Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long
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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 raises the issue of where it is that ordinary people most often go public. In this book, these spaces are called local publics. As a rhetorical construct, the phrase local publics fills the gap between descriptive accounts of situated literacy (Barton; Barton, Hamilton, and Ivanič; Street Literacy) and more abstract theories of public discourse. In comparison to both dominant formal (Barton and Hamilton; Warner) and adversarial (Roberts-Miller) publics, the local publics of community literacy extend Nancy Fraser’s notion of alternative publics. Local publics are located in time and place. Their potential (as well as limitations) as hosts for “actually existing democracy” makes them important sites for rhetorical inquiry (Fraser 109). More than any other entity, local publics constitute the community of community literacy.
The question also immediately raises the issue of institutional affiliation. Some of the earliest controversy in community-literacy studies focused on the power of institutions to define literacy. In this vein, Jeffery Grabill criticized Wayne Peck, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins, founders of Pittsburgh’s Community Literacy Center (CLC), a partnership between Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and a settlement house called the Community House on the city’s North Side.3 Although Peck, Flower, and Higgins “manag[ed] to define” community literacy for the discipline, Grabill charged them with failing to define community (with all its institutional affiliations) “in any meaningful way” (Community 89). Likewise, Eli Goldblatt made institutional sponsorship the focus of “Van Rides in the Dark.” “Literacy, like all human activities,” wrote Goldblatt, “is practiced within a context of institutions, both institutions whose sponsorship of written language is quite explicit [. . .] or institutions for which written language functions subtly to maintain its solidity in the culture [. . .]” (78). In a hallway conversation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) the year prior to the publication of “Van Rides,” Goldblatt gently pointed out to me that the analysis I had just presented insufficiently theorized the issue of institutional sponsorship. At the time, I was coordinating college students serving as writing mentors at the CLC. For me, the revealing relationship was the connection college mentors made between literacy and social justice. In their work supporting urban teen writers at the CLC, they struggled with how best to forge this connection. How to juggle competing priorities (e.g., grammatical correctness, emancipation, free expression, action-oriented problem solving) was a pressing concern for students and an open question in the discipline at large (Long “Intercultural Images”).
Since that time, both Grabill (Community Literacy) and Goldblatt (“Alinsky’s Reveille”; “Van Rides”) have stressed the role that institutions play as literacy sponsors, and Deborah Brandt’s study of literacy sponsorship has provided theoretical underpinnings for understanding this relationship more fully (American). As much light as this work has brought to the issue of sponsorship, it also represents the momentum community-literacy studies has gained while investigating a whole range of problems that arise when literacy is publicly situated. The relationship between local publics and formal institutions is a case in point.
As the following analysis will show, when we ask how do ordinary people go public?, the responses we get in return expose a whole range of possible relationships between local public and formal institutions, sponsorship being one among many. So while the studies reviewed under current views (chapters 4 through 8) have each contributed significantly to community-literacy studies, together they also dramatize a complex (and no doubt incomplete) set of relationships between local publics and formal institutions that shape and constrain how ordinary people go public.4 As table 1 suggests, a local public may turn its back on formal public institutions, or it may rely on one or more such institution to sponsor it. A local public may intersect with a public institution,