Representations of illiteracy in bureaucratic, journalistic, and literary treatments of southern Appalachia reveal a substantial practice by metropolitans of blaming illiteracy in the region for its supposed failure to integrate materially and culturally into a national economy. Yet patterns of illiteracy in southern Appalachia resemble patterns…

This paper stems from a study of an eighth-grade writing club in an urban school. The study asked: How would students use a community-based set of texts to create identities for themselves and each other in relation to their communities, their schooling, and writing and to examine issues of personhood? The paper theorizes about what the notions of…

Whole language, a theory of language instruction that was developed primarily in terms of helping children learn to read, has now been extended to middle- and secondary-school levels. Andragogy, the learning of adults, is a specific theory of adult education, conceived in contradistinction to pedagogy, the teaching of children. When these two…