Writing, Culture, and Community Practices

“Latina Leadership” focuses on the narratives, scholarly lives, pedagogies, and educational activism of established and emerging Latina leaders in K-16 educational environments. As the first edited collection foregrounding the voices of Latina educators who talk back to, with, and for themselves and the student communities with whom they work, this volume highlights the ways in which these leaders shape educational practices. Contributors illustrate, through their grounded stories, how they navigate institutionalized oppression while sustaining themselves and their communities both in and outside of the academy. The collection also outlines the many identities embedded within the term "Latina," showcasing how Latina scholars grapple with various experiences while seeking to remain accountable to each other and to their families and communities. This book serves as a model and a source of support for emerging Latina leaders who can learn from the stories shared in this volume.

In rural America, perhaps more than other areas, high school students have the ability to contribute to the revitalization and sustainability of their home communities by engaging in oral history projects designed to highlight the values that are revered and worth saving in their region. The Arkansas Delta Oral History Project, a multiyear collaboration between the University of Arkansas and several public high schools in small, rural Arkansas towns, gives students that opportunity. Through the project, trained University of Arkansas student mentors work with high school students on in-depth writing projects that grow out of oral history interviews. The Delta, a region where the religious roots of southern culture run deep and the traditions of cooking, farming, and hunting are passed from generation to generation, provides the ideal subject for oral history projects. In this detailed exploration of the project, the authors draw on theories of cultural studies and critical pedagogy of place to show how students' work on religion, food, and race exemplifies the use of community literacy to revitalize a distressed economic region. Advancing the discussion of place-based education, The Arkansas Delta Oral History Project is both inspirational and instructive in offering a successful model of an authentic literacy program.

In the past century, more and more Americans have been migrating from rural areas and urban centers to suburban communities. As a result, the majority of American youth are educated in the suburbs, and the ways in which they learn to be citizens are shaped by their suburban surroundings. Because many of these communities are designed to support a "placeless" lifestyle of a transient yet demographically similar population, they are often disconnected from a regional history and culture. For practitioners of place-conscious education-education that seeks to ground the curriculum in local experience, both natural and cultural-this presents a challenge. In Writing Suburban Citizenship, nine college and secondary writing teachers present suburban classroom projects aimed at exploring the watershed and the commonwealth of the region. Watershed projects, those concerned with the natural environment and ecological realities, include a unit on regional water issues and a naturalist almanac for a local park system. Commonwealth projects are concerned with cultural history, including an investigation of a community's Native American heritage and a chronicle of multigenerational work histories. With these diverse and robust projects, contributors spotlight the myriad ways suburban students can build rich, authentic connections to their surroundings and create a sense of belonging to their community.

In The Writing of Where, Charles Lesh examines how graffiti writers in Boston remake various spaces within and across the city. The spaces readers will encounter in this book are not just meaningful venues of writing, but also outcomes of writing itself: social spaces not just where writing happens but created because writing happens. Lesh contends that these graffiti spaces reinvent the writing landscape of the city and its public relationship with writing. Each chapter introduces readers to different writing spaces: from bold and broadly visible spots along the highway to bridge underpasses seldom seen by non-writers, from inconspicuous notebooks writers call "bibles" to freight yards and model trains, from abandoned factories to benches where writers view trains. Between each chapter, readers will find "community interludes," responses to the preceding chapters from some of the graffiti writers who worked on this project. By working closely with writers engaged in the production of these spaces, as well as drawing on work invested in questions of geography, publics, and writing, Lesh identifies new models of community engagement and articulates a framework for the spatiality of the public work of writing and writing studies.