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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 studentmentors 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.
Reclaiming the Rural moves beyond typical arguments for the preservation, abandonment, or modernization of rural communities, analyzing how communities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico sustain themselves--economically, environmentally, intellectually, and politically--through literate action.
In Literacy as Conversation, the authors tell stories of successful literacy learning outside of schools and inside communities, both within urban neighborhoods of Philadelphia and rural and semi-rural towns of Arkansas. They define literacy not as a basic skill but as a rich, broadly interactive human behavior: the ability to engage in a conversation carried on, framed by, or enriched through written symbols. Eli Goldblatt takes us to after-school literacy programs, community arts centers, and urban farms in the city of Philadelphia, while David Jolliffe explores learning in a Latinx youth theater troupe, a performance based on the words of men on death row, and long-term cooperation with a rural health care provider in Arkansas. As different as urban and rural settings can be—and as beset as they both are with the challenges of historical racism and economic discrimination—the authors see much to encourage both geographical communities to fight for positive change.
In Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition, editors Bruce Horner and Karen Kopelson gather leading scholars and new voices in the field of rhetoric and composition to offer a dynamic new perspective on English as it is used today. This provocative volume explores the myriad ways in which English is constantly redefined, revised, and redirected through specific, located acts of writing, rhetoric, teaching, and learning. Contributors provide insightful contributions to the study of English from both national and international perspectives, revealing the language as a fluid and constantly changing manner of expression that challenges established notions. In part one, “Reworking Language,” writers call into question the idea of language as a static, stable entity. In part two, “Locations and Migrations: Global/Local Interrogations,” contributors explore the impact of writing and teaching English in both in the United States and abroad, from Arkansas and Oklahoma to China, Jamaica, and Lebanon. Part three, “Pedagogical/Institutional Interventions,” addresses English in institutional settings and the implications for future pedagogical work. Each essay in this revolutionary volume substantiates two key premises for the rethinking of English: first, that languages are susceptible to constant change through the very acts of writing, teaching, and learning, and second, that this reworking occurs as it moves between various temporal and spatial locations. Throughout the volume, the variety and flexibility of English across the globe are both advocated and revealed, rejecting dominant Anglophone perspectives and instead placing language in cross-cultural contexts. Brimming with informative and thought-provoking insights, Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition breathes new life into the field and provides direction for scholars and teachers looking to the future of English.
Engagement is trendy. Although paired most often with community, diverse invocations of engagement have gained cache, capturing longstanding shifts toward new practices of knowledge making that both reflect and facilitate multiple ways of being an academic. Engagement functions as a gloss for these shifts—addressing more expansive understandings of where, how, and with whom we research, teach, and partner. This book examines these shifts, locating them within socio-economic trends within and beyond the higher educational landscape, with particular focus on how they have been enacted within the diverse subfields of writing studies. In so doing, this book provides concrete models for enacting these new responsive practices, thereby encouraging scholars to examine how they can facilitate writing for social action through taking positions, building relationships, and crossing boundaries.
Inspired by memories of her beloved grandmother, photographer and author Alysia Burton Steele -- picture editor on a Pulitzer Prize-winning team -- combines heart-wrenching narrative with poignant photographs of more than 50 female church elders in the Mississippi Delta. These ordinary women lived extraordinary lives under the harshest conditions of the Jim Crow era and during the courageous changes of the Civil Rights Movement. With the help of local pastors, Steele recorded these living witnesses to history and folk ways, and shares the significance of being a Black woman -- child, daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother in Mississippi -- a Jewel of the Delta. From the stand Mrs. Tennie Self took for her marriage to be acknowledged in the phone book, to the life-threatening sacrifice required to vote for the first time, these 50 inspiring portraits are the faces of love and triumph that will teach readers faith and courage in difficult times.
Containing some of the most fertile soil in the world, the Arkansas Delta is predominantly an agricultural region. In the early 19th century, however, while the land remained extremely rich, the Delta's inhabitants were suffering from severe poverty. Showcased here in over 200 vintage images with corresponding commentary are the historic efforts in the education of the Delta for the past 150 years, documenting the region's rise in national education standards. Settled in part by the Native American tribes of the Mississippi Delta and later French explorers, the area was always an agricultural gold-mine. As seen in many farm reliant communities, education fell second to tilling the fields. As the rest of the world began its rapid ascension from agriculture to industrialization, the farmers of the Delta, poor and uneducated, were left behind the rest of the nation. This new book, featuring remarkable images of the one-room schoolhouses, teachers, and students of the many communities of the Delta, spans over two centuries, as the authors trace the history of education in the Arkansas Delta from its roots in the mid-19th century to its current state in the dawn of the 21st century.
A diaristic photographic portrait of the memory-laden Mississippi Delta of Arkansas Fifty years ago, New York-based photographer Eugene Richards (born 1944) worked as a VISTA Volunteer and then as a reporter in the Arkansas Delta. Even after the newspaper he helped found closed its doors, Richards kept revisiting the region. In early 2019 he returned to the small town of Earle, Arkansas, where, on a September night in 1970, peaceful protesters were attacked by a crowd of white men and women brandishing sticks and firing guns. Crossing the tracks from what had been the Black side of the town into the white side of the town, Richards happened upon an old appliance store. On the shadowy and cracked walls of the building were painted the faces of Jesus, Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, Dr. Martin Luther King and John Brown--the faces of revolution, reconciliation, change. In the months that followed, the old store became for Richards a kind of portal, a doorway into the region's volatile history and into the lives of those who lived, struggled, raised families, grew old and died there. The Day I Was Born interweaves full-bleed images of Earle with deeply personal narratives in the words of people who live there.
Emerges is a rich tapestry of dichotomies that is the Delta - a land of black and white, of wealth and poverty, of progress and stasis, of despair and hope - in which all that is dear and terrible about this often overlooked region of the South is revealed.