Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long
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participants do put their differences on the table, how can these differences serve as a resource for intercultural knowledge building, rather than the source of competition and strife? “Conflict in Community Collaboration” reports findings from a literacy project called Argue that brought together a group of landlords and tenants. With Lorraine Higgins as project leader, the participants addressed a set of related concerns, ranging from irresponsible tenants and negligent, insensitive landlords to unkempt and abandoned buildings that eroded property values and neighbors’ sense of safety. The project introduced a rhetorical intervention called collaborative planning which committed participants “on the one hand, to articulating conflict—vigorously representing a competing perspective on inner city landlords or tenants—and on the other, to supporting and developing each other’s position in planning and writing a useful document” (99). Unlike strategies that forge consensus, collaborative planning provided a method for “identifying and elaborating on new and unheard positions” (104). The intervention structured and supported negotiated meaning making, placing “writers within the midst of multiple, social, cultural and linguistic forces [that] introduce competing attitudes, values, and bodies of knowledge” (107).
But how would a writing teacher or program administrator go about forging partnerships in the first place? Peck, Flower, Higgins, and Deems described a partnership several years in the making. Grabill recommended his design principles to existing organizations—a United Way organization and other community centers. Faber marketed himself as a change-management consultant to organizations actively seeking his services and looking to change. How could university types—aware of the complex terrain on which they are about to tread—initiate such partnerships? Two studies, published in 2005 and 2006, respectively, depicted activist rhetoricians in the process of public making, using rhetorical interventions to chart their way through complicated rhetorical terrain and then commending their interventions to others. Though Goldblatt and Coogan set their sites on different priorities within the partnership-building process, each offered a rhetorical intervention for building consensus among university and community partners.
In “Alinsky’s Reveille: A Community-Organizing Model for Neighborhood-Based Literacy Projects,” Goldblatt asked, how can university partners leverage the resources that a university has to offer without controlling the terms of agreement? As a knowledge activist, Goldblatt nurtured a neighborhood-based initiative to serve the mutual benefit of community and university partners. The knowledge activist enacts a “deeper level” of Alinsky’s community organizing technique in which partners “talk through conflict and negotiate [. . .] tensions” in order to reach consensus regarding future joint action (Goldblatt, “Alinsky’s Reveille” 289). The knowledge activist becomes an active/activist listener who builds relationships with community leaders and studies their understanding of a community’s needs. With Goldblatt’s patient guidance, members of the Open Doors Collaborative identified a shared problem from which they developed a two-part strategy for providing literacy instruction to adult non-native English speakers in North Philadelphia.
What motivated Coogan’s “Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhetoric” was the need to locate current arguments in their larger historical and political context. In a partnership with a community organization in a Chicago neighborhood called Bronzeville, he served as a rhetorical analyst mobilizing ideological fragments in an effort to forge consensus among disparate parties (see also Coogan “Public Rhetoric”). Coogan based his techne on Michael McGee’s materialist rhetoric in which ideographs “represent in condensed form the normative, collective commitments of the members of a public, and they typically appear in public argumentation as the necessary motivations or justifications for action performed in the name of the public” (Condit and Lucaites qtd. in Coogan, “Service” 670).18 To make this concept of ideographs more concrete, one need look no farther than community-literacy studies. Within this body of scholarship, <local>, <public>, and <literacy> operate as ideographs—“icebergs” indicative of larger arguments and ideologies (Coogan, “Service” 670). One of the tasks of this book is to map how, as ideographs, <local> and <public> have assumed their “formative power to contain our commitments” (Coogan, “Service” 670). In fact, <local> was one of the ideographs that wielded tremendous rhetorical power in the public arguments over school reform in Bronzeville. When tethered to <control>, however, it harkened back to an earlier era of fractious local politics and dissipated contemporary public support. In contrast, when associated with <responsibility>, <local> assumed an altogether different, more positive valence “persuading parents [and other stakeholders] to take a more active role in [local] children’s education” (Coogan, “Service” 688). Coogan found his and his students’ efforts to mobilize action to improve local public schools far more successful once they had conducted a materialist rhetorical analysis.
If Goldblatt and Coogan show how systematic interventions can help community partners build knowledge and consensus, two recent publications challenge the field’s understanding of techne as it relates to community literacy: Mathieus’s Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition and Branch’s “Eyes on the Ought to Be”: What We Teach When We Teach About Literacy, published in 2005 and 2007, respectively.
Mathieu’s sensitivity to academic hubris leads her to distinguish sustained, systematic—or strategic—approaches for public making from a tactical approach that “devis[es] timely and spatially appropriate relationships in the streets” (20). Grounded in the work of de Certeau, Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition offers a postmodern reading of rhetorical techne. Mathieu urges university types to consider “questions of time, space, credibility, knowledge, and success” (21)—or “Who speaks? Who pays?” (66). These questions are designed to spark tactics of hope—rhetorically responsive actions grounded in humility, “radical patience,” and courage (47). “[C]lever uses of time” erupt in the politically charged spirit of the moment and often influence public opinion in ways that not only defy easy prediction and measurement but are themselves “mysterious and unknowable” (48).
Branch prefers the term métis over techne to describe the dynamism characteristic of the Highlander Folk School that Myles Horton founded in 1932 with a colleague named Don West.19 Among its achievements, the school practiced crisis education that subverted Jim Crow laws by teaching African Americans to read and write. In response to its unwavering commitment to building a more democratic society, the school understood its practices to be revisable and its ends in sight to be provisional. Branch explains: “The ‘crisis moment’ was an educational tool that provided motivation and direction, but it did not provide the ends of the educational process, ends which were always fluid, always growing” (152). Consequently, the “Highlander’s project could never have predetermined shape, one of the reasons that Horton was famously dismissive of identifying a Highlander method. [. . . T]he basis of Highlander’s program [. . .] came from a dynamic relationship between current conditions and future goals” (167). For Branch, the legacy of Horton’s crisis education inspires a trickster consciousness that “use[s] hunger and cunning [. . .] to work in the service of covert, situationally grounded, and always constrained action” (189).
Just as descriptive studies of community literacy have documented ordinary people interjecting their vernacular discourses into public spaces, rhetorical interventions—including Mathieu’s tactics of hope and Branch’s trickster consciousness—have drawn upon vernacular literacies as resources for public engagement. This feature is perhaps most explicit in the rhetorical model for community literacy that Higgins, Long, and Flower described in their 2006 article, “Community Literacy: A Rhetorical Model for Personal and Public Inquiry.” In commending practices that enact a vernacular local public, this model of community literacy doesn’t privilege vernacular discourses; rather, it makes sure they have a place at the table. The model responds to an issue central to public-spheres studies: “how to deal with the volatile presence of diversity” within deliberative democracy (Higgins, Long, and Flower 29). In addressing this question, the model creates a distinctive kind of counterpublic. Rather than cultivating and safeguarding oppositional identities in the ways that Warner associates with larger-scale counterpublics, a community-literacy counterpublic “aspire[s] to an intercultural, cross-hierarchy composition” (29). This distinctive kind of counterpublic is “less about