of what I propose as critical latticework, an image and heuristic that brings together identificatory screen-work with rhizomatic and intersectional perspectives on growth and development. Through my analyses of poetry, interviews, and the activities of this youth slam community, I aim to illustrate the value of critical latticework as a perspective that can contribute to altering our perceptions of youth as developing in one direction, with one sense of healthy progression to adulthood. A critical lattice is another way of perceiving the activities of identification that take place in in-between-and-through-spaces, as well as the potential activism and labor occurring in those spaces, which act as more than screens but spaces of growth and significant chaos. I argue that an understanding of critical latticework is transferrable to writing classrooms, offering a practical image with which students of writing can imagine and move with fluidity to generate meaningful discourse and expand their perspectives on identity and writing.

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Diploma thesis "Functional literacy among adolescents" discusses the components of functional literacy. The theoretical part of the thesis briefly introduces the development of functional literacy. It shows the functional literacy, and how its properties affect the individual. It describes each specialization components of functional literacy and represents social views in defined areas of the company (community). It also states components of functional literacy, describes their active participation in the field of functional literacy and the effect on the overall formation. It focuses on the potential negative impacts of these components. In the research, part of the thesis presents the conclusions of the survey.

The purpose of this study was to begin constructing an expanded framework for child literacy learning with participants who educate children in formal and informal settings in literacy, the arts and environmental education. The study explored how a broader framework for child literacy learning could gain strength and purpose from our increasingly diverse and complex social environment. I used participatory arts-based research to spark dialogue and foster partnerships. The design of the study was intended to demonstrate how the arts, in this case photography, can be effective as a means of attending, exploring, and communicating ideas. Three major themes emerged: Child Literacy Practices and how they can attend to belonging and voice; Arts and Culture and the engagement of children in the arts and how this is relevant to child literacy learning ;and Environmental Destruction looking towards preparing children to be ecologically literate in the context of child literacy learning. / Graduate

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In Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach Deborah Britzman (2003) points out that teacher candidates enter their education programs with their own conceptions of teaching, “bring(ing) to teacher education their educational biography and some well-worn and commonsensical images of the teacher’s work” (p. 27). Similarly, teacher candidates bring their own preconceived ideas of literacy and community to their teaching as well. This study focuses on whether or not teacher candidates’ conceptions of literacy and community can change given a teacher education practicum focused on literacy and community, a community learning experience once a month, and two placements in local middle and high school classrooms. In doing so it inquires as to how each of these different classroom environments informs teacher candidates’ conceptions of literacy and community and how literacy and community is utilized in these different environments. Qualitatively and ethnographically based, the study took place at a state university in rural Pennsylvania. It focused on nine teacher candidates enrolled in a practicum course during their 16-week field experience. It utilized a card sort, surveys, e-mails, teacher candidate journals and assignments, audio taped transcripts of practicum classes and observations. All information was analyzed using constant comparison methods and journals and practicum classes were coded to identify changes over the semester and patterns in the data. The study found that teacher candidates’ conceptions of literacy and community changed over a sixteen week time period as a result of the three different environments that teacher candidates participated in during their field experience semester. Teacher candidates’ conceptions of literacy, once focused on more autonomous literacy practices, expanded to include more sociocultural, i.e. ideological literacy practices. Conceptions of community that were based on more homogeneous, relational conceptions of community grew to include more heterogeneous, geographic conceptions of community. Overall, given three environments focused on literacy and community teacher candidates’ expanded their ideas of literacy and overcame their fears of working with communities outside their own. Correlations were also uncovered relating to authority in each of the environments and the importance of teacher candidate/cooperating teacher relationship to placement success. / English