Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long
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do the same—whereby inviting her to set some of the terms of the admissions interview (Struggle 187). Likewise, in “Negotiating the Meaning of Difference,” Flower observed that in crafting their public documents, teen writers at the CLC often used the help of writing mentors to devise text conventions for encoding BEV to address rhetorical goals (for dialogue, say, or commentary) that Standard Written English (SWE) alone could not have conveyed nearly as effectively (Flower, Long, and Higgins 229–53). Likewise, Barton and Hamilton attributed the success of the newsletters that Shirley wrote and distributed around her neighborhood to her skillful integration of vernacular and formal discourses (253).
Descriptive research has verified that such instances are not as rare as prescriptive standards would suggest (Higgins). Such research can be grouped into two categories:
1) ethnographies and other descriptive accounts of minority group practices. These accounts are typically concerned with documenting a whole range of group practices and, thus, draw upon a language of publicness to the extent necessary to describe distinct features within the larger set of group practices.
2) ethnographies that deliberately set out to study situated literacies in the public realm.
In the first set of ethnographies, researchers didn’t set out to study public discourse but drew upon a language of publicness in order to describe and to interpret what they observed over the course of their studies. We can see this dynamic in Ways with Words, published in 1983. A language of publicness (in this case, coded in the theatrical language of public stage performances) let Heath contrast the language-learning rituals in Trackton with those of the neighboring white community of Roadville, but describing language-learning rituals, not public discourse, was Heath’s first priority.
Likewise, when launching Until We are Strong Together, published in 1997, Heller sought a personally and professionally meaningful research project (10). So she positioned her ethnography within a women’s writing workshop in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. At first glance, the workshop seemed to be expressivist in nature, emphasizing belletristic genres for personal expression. However, she soon found that the workshop’s sponsors were committed to developing the writers’ public voices. So as we will see in chapter 5, Heller employed a language of publicness to the extent necessary to describe specific public features within the workshop’s overall orientation; for instance, workshop members represented the “larger public” (143) and neighborhood poetry readings created “public forums” (103).
Likewise, Beverly Moss and Deborah Brandt had other fish to fry besides documenting public discourses in their analyses of African American churches. In A Community Text Arises, published in 2002, Moss set out to document the intertextual composing process by which congregations and pastors co-created sermons as community texts. Moss drew upon a language of publicness to describe worship service as a “public” event (see also Moss, “Pew” 209). Published the previous year, Brandt’s study of the African American church was part of a larger study entitled Literacy in American Lives analyzing how ordinary people born between 1895 and 1985 in the U.S. have learned to read and write. In both cases, Moss and Brandt drew upon a language of publicness in order to convey the significance of the church as public institution that circulates practices for personal and social transformation. While Moss explicitly classified her work as community literacy, Brandt did not. Either way, in documenting situated-public literacies, their work participated in the constructive process by which scholars both piqued disciplinary interest in how it is that ordinary people go public and also contributed scholarship to a growing body of literature exploring this question.
Meanwhile, another set of descriptive studies within rhetoric and composition identified from the outset the public realm as pertinent to their research, and deliberately situated their studies of literacy there. Among the first to carry out this line of research was Wayne Peck in his 1991 study of Bob, Althea, Buzz, and Barbara—community residents whom he documented “composing for action” (1). Based on the case studies of these writers, Peck defined the complex and persistent nature of the rhetorical situation that would come to define community literacy as a rhetorical act of shared deliberation and problem solving:
Whether the occasion for literate practice be a dispute with city housing officials, such as in the case of Bob, or a person trying to turn his life around by writing an action plan, such as the case of Buzz, community literate practices emerge as existential responses to problems that carry real consequences for the writers. Either Bob wins his case before the city or he loses his house and must go live in a neighborhood shelter. Either Buzz composes a workable plan for his life or he must move from the shelter to live on the streets. Community literacy practices are rooted in the life struggles of urban residents and are best understood as transactions or responses of people addressing dilemmas through writing. (20)
Peck’s observation that community literacy is a literate response to pressing social and existential exigencies is not only relevant to Barton and Hamilton’s Lancaster Literacy Project, but it also provides a tighter frame than the sociolinguistic one that Tabouret-Keller used to describe the situations in which “ordinary people” in the IGLSVL’s study practiced their language rights. The women in Dakar who assumed responsibility for their household finances (Tabouret-Keller 324), the farmers in North Cameroon who responded to newly mandated land-management practices (Gerbault 183), the Portuguese immigrants in France who invented a vernacular immigrais to aid communication under hostile social conditions (Gardner-Chloros 216)—in these instances everyday people pooled their literate resources to respond to pervasive and complex manifestations of poverty and disenfranchisement that UNESCO has long attempted to eradicate. Likewise, it was the rhetorical nature of such community problems that compelled Lorraine Higgins and Lisa Brush to position their research of personal narratives in the public realm. Their 2006 study “Writing the Wrongs of Welfare” examined “how subordinated rhetors [former and current welfare recipients] might enter into the public record their tacit and frequently discounted knowledge about poverty and welfare” (697).
As Peck’s study indicates, as scholars in rhetoric and composition situated literacy studies in the public realm, their scholarship also developed theories of local public discourse. This is even the case, for instance, for scholars who positioned their work as a deliberate departure from some of the earlier community-literacy scholarship. In the first chapter of Angels’ Town, Cintron noted the insufficiencies of sociolinguistic theory to get at “the broader cultural examination [he] aspired to” (10). Thus, he called his 1997 analysis of street life in an industrial city outside Chicago a “critical ethnography” by which he “bec[ame] a rhetorician of public culture” and “Heath as a theoretical lens [was] replaced by Michel de Certeau” (10). Throughout Angels’ Town, Cintron drew upon de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life to account for the repetitive and unconscious aspects of everyday life that fuel how culture is both produced and consumed. Likewise, Cushman framed The Struggle and the Tools within the same French political philosophy, quoting, for instance, de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life in its opening lines. Focused on the private-public nature of the gatekeeping encounter, Cushman developed a theory of dueling dualities by which everyday people’s hidden transcripts spar with the public transcript to unleash the noisy wrangling between political binaries. In important ways, European political philosophy has let rhetoricians infuse their observations of literacy in the public realm with NLG’s concern for issues of power and ideology. By drawing on political philosophies such as de Certeau’s, literacy scholars have helped to characterize community literacy as a distinctive multivocal, multimodal local public discourse.
Features of Situated-Public Literacies
Taken together, studies of literacy have identified distinctive features of the situated-public literacies that people use to go public. These studies confirm that—as Tabouret-Keller observed—although the vernacular-vs.-standard distinction carries important information, other features may be more instrumental in helping ordinary people go public. Some of these most prominent features are described below.
Situated-public literacies are performative. Heath needed a language of public performance to describe what was distinctive about the situated literacies she observed in Trackton. Here, youngsters’ street performances called a public into being around the rituals that defined community life—and