Exploring literacy practices of home cooks, this article analyzes how cookbooks are remixed by users (with writings, clippings and other ephemera added to the text throughout its use). The practice of remixing the text with further editing by its user/audience illustrates the multilayered literacies at work in establishing authorship within the…

The author shares the challenges of facilitating a writing group in a temporary emergency shelter in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. She shows how within this constantly changing environment and its safety protocols, community literacy was as difficult to establish as it was vital to make available. Exploring some of the best practices…

In this article, Paula Mathieu shares a few lessons about what she now sees as the contemplative call of community writing, which is at once personal, political, historical, and pedagogical. If people are going to do community-based work ethically and, mindful of past and present racial and other political wounds, they need to do their work…

Frames--defined as mental structures built through language and symbols that categorize our thoughts and experiences--have a significant impact on partnerships, shaping how participants understand the nature of the collaboration. While scholars have explored how teachers might frame engagement partnerships for university students and…

The Drake Community Press is a collaborative publishing project involving students and faculty from a variety of disciplines along with a non-profit community partner with a compelling story to share. Over two years and eight production phases, campus and community participants create the content, format, design, promotion, and distribution plan…

Emerging from the keynote address at the inaugural Conference on Community Writing, this snapshot examines how an engaged infrastructure for community writing might operate as a flow-cultivation milieu. Such a milieu would facilitate self-determination, which suggests that people do their most compelling, rewarding, and innovative work when they…

The following essay is a collective reflection in which the authors revisit the themes they raise in the edited volume "Unsustainable," ask new questions, and suggest, again, that long-term sustainability might not be the most appropriate goal for every university-community partnership. Still, relationships, with all their variability,…

This is a snapshot of a service learning course founded on narrative medicine, a clinical practice designed to replace impersonal care with empathic listening. By utilizing poetry therapy techniques among nursing home populations, a program called "HPU LifeLines" promotes a community literacy of illness and provides psychological and…

During a series of writing workshops at a shelter for young homeless people in Copenhagen, I examined to what extent the literary practice of student-driven imitation with its emphasis on self-governance and a dialogical approach can engage marginalized learners in reading and writing. I found that student-driven imitation had the potential to…