"The Language of Experience" examines the relationship between literacy and change--both personal and social. Gorzelsky studies three cases, two historical and one contemporary, that speak to key issues on the national education agenda.
"Struggle" is a community literacy program for urban teens and parents. It encourages them to reflect on, articulate, and revise their life goals and design and implement strategies for reaching them. To provide historical context for this and other contemporary efforts in using literacy to promote social change, Gorzelsky analyzes two radical religious and political movements of the English Civil Wars and the 1930s unionizing movement in the Pittsburgh region. Charting the similarities and differences in the function of literate practices in each case shows how different situations and contexts can foster very different outcomes.
Gorzelsky's analytic frame is drawn from Gestalt theory, which emphasizes the holistic nature of perception, communication, and learning. Through it she views how discourse and language structures interact with experience and how this interaction changes awareness and perception.
The book is methodologically innovative in its integration of a macro-social view of cultural, social, and discursive structures with a micro-social view of the potential for change embodied in them. Through her analysis and in her use of the voices of the people she studies, Gorzelsky offers a tool for analyzing individual instances of literate practices and their potential for fostering change.

This collection of memoirs examines the relationship between daughters with academic degrees and their working-class parents. Each contributor explores the influence that higher education has had on her relationship with her parent(s), as well as their influence on her academic work. In writing that is akin to archeological work, each writer sifts through layers of experience and draws on the lessons and language of home to consider what working-class parents provide beyond food and shelter for their academically inclined child, and what personal cost is exacted of parent and child in the process. Their stories provoke anyone who has gone to college - woman or man - to consider the influence of their parents on their academic career. The themes in the collection fall into five broad categories: the value and power of bringing the lessons and language of working-class parents into the academy; the psychology of class learned from a parent; the ambivalence of love and pain associated with a parent's sacrifice and the process of becoming an academic; the balancing act of straddling the worlds of academia and home; and definitions of work that either complement or conflict with those learned from parents. The memoirs acknowledge in retrospect how each writer's understanding of her parent(s) shapes her views on education and work.