of literacy—and one of the first to situate the study of literacy in the public realm. First expressed in his dissertation in 1959, his ideas caught international attention with the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1970. Working in Brazil and later for UNESCO under exile in Chile, he critiqued teaching literacy as a technical skill and focused instead on literacy learning as a critical act of emancipatory engagement. Interrogating the purposes of literacy instruction, Freire challenged the assumption driving the UNESCO 1953 monograph that the ultimate purpose of literacy instruction was to “bring about conformity to [. . .] the present system”—a position that got him exiled from his home country (Gerbault 147). Instead, Freire promoted education as “‘the practice of freedom,’ the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world” (Shaull 16). His pedagogy called for circle facilitators to introduce vernacular literacy to the extent that it addressed the problems that members of the circle had posed. It would be hard to overstate Freire’s influence on rhetoric and composition. Looking back on the discipline in 2002, Weisser contended: “[Freire’s] work—most notably The Pedagogy of the Oppressed [. . .]—is directly responsible for the discipline’s current focus on public writing” (37).
The critique of the autonomous model instigated numerous historical studies, such as David Cressy’s “The Environment for Literacy: Accomplishment and Context in Seventeenth Century England and New England,” published in 1983.4 These historical reviews indicated that rather than triggering economic development, literacy flourishes in contexts where other “favourable factors” such as health and economic well-being do, too (Carrington 84).
By the mid-1980s, problems with the autonomous model of literacy—primarily, its insufficient empirical grounds—gave rise to New Literacy Studies (NLS) that focused on “the role of literacy practices in reproducing or challenging structure of power and domination” (Street, Cross-cultural 7). One of the strongest advocates of the ideological model and the research supporting it is Street who in 1984 published Literacy in Theory and Practice based on his fieldwork in Iran in the 1970s. Arguing that anthropology offered a better framework for studying literacy than formal linguistics, Street pushed literacy scholars to use ethnographic methods to study “the site of tension between authority and power on the one hand and resistance and creativity on the other” (Cross-cultural 8). During the second half of the 1980s, the NLG advocated studying literacies in the social and cultural contexts in which they actually occur—for instance, a village in Papua New Guinea (Kulick and Stroud), a fishing boat in Alaska (Reder and Wikelund), or a high school in North Philadelphia (Camitta).
Throughout the 1990s, the NLG continued to launch numerous cross-cultural comparisons (Street Cross-cultural; Tabouret-Keller et al.) and inspired similar studies of minority-group practices here in the United States—work that continues today (e.g., Anderson, Kendrick, Rogers, and Smythe; Farr, Latino Language; Farr, Racheros; Joyce Harris, Kamhi, and Pollock; Kells, Balester, and Villanueva; Moss Community Text; Moss Literacy Across Communities; Zantella). Such research has highlighted that literacy helps shape ethnic, gender, and religious identities by structuring and sustaining the institutional relationships that engage these identities (Street Cross-cultural).
By the 1990s, the NLG’s ideological model of literacy had replaced the autonomous model in most literacy scholarship (Hull and Schultz). The ideological model defined literacy as a constellation of local, situated practices (Barton, Hamilton, and Ivanič) that are shaped by institutional power (Street Literacy) and responsive to changes across time and place (Tusting). In a 2000 retrospective, Karin Tusting characterized the claims of the ideological model:
• Literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; they can be inferred from events which are mediated by written texts.
• Different literacies are associated with different domains of life.
• Literacy practices are patterned by social institutions and power relationships. Thus, some literacies are more dominant, visible, and influential than others.
• Literacy practices are purposeful, embedded in social goals and cultural practices.
• Literacy practices change and new ones are frequently acquired through the process of informal learning and sense making as well as formal education. (38–41)
The NLG and its ideological model were instrumental in advocating the study of situated literacies. The strength of the ideological model is its ability to “connect[. . .] microanalyses of language and literacy use with macroanalyses of discourse and power” (Schultz and Hull 23).
The effort to locate the study of literacy in decidedly public domains came about in the 1990s primarily as a result of two research projects, led—not surprisingly—by researchers affiliated with the NLG: the Lancaster Literacy Project (conducted by David Barton, Mary Hamilton, and associates) and the re-evaluation of UNESCO’s 1953 vernacularization project, led by Andrée Tabouret-Keller in association with the International Group for the Study of Language Standardization and the Vernacularization of Literacy (IGLSVL). Conducted in the first half of 1990s, these two landmark research projects moved the study of situated literacies into public domains, and they did so not by studying formal public discourse, but by identifying local discursive sites where ordinary people went public.
Barton and Hamilton conducted the Lancaster Literacy Project 1990 to 1996 and published the results in 1998 under the title Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. Here Barton and Hamilton used the term “domain” to refer to the “structured, patterned contexts within which literacy is used and learned” (10).5 In keeping with the NLG, they observed that the literacies which people of Lancaster practiced in the domain of the home were different from those they practiced in the neighborhood, and different still from literacies required within the academy, workplace, or formal public institution such as the courtroom or doctor’s office. The differences were due, in large part, to the distinctive social purposes that organize these domains. But Barton and Hamilton were especially interested in the domain of community; thus, reports of a neighborhood activist named Shirley caught their attention. Interviews with Shirley revealed that in her informal but efficacious social role as local-public liaison, Shirley used a mix of vernacular and more formal literacies to go public, spanning the space between the informal and formal, the private and public.
At this same time, an international group of literacy scholars, under the acronym IGLSVL, joined forces to re-evaluate the 1953 UNESCO vernacularization project that had proclaimed vernacular literacy to be a human right. When their research results were published in 1997, Tabouret-Keller sounded the call for more literacy scholars to situate their studies in the public realm. To consider this call, imagine yourself a member of the IGLSVL that met in Sèvres, France, in 1992 to re-evaluate UNESCO’s earlier project. You and your colleagues represent vernacularization projects from all over the world—“former colonies of Britain and France, but also in Europe, the Americas, East, South, and South-East Asia and in Oceanic Australia” (Le Page 6). For your contribution to the research symposium, you need to identify the consequences of the 1953 UNESCO monograph on the corner of the globe where you have been conducting your sociolinguistic research. Your colleagues would be doing the same for theirs. It’s not just that forty years have passed. Time itself would have made your job quite straight forward: you would have measured the effect of the vernacularization policies on your region and identified any constraints that thwarted their effectiveness—or conditions that made for their success. But that’s not what frames your research problem. The point is that over the past forty years, you and your colleagues have rejected the formal linguistics, as well as the great divide theory, that motivated the 1953 UNESCO monograph. You no longer see languages as discrete entities that more or less respect the boundaries of nation states. Instead, you have come to understand languages falling along “linguistic continua focused from place to place and generation to generation around social group nodes, and labeled accordingly” (Le Page 4).6 Likewise, you no longer assign agency to language as the UNESCO monograph
