for education; people do things—languages are abstractions from what people do, and language is in a symbiotic relationship with other social processes” (Le Page 6). Given this shift in perspective—given the humility that has replaced UNESCO’s ethnocentric confidence—the question is, what do you now consider noteworthy to report back to your colleagues?
From here, we no longer need to hypothesize. Published in 1997, the IGLSVL’s research proceedings Vernacular Literacy: A Re-Evaluation recorded observations the group considered noteworthy. For example, Jean-Michel Charpentier described a group of singers in Melanesia who had devised an improvisational pidgin to “exalt the existence and the genius of a group that had previously remained unexpressed” (242). The singers could have sung in their regional local language. But that vernacular was already used for folk songs. Instead, the invented pidgin let the singers reach a larger audience (Charpentier 242).7 Referring to the singer’s decision to employ a pidgin over a regional vernacular, Charpentier noted that the pidgin allowed the singers to call into being a “new semantic field” that made an “outward-turn[. . .]” (242).8 Pushing the capacity of sociolinguistic terminology to express rhetorical ideas of audience and reach, commentary like Charpentier’s referred to the rhetorical space of a local public; his phrase “new semantic field” suggests an invented, local discursive space and the “outward turn” refers to the singers’ public orientation.
Throughout Vernacular Literacy: A Re-Evaluation, what the sociolinguists noted were accounts of “ordinary people” finding “genuine utility” in literacy (whether standard, vernacular, or some inventive mix) as it proved useful “for those aspects of social and political life with which they are concerned” (Tabouret-Keller 327). In fact, this descriptor becomes the group’s boldest claim concerning where and how it is that people exercise their language rights. In her conclusion to the report, Andrée Tabouret-Keller offered not broad, propositional claims about literacy or language rights.9 Instead, she concluded that people best exercise their language rights by using language to pool literate resources in order to address pressing social and public issues (327).
Here in the United States, the call to situate the study of literacy in the public realm has also been framed in terms of language rights. In rhetoric and composition, the clearest example is the 1974 Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) resolution “affirm[ing] the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language” (Students’ Right 1).10 Most basically, the SRTOL resolution encapsulated the field’s commitment to respond to and to make room for the growing number of “Blacks, Browns, women and other historically marginalized groups” who appeared in mainstream colleges in the 1960s and 1970s (Smitherman, “CCCC’s Role” 354). The SRTOL recognized the existential centrality and linguistic legitimacy of the discourses that students bring with them to composition classrooms—vernacular literacies like Black English Vernacular (BEV) or, more generally, what the linguistics in the UNESCO project would have called one’s mother tongue. In calling attention to the ways that classroom practices have institutionalized racial and class-based biases, the SRTOL also raised the possibility of reconfiguring educational spaces and institutional relationships to allow for reciprocity and mutual learning among writers who come from different cultural backgrounds and occupy different social locations (Smitherman, “CCCC’s Role” 354).11 When the profession passed the resolution back in 1974, the unspoken question was how those in rhetoric and composition would promote linguistic and rhetorical diversity in “public and professional settings” (Bruch and Marback 664).
The SRTOL resolution spoke for compelling social ideals—most notably human dignity, improved literacy education, and fair and equitable institutional practices. The challenge was how educators in an academic discipline would work within their spheres of influence to make public life more inclusive—a challenge that continues to engage some of the field’s most active scholars (e.g., Bean et al.; Bruch and Marback; Busch and Ball; Canagarajah “Place”; Gilyard Race; Gilyard Voices; Joyce Harris, Kamhi and Pollock; Kells; Kinloch; Marzluf; Parks; Tollefson; Smitherman “CCCC’s Role”; Wible).
As an heir of the SRTOL, community-literacy studies has instantiated the movement’s ideals by documenting two possibilities for situating vernacular literacies in public domains. The first possibility emphasizes students and other ordinary people employing vernacular literacies in public spaces. The second designs and tests rhetorical interventions to help students and other ordinary people use their vernacular literacies as resources for public engagement, building together new knowledge about shared issues.
Documenting and Theorizing Local Public Discourse
In rhetoric and composition, researchers have documented ordinary people using vernacular discourses to go public in arenas more fluid and permeable than the sites that Graham Crow and Graham Allen describe as formal publics. And vernacular discourse still gets the job done here, and arguably more effectively than more sedimented practices (Cushman Struggle; Moss Community Text). Cushman documented this comparative advantage, for example, when an African American admissions counselor switched to BEV to signal to a nervous young admissions candidate that she could do the same—whereby inviting her to set some of the terms of the admissions interview (Struggle 187). Likewise, in “Negotiating the Meaning of Difference,” Flower observed that in crafting their public documents, teen writers at the CLC often used the help of writing mentors to devise text conventions for encoding BEV to address rhetorical goals (for dialogue, say, or commentary) that Standard Written English (SWE) alone could not have conveyed nearly as effectively (Flower, Long, and Higgins 229–53). Likewise, Barton and Hamilton attributed the success of the newsletters that Shirley wrote and distributed around her neighborhood to her skillful integration of vernacular and formal discourses (253).
Descriptive research has verified that such instances are not as rare as prescriptive standards would suggest (Higgins). Such research can be grouped into two categories:
1) ethnographies and other descriptive accounts of minority group practices. These accounts are typically concerned with documenting a whole range of group practices and, thus, draw upon a language of publicness to the extent necessary to describe distinct features within the larger set of group practices.
2) ethnographies that deliberately set out to study situated literacies in the public realm.
In the first set of ethnographies, researchers didn’t set out to study public discourse but drew upon a language of publicness in order to describe and to interpret what they observed over the course of their studies. We can see this dynamic in Ways with Words, published in 1983. A language of publicness (in this case, coded in the theatrical language of public stage performances) let Heath contrast the language-learning rituals in Trackton with those of the neighboring white community of Roadville, but describing language-learning rituals, not public discourse, was Heath’s first priority.
Likewise, when launching Until We are Strong Together, published in 1997, Heller sought a personally and professionally meaningful research project (10). So she positioned her ethnography within a women’s writing workshop in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. At first glance, the workshop seemed to be expressivist in nature, emphasizing belletristic genres for personal expression. However, she soon found that the workshop’s sponsors were committed to developing the writers’ public voices. So as we will see in chapter 5, Heller employed a language of publicness to the extent necessary to describe specific public features within the workshop’s overall orientation; for instance, workshop members represented the “larger public” (143) and neighborhood poetry readings created “public forums” (103).
Likewise, Beverly Moss and Deborah Brandt had other fish to fry besides documenting public discourses in their analyses of African American churches. In A Community Text Arises, published in 2002, Moss set out to document the intertextual composing process by which congregations and pastors co-created sermons as community texts. Moss drew upon a language of publicness to describe worship service as a “public” event (see also Moss, “Pew” 209). Published the previous year, Brandt’s study of the African
