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The Reading Crisis
Why Poor Children Fall Behind
Jeanne S. Chall, Vicki A. Jacobs, and Luke E. Baldwin
Harvard University Press, 1990

How severe is the literacy gap in our schools? Why does the nine-year-old child from a culturally disadvantaged background so often fall victim to the fourth-grade slump? Although the cognitive abilities of these “children at risk” may be consistent with the norm, their literacy development lags far behind that of other children. In The Reading Crisis, the renowned reading specialist Jeanne Chall and her colleagues examine the causes of this disparity and suggest some remedies.

Using Chall’s widely applied model of reading development, the authors examine the strengths and weaknesses in the reading, writing, and language development of children from low-income families in an attempt to identify the onset of their difficulties. They show how, in the transition from learning the medium to understanding the message, the demands on children’s reading skills become significantly more complex. The crucial point is fourth grade, when students confront texts containing unfamiliar words and ideas that are beyond the range of their own experience. According to Chall’s findings, the lack of specific literacy skills—not cognitive factors—explains the deceleration in the reading and writing development of low-income children. The authors outline an active role for the schools in remedying weaknesses in literacy development, and give suggestions for the home and the community. Their recommendations address both practical issues in instruction and the teacher–student dynamic that fosters literacy development.

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Reading Palestine
Printing and Literacy, 1900-1948
By Ami Ayalon
University of Texas Press, 2004

Prior to the twentieth century, Arab society in Palestine was predominantly illiterate, with most social and political activities conducted through oral communication. There were no printing presses, no book or periodical production, and no written signs in public places. But a groundswell of change rapidly raised the region's literacy rates, a fascinating transformation explored for the first time in Reading Palestine.

Addressing an exciting aspect of Middle Eastern history as well as the power of the printed word itself, Reading Palestine describes how this hurried process intensified the role of literacy in every sphere of community life. Ami Ayalon examines Palestine's development of a modern educational system in conjunction with the emergence of a print industry, libraries and reading clubs, and the impact of print media on urban and rural populations. Drawn from extensive archival sources, official reports, autobiographies, and a rich trove of early Palestinian journalism, Reading Palestine provides crucial insight into the dynamic rise of literacy that revolutionized the way Palestinians navigated turbulent political waters.

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Reading Piers Plowman and the Pilgrim's Progress
Reception and the Protestant Reader
Barbara A. Johnson
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

Centering her discussion on two historical "ways of reading"—which she calls the Protestant and the lettered—Barbara A. Johnson traces the development of a Protestant readership as it is reflected in the reception of Langland’s Piers Plowman and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

Informed by reader-response and reception theory and literacy and cultural studies, Johnson’s ambitious examination of these two ostensibly literary texts charts the cultural roles they played in the centuries following their composition, roles far more important than their modern critical reputations can explain.

Johnson argues that much more evidence exists about how earlier readers read than has hitherto been acknowledged. The reception of Piers Plowman, for example, can be inferred from references to the work, the apparatus its Renaissance printer inserted in his editions, the marginal comments readers inscribed both in printed editions and in manuscripts, and the apocryphal "plowman" texts that constitute interpretations of Langland’s poem. She demonstrates by example that what is culturally transmitted has not been just the work itself; it includes vestiges of past readers’ encounters with the text that are traceable both in the way a text is presented as well as in the way that presentation is received.

Conditioned more by religious, historical, and economic forces than by literary concerns, Langland’s poem became a part of the reformist tradition that culminated in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. By understanding this tradition, Bunyan’s place in it, and the way the reception of The Pilgrim’s Progress illustrates the beginning of a new, more realistic fictional tradition, Johnson concludes, we can begin to delineate a more accurate history of the ways literature and society intersect, a history of readers reading.

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Reading Places
Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America
Christine Pawley
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
This book recounts the history of an experimental regional library service in the early 1950s, a story that has implications far beyond the two Wisconsin counties where it took place. Using interviews and library records, Christine Pawley reveals the choices of ordinary individual readers, showing how local cultures of reading interacted with formal institutions to implement an official literacy policy.

Central to the experiment were well-stocked bookmobiles that brought books to rural districts and the one-room schools that dotted the region. Three years after the project began, state officials and local librarians judged it an overwhelming success. Library circulation figures soared to two-and-a-half times their previous level. Over 90 percent of grade-school children in the rural schools used the bookmobile service, and their reading scores improved beyond expectation.

Despite these successes, however, local communities displayed deeply divided reactions. Some welcomed the book-mobiles and new library services wholeheartedly, valuing print and reading as essential to the exercise of democracy, and keen to widen educational opportunities for children growing up on hardscrabble farms where books and magazines were rare. Others feared the intrusion of govern- ment into their homes and communities, resented the tax increases that library services entailed, and complained about the subversive or immoral nature of some books.

Analyzing the history of tensions between various community groups, Pawley delineates the long-standing antagonisms arising from class, gender, and ethnic differences which contributed to a suspicion of official projects to expand education. Relating a seemingly small story of library policy, she teases out the complex interaction of reading, locality, and cultural difference. In so doing, she illuminates broader questions regarding libraries, literacy, and citizenship, reaching back to the nineteenth century and forward to the present day.
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Reading Prisoners
Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845
Schorb, Jodi
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Shining new light on early American prison literature—from its origins in last words, dying warnings, and gallows literature to its later works of autobiography, exposé, and imaginative literature—Reading Prisoners weaves together insights about the rise of the early American penitentiary, the history of early American literacy instruction, and the transformation of crime writing in the “long” eighteenth century. 

Looking first at colonial America—an era often said to devalue jailhouse literacy—Jodi Schorb reveals that in fact this era launched the literate prisoner into public prominence. Criminal confessions published between 1700 and 1740, she shows, were crucial “literacy events” that sparked widespread public fascination with the reading habits of the condemned, consistent with the evangelical revivalism that culminated in the first Great Awakening. By century’s end, narratives by condemned criminals helped an audience of new writers navigate the perils and promises of expanded literacy.

Schorb takes us off the scaffold and inside the private world of the first penitentiaries—such as Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison and New York’s Newgate, Auburn, and Sing Sing. She unveils the long and contentious struggle over the value of prisoner education that ultimately led to sporadic efforts to supply prisoners with books and education. Indeed, a new philosophy emerged, one that argued that prisoners were best served by silence and hard labor, not by reading and writing—a stance that a new generation of convict authors vociferously protested.

The staggering rise of mass incarceration in America since the 1970s has brought the issue of prisoner rehabilitation once again to the fore. Reading Prisoners offers vital background to the ongoing, crucial debates over the benefits of prisoner education.
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Realms of Literacy
Early Japan and the History of Writing
David B. Lurie
Harvard University Press, 2011

In the world history of writing, Japan presents an unusually detailed record of transition to literacy. Extant materials attest to the social, cultural, and political contexts and consequences of the advent of writing and reading, from the earliest appearance of imported artifacts with Chinese inscriptions in the first century BCE, through the production of texts within the Japanese archipelago in the fifth century, to the widespread literacies and the simultaneous rise of a full-fledged state in the late seventh and eighth centuries.

David B. Lurie explores the complex processes of adaptation and invention that defined the early Japanese transition from orality to textuality. Drawing on archaeological and archival sources varying in content, style, and medium, this book highlights the diverse modes and uses of writing that coexisted in a variety of configurations among different social groups. It offers new perspectives on the pragmatic contexts and varied natures of multiple simultaneous literacies, the relations between languages and systems of inscription, and the aesthetic dimensions of writing. Lurie’s investigation into the textual practices of early Japan illuminates not only the cultural history of East Asia but also the broader comparative history of writing and literacy in the ancient world.

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Reclaiming Catherine of Siena
Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others
Jane Tylus
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) wrote almost four hundred epistles in her lifetime, effectively insinuating herself into the literary, political, and theological debates of her day. At the same time, as the daughter of a Sienese dyer, Catherine had no formal education, and her accomplishments were considered miracles rather than the work of her own hand. As a result, she has been largely excluded from accounts of the development of European humanism and the language and literature of Italy. Reclaiming Catherine ofSiena makes the case for considering Catherine alongside literary giants such as Dante and Petrarch, as it underscores Catherine's commitment to using the vernacular to manifest Christ's message—and her own.
Jane Tylus charts here the contested struggles of scholars over the centuries to situate Catherine in the history of Italian culture in early modernity. But she mainly focuses on Catherine’s works, calling attention to the interplay between orality and textuality in the letters and demonstrating why it was so important for Catherine to envision herself as a writer. Tylus argues for a reevalution of Catherine as not just a medieval saint, but one of the major figures at the birth of the Italian literary canon.
 
 
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Reclaiming the Rural
Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy
Edited by Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen E. Schell
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

In Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy, editors Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen E. Schell bring together a diverse collection of essays that consider literacy, rhetoric, and pedagogy in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The essays move beyond the typical arguments for preserving, abandoning, or modernizing by analyzing how rural communities sustain themselves through literate action. The contributors explore the rhetorics of water disputes in the western United States, the histories and influences of religious rhetorics in Mexico, agricultural and rural literacy curricula, the literacies of organizations such as 4-H and Academia de la Nueva Raza, and neoliberal rhetorics. Central to these examinations are the rural populations themselves, which include indigenous peoples in the rural United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as those of European or other backgrounds.

The strength of the anthology lies in its multiple perspectives, various research sites, and the range of methodologies employed, including rhetorical analyses of economies and environments, media, and public spaces; classroom-based research; historical analysis and archival work; and qualitative research. The researchers engage the duality between the practices of everyday life in rural communities and the practices of reflecting on and making meaning.

Reclaiming the Rural reflects the continually changing, nuanced, context-dependent realities of rural life while acknowledging the complex histories, power struggles, and governmental actions that have affected and continue to affect the lives of rural citizens. This thought-provoking collection demonstrates the value in reclaiming the rural for scholarly and pedagogical analysis.

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(Re)Considering What We Know
Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy
Linda Adler-Kassner
Utah State University Press, 2019
Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, published in 2015, contributed to a discussion about the relevance of identifying key concepts and ideas of writing studies. (Re)Considering What We Know continues that conversation while simultaneously raising questions about the ideas around threshold concepts. Contributions introduce new concepts, investigate threshold concepts as a framework, and explore their use within and beyond writing.
 
Part 1 raises questions about the ideologies of consensus that are associated with naming threshold concepts of a discipline. Contributions challenge the idea of consensus and seek to expand both the threshold concepts framework and the concepts themselves. Part 2 focuses on threshold concepts in action and practice, demonstrating the innovative ways threshold concepts and a threshold concepts framework have been used in writing courses and programs. Part 3 shows how a threshold concepts framework can help us engage in conversations beyond writing studies.
 
(Re)Considering What We Know raises new questions and offers new ideas that can help to advance the discussion and use of threshold concepts in the field of writing studies. It will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students in writing studies, especially those who have previously engaged with Naming What We Know.
 
Contributors:
Marianne Ahokas, Jonathan Alexander, Chris M. Anson, Ian G. Anson, Sarah Ben-Zvi, Jami Blaauw-Hara, Mark Blaauw-Hara, Maggie Black, Dominic Borowiak, Chris Castillo, Chen Chen, Sandra Descourtis, Norbert Elliot, Heidi Estrem, Alison Farrell, Matthew Fogarty, Joanne Baird Giordano, James Hammond, Holly Hassel, Lauren Heap, Jennifer Heinert, Doug Hesse, Jonathan Isaac, Katie Kalish, Páraic Kerrigan, Ann Meejung Kim, Kassia Krzus-Shaw, Saul Lopez, Jennifer Helane Maher, Aishah Mahmood, Aimee Mapes, Kerry Marsden, Susan Miller-Cochran, Deborah Mutnick, Rebecca Nowacek, Sarah O’Brien, Ọlá Ọládipọ̀, Peggy O’Neill, Cassandra Phillips, Mya Poe, Patricia Ratanapraphart, Jacqueline Rhodes, Samitha Senanayake, Susan E. Shadle, Dawn Shepherd, Katherine Stein, Patrick Sullivan, Brenna Swift, Carrie Strand Tebeau, Matt Thul, Nikhil Tiwari, Lisa Tremain, Lisa Velarde, Kate Vieira, Gordon Blaine West, Anne-Marie Womack, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Xiaopei Yang, Madylan Yarc
 
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Reimagining Popular Notions of American Intellectualism
Literacy, Education, and Class
Kelly Susan Bradbury
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
The image of the lazy, media-obsessed American, preoccupied with vanity and consumerism, permeates popular culture and fuels critiques of American education. In Reimagining Popular Notions of American Intellectualism, Kelly Susan Bradbury challenges this image by examining and reimagining widespread conceptions of intellectualism that assume intellectual activity is situated solely in elite institutions of higher education.

Bradbury begins by tracing the origins and evolution of the narrow views of intellectualism that are common in the United States today. Then, applying a more inclusive and egalitarian definition of intellectualism, she examines the literacy and learning practices of three nonelite sites of adult public education in the United States: the nineteenth-century lyceum, a twentieth-century labor college, and a twenty-first-century GED writing workshop. Bradbury argues that together these three case studies teach us much about literacy, learning, and intellectualism in the United States over time and place. She concludes the book with a reflection on her own efforts to aid students in recognizing and resisting the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism that surrounds them and that influences their attitudes and actions.

Drawing on case studies as well as Bradbury’s own experiences with students, Reimagining Popular Notions of American Intellectualism demonstrates that Americans have engaged and do engage in the process and exercise of intellectual inquiry, contrary to what many people believe. Addressing a topic often overlooked by rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies scholars, it offers methods for helping students reimagine what it means to be intellectual in the twenty-first century.
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Reimagining the Educated Citizen
Creole Pedagogies in the Transatlantic World, 1685-1896
Petra Munro Hendry
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Reimagining the Educated Citizen contends that the constructs of public education and citizenship in the struggle to constitute a U.S. national identity are inseparable from the simultaneous emergence of transatlantic constructs of an educated citizen along transnational and transracial lines. The nineteenth century is commonly understood as the age of nationalism and nation formation in which the Anglo-Protestant Common School movement takes center stage in the production of the American democratic citizen. Ironically, the argument for public, Common Schools privileged whiteness instead of equality. This book suggests that an alternative vision of the relationship between education and citizenship emerged from a larger transatlantic history. Given shape by the movement of people, ideas, commodities, and practices across the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Valley, this radical egalitarian vision emerged at the crossroads of the Atlantic-colonial and antebellum Louisiana.

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Relocating Authority
Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration
Mira Shimabukuro
University Press of Colorado, 2015

Relocating Authority examines the ways Japanese Americans have continually used writing to respond to the circumstances of their community’s mass imprisonment during World War II. Using both Nikkei cultural frameworks and community-specific history for methodological inspiration and guidance, Mira Shimabukuro shows how writing was used privately and publicly to individually survive and collectively resist the conditions of incarceration.

Examining a wide range of diverse texts and literacy practices such as diary entries, note-taking, manifestos, and multiple drafts of single documents, Relocating Authority draws upon community archives, visual histories, and Asian American history and theory to reveal the ways writing has served as a critical tool for incarcerees and their descendants. Incarcerees not only used writing to redress the “internment” in the moment but also created pieces of text that enabled and inspired further redress long after the camps had closed.

Relocating Authority highlights literacy’s enduring potential to participate in social change and assist an imprisoned people in relocating authority away from their captors and back to their community and themselves. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of ethnic and Asian American rhetorics, American studies, and anyone interested in the relationship between literacy and social justice.

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Rewriting Partnerships
Community Perspectives on Community-Based Learning
Rachael W. Shah
Utah State University Press, 2020

Winner of the IARSLCE 2021 Publication of the Year Award and the Coalition for Community Writing Outstanding Book Award.

Community members are rarely tapped for their insights on engaged teaching and research, but without these perspectives, it is difficult to create ethical and effective practices. Rewriting Partnerships calls for a radical reorientation to the knowledges of community partners. Emphasizing the voices of community members themselves—the adult literacy learners, secondary students, and youth activists who work with college students—the book introduces Critical Community-Based Epistemologies, a deeply practical approach to knowledge construction that centers the perspectives of marginalized participants.
 
Drawing on interviews with over eighty community members, Rewriting Partnerships features community knowledges in three common types of community-engaged learning: youth working with college students in a writing exchange program, nonprofit staff who serve as clients for student projects, and community members who work with graduate students. Interviewees from each type of partnership offer practical strategies for creating more ethical collaborations, including how programs are built, how projects are introduced to partners, and how graduate students are educated. The book also explores three approaches to partnership design that create space for community voices at the structural level: advisory boards, participatory evaluation, and community grading.
 
Immediately applicable to teachers, researchers, community partners, and administrators involved in community engagement, Rewriting Partnerships offers concrete strategies for creating more community-responsive partnerships at the classroom level as well as at the level of program and research design. But most provocatively, the book challenges common assumptions about who can create knowledge about community-based learning, demonstrating that community partners have the potential to contribute significantly to community engagement scholarship and program decision-making.

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Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse
A Cross-Historical Study
Ben McCorkle
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

According to Ben McCorkle, the rhetorical canon of delivery—traditionally seen as the aspect of oratory pertaining to vocal tone, inflection, and physical gesture—has undergone a period of renewal within the last few decades to include the array of typefaces, color palettes, graphics, and other design elements used to convey a message to a chosen audience. McCorkle posits that this redefinition, while a noteworthy moment of modern rhetorical theory, is just the latest instance in a historical pattern of interaction between rhetoric and technology. In Rhetorical

Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study, McCorkle explores the symbiotic relationship between delivery and technologies of writing and communication. Aiming to enhance historical understanding by demonstrating how changes in writing technology have altered our conception of delivery, McCorkle reveals the ways in which oratory and the tools of written expression have directly affected one another throughout the ages.

To make his argument, the author examines case studies from significant historical moments in the Western  rhetorical tradition. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, McCorkle illustrates how the increasingly literate Greeks developed rhetorical theories intended for oratory that incorporated “writerly” tendencies, diminishing delivery’s once-prime status in the process. Also explored is the near-eradication of rhetorical delivery in the mid-fifteenth century—the period of transition from late manuscript to early print culture—and the implications of the burgeoning

print culture during the nineteenth century.

McCorkle then investigates the declining interest in delivery as technology designed to replace the human voice and gesture became prominent at the beginning of the 1900s. Situating scholarship on delivery within a broader  postmodern structure, he moves on to a discussion of the characteristics of contemporary hypertextual and digital communication and its role in reviving the canon, while also anticipating the future of communication technologies, the likely shifts in attitude toward delivery, and the implications of both on the future of teaching rhetoric.

Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse traces a long-view perspective of rhetorical history to present readers a productive reading of the volatile treatment of delivery alongside the parallel history of writing and communication technologies. This rereading will expand knowledge of the canon by not only offering the most thorough treatment of the history of rhetorical delivery available but also inviting conversation about the reciprocal impacts of rhetorical theory and written communication on each other throughout this history.

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Rhetorical Education in Turn-of-the-Century U.S. Women's Journalism
Grace Wetzel, with a foreword by Shari J. Stenberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 2022
Examining the rhetorical and pedagogical work of three turn-of-the-century newspaperwomen

At the end of the nineteenth century, newspapers powerfully shaped the U.S. reading public, fostering widespread literacy development and facilitating rhetorical education. With new opportunities to engage audiences, female journalists repurposed the masculine tradition of journalistic writing by bringing together intimate forms of rhetoric and pedagogy to create innovative new dialogues. Rhetorical Education in Turn-of-the-Century U.S. Women’s Journalism illuminates the pedagogical contributions of three newspaperwomen to show how the field became a dynamic site of public participation, relationship building, education, and activism in the 1880s and 1890s.

Grace Wetzel introduces us to the work of Omaha correspondent Susette La Flesche Tibbles (Inshta Theamba), African American newspaper columnist Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and white middle-class reporter Winifred Black (“Annie Laurie”). Journalists by trade, these three writers made the mass-circulating newspaper their site of teaching and social action, inviting their audiences and communities—especially systematically marginalized voices—to speak, write, and teach alongside them.

Situating these journalists within their own specific writing contexts and personas, Wetzel reveals how Mossell promoted literacy learning and community investment among African American women through a reader-centered pedagogy; La Flesche modeled relational news research and reporting as a survivance practice while reporting for the Omaha Morning World-Herald at the time of the Wounded Knee Massacre; and Black inspired public writing and activism among children from different socioeconomic classes through her “Little Jim” story. The teachings of these figures serve as enduring examples of how we can engage in meaningful public literacy and ethical journalism.
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Rhetorics of Literacy
The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry
Nadia Nurhussein
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry explores the production and reception of dialect poetry in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America and investigates the genre’s rhetorical interest in where sound meets print. Dialect poetry’s popularity stems not only from its use as an entertaining distraction from “serious” poetry, but as a surprisingly complicated pedagogical tool collaborating with elite literary culture. Indeed, the intersections of the oral and textual aspects of the dialect poem, visible in both its composition and its reception, resulted in confusing and contradictory interactions with the genre.
 
In this innovative study, Nadia Nurhussein demonstrates how an art form that appears to be most closely linked to the vernacular is in fact preoccupied with investigating its distance from it. Although dialect poetry performance during this period has garnered more attention than the silent reading of it, the history of dialect poetry’s reception proves that readers invited the challenge of printed dialect into their lives in unexpected places, such as highbrow magazines and primary school textbooks. Attentiveness to the appearances of dialect poetry in print—in books, pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, and other media—alongside its recitation are necessary to an understanding of its cultural impact.
 
Recontextualizing familiar and neglected poets, Rhetorics of Literacy proposes new literary genealogies and throws light upon the cultural and literary relevance of the laborious and strange reading practices associated with dialect poetry that made it distinct from other popular literary genres.
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Rural Literacies
Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen Schell
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006
Rural Literacies identifies the problems inherent in trying to understand rural literacy, addresses the lack of substantive research on literacy in rural areas, and reviews traditional misrepresentations of rural literacy.
This innovative volume frames debates over literacy in relation to larger social, political, and economic forces, such as the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act on rural schools and the effects of out-migration, globalization, and the loss of small family farms on rural communities.
Drawing upon traditional literacy and composition research and employing theory from education and sociology, the text engages compositionists in broader conversations regarding rural literacies. The authors share strategies that will help compositionists participate in pedagogies that are rooted in a richer understanding of rural literacies and work toward sustainability for all communities in a globalized age.
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