The Brown Chair in English Literacy Initiative will support research, teaching, and outreach projects in four broad areas of literacy:

• General adult literacy: Helping adults throughout Arkansas read and write more richly, productively, and critically in many parts of their lives—personal, familial, professional, psychological, and spiritual.
• Literacy and work: Helping adults throughout Arkansas prepare and retool so that they will be able to participate more fully in high-quality jobs that call for careful and critical reading, writing, listening, speaking, discussing and problem-solving.
• Academic literacy, K-16: Helping students throughout Arkansas develop the abilities to read and write so that they can remain and succeed in school and achieve the highest level of education possible.
• Family, parent, and child literacy: Helping families, parents, and social-service agencies throughout Arkansas build a solid literacy foundation for children from birth through pre-school.

To learn more about how you and your organization can work with the Office of the Brown Chair on any of these initiatives, call David Jolliffe at 479-575-2289 or write him at djollif@uark.edu.

The Office of the Brown Chair in English Literacy is eager to work with towns and cities throughout Arkansas that want to engage the services of a Community Literacy Advocate, a person who would be charged specifically with establishing literacy-rich connections between and among schools, community colleges and universities, Adult Basic Education centers, local literacy councils, public libraries, and local economic development councils.

The town of Augusta, Arkansas, has become the initial site of the Community Literacy Advocacy Program, developed by the Office of the Brown Chair in English Literacy at the University of Arkansas. In Augusta, the Community Literacy Advocate is sponsored by the White River Rural Health Center. The Advocate, former public school teacher and literacy specialist Joy Lynn Bowen, is establishing "literacy connections" and developing programs involving organizations that work to improve reading and writing in the community but have not necessarily worked together in the past. Young parents are working on building a literate environment for their pre-school children. Elementary students are creating literacy projects based on popular music. High school students are writing oral history essays and stories. Adults are writing essays and stories about military veterans as part of a veterans’ memorial project. Ministers are building reading and writing into their churches’ activities. Librarians are learning about community arts and literacy activities. In short, the whole town has turned it attention to reading and writing.

Look for new sites of the Community Literacy Advocacy Program to develop soon in Brinkley, Helena/West Helena, and Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

Write to David Jolliffe (djollif@uark.edu) for more information about the Community Literacy Advocacy Program.

Residents of other towns and cities in Arkansas interested in establishing a Community Literacy Advocacy Program should get in touch with David Jolliffe, the Brown Chair in English Literacy at the University of Arkansas, by calling 479-575-2289 or writing to djollif@uark.edu.

On September 15, 2005, the Brown Chair in English Literacy hosted a statewide Town Hall Meeting on Literacy, designed to address four pressing questions: What do we know about literacy in Arkansas already? What do we need to know? What are we doing about literacy in Arkansas already? What do we need to do? To read a report about this meeting, please click HERE.