Browse community and public writing-centered reading by clicking on the links below.
If you have a community or public writing book, article, or other media form that you would like shared on our page, we would love to include it here! Email your recommendation to VACommunityWriting@gmail.com!
A really interesting find, this 21 page white paper from The Adult Literacy & Learning Impact Network describes what forms of supports are being provided by corporations and organizations for employees. For example, Tyson Foods, Inc. offers employees language and life skills support through access to Upward Academy, while Denny’s employees receive GED support, some college credit, and life skills supports.
This 33 minute video recorded podcast features community engaged work by Sylvia Ryerson and Luis G. Luna. Luna is a field director of the Working Families Party, and runs a local (CT) activist-oriented radio station that mixes music and the topic of immigration. Ryerson runs a radio program that transmits pre-recorded messages over the radio, to incarcerated individuals, in order to bypass expensive phone calls to immigrants. This video links to the Yale Public Humanities video series, and highlights some very interesting public and community projects!
This website published article is titled “The Benefits of Writing for Non-Profit Organizations” and describes the skills needed and benefits of writing for nonprofit organizations. This form of public writing promotes social change and activism through effective communication. Through storytelling, building trust, prompting donor engagement or support, persuasive fundraising appeals, and impactful reports, writing for nonprofits has the potential to advocate for social change and meet the goals of nonprofit organizations. This is a great resource for students learning about nonprofit writing!
Visibly (and Invisibly) Muslim on Grounds: Classroom, Culture, and Community at the University of Virginia offers a unique insight into the experience of Muslim students studying and living on an elite university campus. This book emphasizes pathways toward inclusion, which can be created across a university campus.
Community is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change
Community is the Way provides examples of concrete, situated action grounded in disciplinary knowledge and extensive fieldwork. Reflecting on her experiences operating a community writing program, Knight argues that the equity-based approach described in this book requires a commitment to interrogating how power, oppression, resistance, privilege, penalties, benefits, and harms are built into the systems we seek to change.
A Socially Just Classroom: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching Writing Across the Humanities
This collection discusses transdisciplinary approaches to the teaching of writing across the humanities, through a lens of inclusion and equity in higher education. Chapters focus on teaching triumphs and challenges, specific learning objectives and best practices, theories and their applications, and concrete examples of campus action within specific institutional or socio-historical contexts.
Anti-Racist Community Engagement: Principles and Practices
Anti-racist Community Engagement: Principles and Practices centers anti-racist community-engaged traditions that BIPOC academics and community members have created through more than a century of collaboration. The book is organized around a set of Anti-racist Community Engagement Principles developed by the editors as part of their shared work and dialogue with colleagues regionally and across the country.
CCCC Statement on Community-Engaged Scholarship and Pedagogy in Rhetoric and Composition
CCCC recognizes the need to promote a range of community-engaged works while working to ensure the ethical and collaborative nature of the work from an antiracist, anticolonial, anti-ableist perspective.
The Virginia Community Writing Collaborative 