between vernacular literacies and public life—a connection that contends with the inherent ambiguity of language rights discourse and all the complexity of public-spheres studies.
Two Prior Accounts
People have been writing in their communities for several hundreds of years (Howard).1 Yet compared to invention—the topic of the first book in this series—with its two-thousand-year history, the history of the discipline’s interest in community literacy is strikingly brief, transpiring over the last few decades. Significant portions of this history have already been told. In Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere, published in 2002, Christian Weisser positioned community literacy in terms of larger social then public turns in the field at large. One of the earliest visionaries was Michael Halloran who in 1975 and then in 1982 sounded the call to revitalize rhetorical education by reclaiming the classical attention to public discourse. In relation to this call, Weisser mapped a now familiar disciplinary history in which cognitivism, expressivism, and social constructionism gave way to one another respectively and then to the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire and to Freiristas’ “activism in the academy” (116). In relation to this history, Weisser identified community-literacy programs as valuable sites where college students develop their capacities for going public (48).
More recently, in the third chapter of Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Engagement, Flower has recounted the historical context of the CLC as it relates to the development of cognitive rhetoric. The CLC was an experiment in the rhetoric of engagement, the practice of learning to “speak with others [. . .] for something” as an engaged response to collaborative inquiry (79). Flower’s account positions the CLC in relation to some of the same process-movement, cognition/society debates that Weisser detailed, but for Flower the promise of this disciplinary discussion has lain not in the power of cultural critique to inform public pedagogies (where Weisser took his history) but in the discipline’s capacity to develop working theories to articulate rhetorics of performance capable of supporting both personal and public discovery and change (R. Young, Becker and Pike). That, for Flower, is the power of Freire’s pedagogy—its contribution as a working theory of politically charged literate action and reflection. Likewise, for Flower what is especially valuable about the renewed interest in Aristotelian and sophistic rhetorics is that they restore traditions of praxis (theory and action) and phronesis (contingent judgment) that can be employed to meet the contemporary demands of intercultural inquiry for productive working relationships and wise action.
As Flower explains, the CLC was founded in 1989 as an attempt to enact a theory-driven, context-sensitive rhetoric, grounded in the legacy of the African American freedom struggle, in the commitments of social activism as embodied in the settlement house tradition, and in the problem-solving orientation of cognitive rhetoric (Flower Community Literacy). Based on Wayne Peck’s observations of the inventive, transactional purposes to which the everyday people in his neighborhood put literacy, the CLC tested four principles of literate social action: a dedication to social change and action; support of intercultural inquiry and collaboration; a commitment to strategies for collaboration, planning, argument, and reflection that are intentionally taught and deliberately negotiated; and a commitment to a mutually beneficial community-university partnership that supports joint inquiry (Peck, Flower, and Higgins 207–18). The CLC posed “[t]he question [of] how to create an atmosphere of respect, a commitment to equality, and an acknowledgement of the multiple forms of expertise at the table” (210). In response, the CLC envisaged the alternative public discourse of the community problem-solving dialogue—what Flower has termed more recently a vernacular local public (Flower “Can You Build”; Flower, “Intercultural Knowledge” 252; Higgins, Long, and Flower 16–18).
Over the years that community literacy was coming into its own, scholars outside rhetoric and composition sounded two calls that would shape the direction of community-literacy studies. One of these calls urged literacy scholars to situate the study of literacy in the public realm in an effort to study language rights; the other call urged public-sphere scholars to test their theoretical propositions in the crucible of “actually existing democracy” in order to build a more nuanced understanding of the limits and potential of democratic practices (Fraser 109). While literacy scholars and public-spheres theorists responded to these calls within their own disciplinary arenas, community literacy emerged as another site of inquiry, one attentive to the new scholarship in both sociolinguistics and public-spheres studies. As a constructive response to these two calls, community-literacy studies has coalesced in a distinctive way around the democratic potential of vernacular local publics. In this account, I locate community-literacy studies in its academic/disciplinary context at the same time that I make a case for community literacy as a distinctive area of scholarship that integrates literacy and public-spheres theories to study how ordinary people go public and to design interventions that help them to do so more effectively within and across complex discursive spaces.
Situating the Study of Literacy in the Public Realm
Over time, the call to situate the study of literacy in the public realm would come to mean studying people using literacy in a multiplicity of decidedly public domains—not commercial nor academic ones, but institutional sites representing versions of some greater good, such as the medical system designed to promote health or human service agencies organized to strengthen the larger “social fabric” (Cushman, Struggle 45). Eventually, this call would direct literacy scholars to conduct research in the community. In sociolinguistic parlance, community designates that subset of the public domain mediating between “the private sphere of home and family [ . . . and] the impersonal institutions of the wider society”; thus, community is the realm that ordinary people most readily experience as “public life” (Crow and Allen 1). In the 1970s, it was a new idea to situate the study of literacy in any locale whatsoever—and it was toward this effort that the call was first sounded.
The call to move the study of situated literacies into the public realm was international in scope. It began as a critique of assumptions about literacy so pervasive and bold that they governed most notably the international, multi-organizational, multi-million-dollar initiative that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) sponsored in the 1950s to eradicate illiteracy world wide (Le Page 4): the vernacularization project.2 Today, literacy scholars use the phrase the autonomous model of literacy to encapsulate these assumptions. In short, the autonomous model took literacy to be a generalizable skill that fostered levels of abstract thinking and critical analysis unavailable to the oral mind (Goody; Havelock; Ong). The model assumed that, as a generalizable skill, literacy could be packaged and transported from one setting to another for equal effect. It drove the overstated claims of the great divide: that literate people are more intellectually agile (for instance, able to separate fact from myth and to glean abstract principles from concrete experience) than people who do not read and write. The model also supported the view that a country needs to cross a certain threshold of literacy in order to ensure the functioning of its institutions and to achieve economic autonomy (Le Page 9). According to this model, everyday people “went public” to the extent that they developed the literate skills necessary to participate in the economic mainstream of their countries. Thus, the vernacularization project (which aimed to teach people in developing countries to read and write in their mother tongues) was a means toward an end—the most efficient means, that is, to teach people to function in a given country’s standard language.3
Among the first to call for and conduct research to interrogate the claims of the autonomous model were Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole. From 1973 to 1978 they directed the Vai Literacy Project in Liberia. Rather than describing general features of literacy, Scribner and Cole found it necessary to refer to literate practices, defined as “a recurrent, goal-directed sequence of activities using a particular technology and particular systems of knowledge” (236). Situated as they were within specific domains of activity, literate practices—from letter writing to reciting the Qu’ran to “doing school”—let the Vai accomplish different things in different contexts for different purposes, but these practices didn’t add up to sweeping changes in cognitive ability or socioeconomic status.
Freire
