Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long
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to ensure dynastic power, and powerful institutions could sponsor schooling to provide continuing leadership and bureaucracies. Within such academic settings, rhetoric became a school taught art and an elaborated theoretical subject. However, the poor, the dispossessed, the victims of power, or even just the ordinary working people were left to their own spontaneous rhetorical savvy and carnivalesque resistance to assert their rights. Only rarely did they gain access to the most powerful tools of oratory and language.
Composition was born in the nineteenth-century school and university to teach the writing skills necessary for academic accomplishment and entering elite social roles upon graduation. Yet the increasing democratization of education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also brought in more people of various backgrounds and an interest in the needs of all parts of society. Universities often became sites of community involvement and progressivism, starting with the landgrants and famously with the University of Chicago at the time of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Jane Addams. In the Post World War II and Civil Rights eras in the U.S., universities became increasingly engaged with community issues and what became eventually known as urban missions. So perhaps it is not so surprising that composition and rhetoric have engaged with community projects, where ordinary citizens gain public voice. Nonetheless, this return to the public sphere turns the power dynamics of rhetoric on its head and represents a major turn outward from composition’s traditional work in preparing students for academic and professional success.
Elenore Long’s Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics—the latest volume in the Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition—reviews the major community rhetoric projects that have emerged in recent years, laying out the underlying logic, approaches and methods of each, and illuminating them through a theorized comparison. Long’s theoretical view unpacks the underlying metaphors of these projects to understand how each conceives the local public, the participation of individuals and groups, and the relations to larger institutions. In so doing she illuminates what role writing teachers and other communication specialists can take within community organizations and how such projects can serve as a means of community engagement for college writing students.
This volume gives us overview and insight into a major new direction in rhetoric and composition that foretells changes in undergraduate education and a reorientation of the university to the community. This volume brings these movements to a new level of understanding, thoughtfulness, and effectiveness.
Acknowledgments
My heartfelt thanks to Wayne Peck, Joyce Baskins, and everyone at the Community House Church. My greatest joys in life include the projects we have carried out together. I am also indebted to the scholars whose work informs community-literacy studies. Their care as researchers and their commitments as people have made my task inspiring and pleasurable. Linda and Tim Flower have been steadfast friends of this project—one could ask for no better collaborative planning partners. Linda, thank you for your patience, insight, and encouragement across enumerable drafts.
Maureen Daly Goggin prompted patiently as I shaped the third chapter that locates community-literacy studies in the larger disciplinary history. Lorraine Higgins rekindled my interest in communicative democracy and offered helpful comments on chapter 5, especially regarding implications that follow when work disappears from urban areas. I am grateful to my entire circle of friends—including Patti Wojahn, Loel Kim, David Fleming, Kirk Branch, and Amanda Young—who contributed all varieties of support and inspiration.
Several professional forums have nourished this project and made a place for it in the discipline. I am grateful to those whose vision and attention to detail have allowed for such fruitful discussion: Frans H. van Eemeren and colleagues sponsored the Fifth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation where I mapped out the initial grid for this book; Glynda Hull and Kathy Schultz organized the 2004 NCTE assembly for research where colleagues from the Community House in Pittsburgh and I cast digital storytelling as local public practice; Peter Goggin and Maureen Mathison sponsored the annual Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Conference where I tested early and the most recent incantations of a local public rhetoric; Charles Bazerman and Sue McLeod made possible CCCCs sessions dedicated to this and related work. With support from Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Community Literacy, and Service-Learning and the Community Literacy Journal, Eli Goldblatt, Steve Parks, and David Jolliffe organized a symposium in Philadelphia to imagine the future of community-literacy studies.
In all my enthusiasm, my initial version of this project was far too long. You are in for a better read, thanks to Charles Bazerman and his vision for the Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition. David Blakesley and Michael Palmquist patiently provided guidance all along the way. Judy Holiday, Sundy Watanabe, Jeffery Grabill and his students in AI 877: Community Literacies put drafts of this manuscript to various uses; their interest and feedback have strengthened this text and fortified my spirit in numerous ways. I am grateful, as well, to Tracy Clark, who copyedited the manuscript.
The administration and my colleagues at Bay Path College provided time and resources to support this project. I am especially indebted to the College’s provost, William Sipple; the reference librarian, Sandra Cahillane; student assistants, Andrea English and Stephanie Zeiser; and my dear friend and colleague, Brenda Hardin Abbott.
New colleagues at Eastern Washington University helped me to make time to complete this project while learning a new culture and assuming new professional responsibilities. I am particularly indebted to Logan Greene and Garrett Kenney.
My extended family has sustained me with their companionship, laughter, food, and great stories. John and Hannah Jarvis have adjusted their own lives to make room for this project and celebrated each little step toward its completion. Best of all, now—they say—the time has come to pack it up. Thank you.
Common Abbreviations
AAHE: American Association for Higher Education:
BEV: Black English Vernacular
CCCC: Conference on College Composition and Communication
CLC: Community Literacy Center
CMU: Carnegie Mellon University
DUSTY: Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth
IGLSVL: International Group for the Study of Language Standardization and the Vernacularization of Literacy
IPRP: Interprofessional Research Project
IIT: Illinois Institute of Technology
Metro AME: Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church
NLG: New Literacies Group
NLS: New Literacies Studies
NWP: National Writing Project
SRTOL: Students’ Right to Their Own Language
SWE: Standard Written English
TWWW: Tenderloin Women’s Writing Workshop
UNESCO: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
WFYL: Write For Your Life
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