Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long

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      1 Introduction and Overview

      Over the past twenty years that community-literacy studies has emerged as a distinct area of inquiry, scholars have tested the capacity of rhetorical theory to make a difference in the world outside college walls. Working with community partners, they have prepared students in new ways to carry on responsible, effective, socially aware communication in a variety of workplaces and communities, as well as in school. There is joy in much of this work—the fruit of working with people whom we otherwise would not have known on projects that matter to others as well as to ourselves.

      A vibrant array of theoretical perspectives and methods of inquiry infuses this work. The array is due, in part, to the complexity and range of issues that community-literacy studies explores—issues of “real-world” reading and writing, of ethical communication, of cultural border crossing, among others.1 But the variation is also due to something even more basic. Community literacy requires each of us to make a judgment call. It demands that we venture an educated guess in response to a pressing social question: How do we engage such issues (of reading and writing, ethics, and border crossing) in ways and in locales that will make a difference? And it demands that we make that call not only in the theoretical claims we assert in our classrooms and scholarship but also in the theory-driven action we take outside the academy—in what we do with others under material, social, political, and economic conditions not of our making or under our control, nor even entirely within our understanding. This is, after all, the very conundrum of human affairs that characterizes rhetoric itself as a deliberative domain calling for productive knowledge (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1139a27–28) and practical wisdom (Isocrates, Antidosis 256–57)—the ability to articulate new understandings and to intervene rather than to represent what is already known (Atwill 66–69).

      Community-literacy scholars have made this judgment call in a number of ways—for instance, by carefully documenting and supporting the literacies of African American women negotiating the bureaucratic world of social service agencies (Cushman Struggle), by cultivating consensus among community organizers for a shared literacy initiative to support adult learners in North Philadelphia (Goldblatt “Alinsky’s Reveille”) and by building the rhetorical capacity of Pittsburgh residents to construct an alternative, inclusive discourse for deliberating issues of shared concern, such as welfare-to-work policies and staffing issues at long-term care facilities (Flower “Intercultural Knowledge”).

      Despite this variation, however, such responses share a common theme: we, as everyday people, stand to make a difference by using our literate repertoires to go public.

      As expressed in Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism, the promise of going public is twofold. First, public engagement strives to “accentuate [ . . . the] humanity [, . . . ] agency, capacity and ability” of ordinary people “to attenuate the institutional constraints on their life-chances for surviving and thriving” (Keeping 29). This means that opportunities for going public are open to all of us who, as “ordinary people,” strive “to participate in the decision-making procedures of institutions that fundamentally regulate [our] lives” (Keeping 140). The purpose of this book is to pull together alternative theoretical accounts of public engagement, so I won’t try to encapsulate them all here. But even a quick glance at some public-writing textbooks suggests the range of options available to those looking to go public—from having our say (Charney and Neuwirth) to researching social issues (Collins) to problem solving in the community (Flower Problem Solving). So readers of this book—including teachers, researchers and students—are, like myself, ordinary people developing their own literate repertories for public action.

      Second, the promise of public engagement calls readers located in relative institutional privilege to speak wisely and persuasively for social change. To do so is to acknowledge—as West puts it—that the “bourgeois liberal and communist illiberal status quos” have “culturally degraded, politically oppressed and economically exploited” some of us more than others (Keeping 29)—another theme in community-literacy studies. Although the goal of leveraging institutional resources to bring about progressive social change is generally shared across community-literacy scholars, it, too, affords multiple theoretical perspectives and multiple conceptions of democratic practice.

      Among the questions that organize community literacy as a field of study, this question of how ordinary people go public perhaps best indicates community literacy’s relevance to rhetoric and composition at large, especially given “the public turn” the discipline has taken over the past two decades (Weisser 1). Granted, individual researchers don’t necessarily state their research questions this way.2 All the same, this interest in how ordinary people go public is an abiding one. It shows up not only in rhetoric textbooks, but also whenever literacy scholars draw on a vocabulary of publicness to convey the rhetorical significance of their observations. It also appears whenever literacy scholars look to public-spheres theorists to help them think through rhetorical conundrums of contemporary life.

      The question—how it is that ordinary people go public?—carries with it several implications. First, the question represents a shift from the academy and workplace, where so much of composition research has previously focused attention, to the community, itself a hybrid domain at the intersection between private lives and public institutions (Crow and Allan 18). The question is also more narrow in focus than two broader strains of scholarship—work in service learning and action research—that frame community-literacy scholarship in the largest sense to include studies of the more private literacies of individuals, families, and neighborhoods (Cushman, Barbier, Mazak, and Petrone).

      This question also СКАЧАТЬ