Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long
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Mary Hamilton, and associates) and the re-evaluation of UNESCO’s 1953 vernacularization project, led by Andrée Tabouret-Keller in association with the International Group for the Study of Language Standardization and the Vernacularization of Literacy (IGLSVL). Conducted in the first half of 1990s, these two landmark research projects moved the study of situated literacies into public domains, and they did so not by studying formal public discourse, but by identifying local discursive sites where ordinary people went public.
Barton and Hamilton conducted the Lancaster Literacy Project 1990 to 1996 and published the results in 1998 under the title Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. Here Barton and Hamilton used the term “domain” to refer to the “structured, patterned contexts within which literacy is used and learned” (10).5 In keeping with the NLG, they observed that the literacies which people of Lancaster practiced in the domain of the home were different from those they practiced in the neighborhood, and different still from literacies required within the academy, workplace, or formal public institution such as the courtroom or doctor’s office. The differences were due, in large part, to the distinctive social purposes that organize these domains. But Barton and Hamilton were especially interested in the domain of community; thus, reports of a neighborhood activist named Shirley caught their attention. Interviews with Shirley revealed that in her informal but efficacious social role as local-public liaison, Shirley used a mix of vernacular and more formal literacies to go public, spanning the space between the informal and formal, the private and public.
At this same time, an international group of literacy scholars, under the acronym IGLSVL, joined forces to re-evaluate the 1953 UNESCO vernacularization project that had proclaimed vernacular literacy to be a human right. When their research results were published in 1997, Tabouret-Keller sounded the call for more literacy scholars to situate their studies in the public realm. To consider this call, imagine yourself a member of the IGLSVL that met in Sèvres, France, in 1992 to re-evaluate UNESCO’s earlier project. You and your colleagues represent vernacularization projects from all over the world—“former colonies of Britain and France, but also in Europe, the Americas, East, South, and South-East Asia and in Oceanic Australia” (Le Page 6). For your contribution to the research symposium, you need to identify the consequences of the 1953 UNESCO monograph on the corner of the globe where you have been conducting your sociolinguistic research. Your colleagues would be doing the same for theirs. It’s not just that forty years have passed. Time itself would have made your job quite straight forward: you would have measured the effect of the vernacularization policies on your region and identified any constraints that thwarted their effectiveness—or conditions that made for their success. But that’s not what frames your research problem. The point is that over the past forty years, you and your colleagues have rejected the formal linguistics, as well as the great divide theory, that motivated the 1953 UNESCO monograph. You no longer see languages as discrete entities that more or less respect the boundaries of nation states. Instead, you have come to understand languages falling along “linguistic continua focused from place to place and generation to generation around social group nodes, and labeled accordingly” (Le Page 4).6 Likewise, you no longer assign agency to language as the UNESCO monograph had. Instead, as a colleague put it: “It is no longer very meaningful to say that languages are capable of doing things, such as being used for education; people do things—languages are abstractions from what people do, and language is in a symbiotic relationship with other social processes” (Le Page 6). Given this shift in perspective—given the humility that has replaced UNESCO’s ethnocentric confidence—the question is, what do you now consider noteworthy to report back to your colleagues?
From here, we no longer need to hypothesize. Published in 1997, the IGLSVL’s research proceedings Vernacular Literacy: A Re-Evaluation recorded observations the group considered noteworthy. For example, Jean-Michel Charpentier described a group of singers in Melanesia who had devised an improvisational pidgin to “exalt the existence and the genius of a group that had previously remained unexpressed” (242). The singers could have sung in their regional local language. But that vernacular was already used for folk songs. Instead, the invented pidgin let the singers reach a larger audience (Charpentier 242).7 Referring to the singer’s decision to employ a pidgin over a regional vernacular, Charpentier noted that the pidgin allowed the singers to call into being a “new semantic field” that made an “outward-turn[. . .]” (242).8 Pushing the capacity of sociolinguistic terminology to express rhetorical ideas of audience and reach, commentary like Charpentier’s referred to the rhetorical space of a local public; his phrase “new semantic field” suggests an invented, local discursive space and the “outward turn” refers to the singers’ public orientation.
Throughout Vernacular Literacy: A Re-Evaluation, what the sociolinguists noted were accounts of “ordinary people” finding “genuine utility” in literacy (whether standard, vernacular, or some inventive mix) as it proved useful “for those aspects of social and political life with which they are concerned” (Tabouret-Keller 327). In fact, this descriptor becomes the group’s boldest claim concerning where and how it is that people exercise their language rights. In her conclusion to the report, Andrée Tabouret-Keller offered not broad, propositional claims about literacy or language rights.9 Instead, she concluded that people best exercise their language rights by using language to pool literate resources in order to address pressing social and public issues (327).
Here in the United States, the call to situate the study of literacy in the public realm has also been framed in terms of language rights. In rhetoric and composition, the clearest example is the 1974 Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) resolution “affirm[ing] the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language” (Students’ Right 1).10 Most basically, the SRTOL resolution encapsulated the field’s commitment to respond to and to make room for the growing number of “Blacks, Browns, women and other historically marginalized groups” who appeared in mainstream colleges in the 1960s and 1970s (Smitherman, “CCCC’s Role” 354). The SRTOL recognized the existential centrality and linguistic legitimacy of the discourses that students bring with them to composition classrooms—vernacular literacies like Black English Vernacular (BEV) or, more generally, what the linguistics in the UNESCO project would have called one’s mother tongue. In calling attention to the ways that classroom practices have institutionalized racial and class-based biases, the SRTOL also raised the possibility of reconfiguring educational spaces and institutional relationships to allow for reciprocity and mutual learning among writers who come from different cultural backgrounds and occupy different social locations (Smitherman, “CCCC’s Role” 354).11 When the profession passed the resolution back in 1974, the unspoken question was how those in rhetoric and composition would promote linguistic and rhetorical diversity in “public and professional settings” (Bruch and Marback 664).
The SRTOL resolution spoke for compelling social ideals—most notably human dignity, improved literacy education, and fair and equitable institutional practices. The challenge was how educators in an academic discipline would work within their spheres of influence to make public life more inclusive—a challenge that continues to engage some of the field’s most active scholars (e.g., Bean et al.; Bruch and Marback; Busch and Ball; Canagarajah “Place”; Gilyard Race; Gilyard Voices; Joyce Harris, Kamhi and Pollock; Kells; Kinloch; Marzluf; Parks; Tollefson; Smitherman “CCCC’s Role”; Wible).
As an heir of the SRTOL, community-literacy studies has instantiated the movement’s ideals by documenting two possibilities for situating vernacular literacies in public domains. The first possibility emphasizes students and other ordinary people employing vernacular literacies in public spaces. The second designs and tests rhetorical interventions to help students and other ordinary people use their vernacular literacies as resources for public engagement, building together new knowledge about shared issues.
Documenting and Theorizing Local Public Discourse
In rhetoric and composition, researchers have documented ordinary people using vernacular discourses to go public in arenas more fluid and permeable than the sites that Graham Crow and Graham Allen describe as formal publics. And vernacular discourse still gets the job done here, and arguably more effectively than more sedimented practices (Cushman Struggle; Moss Community Text). Cushman documented this comparative advantage, for example, when an African American