1895 and 1985 in the U.S. have learned to read and write. In both cases, Moss and Brandt drew upon a language of publicness in order to convey the significance of the church as public institution that circulates practices for personal and social transformation. While Moss explicitly classified her work as community literacy, Brandt did not. Either way, in documenting situated-public literacies, their work participated in the constructive process by which scholars both piqued disciplinary interest in how it is that ordinary people go public and also contributed scholarship to a growing body of literature exploring this question.
Meanwhile, another set of descriptive studies within rhetoric and composition identified from the outset the public realm as pertinent to their research, and deliberately situated their studies of literacy there. Among the first to carry out this line of research was Wayne Peck in his 1991 study of Bob, Althea, Buzz, and Barbara—community residents whom he documented “composing for action” (1). Based on the case studies of these writers, Peck defined the complex and persistent nature of the rhetorical situation that would come to define community literacy as a rhetorical act of shared deliberation and problem solving:
Whether the occasion for literate practice be a dispute with city housing officials, such as in the case of Bob, or a person trying to turn his life around by writing an action plan, such as the case of Buzz, community literate practices emerge as existential responses to problems that carry real consequences for the writers. Either Bob wins his case before the city or he loses his house and must go live in a neighborhood shelter. Either Buzz composes a workable plan for his life or he must move from the shelter to live on the streets. Community literacy practices are rooted in the life struggles of urban residents and are best understood as transactions or responses of people addressing dilemmas through writing. (20)
Peck’s observation that community literacy is a literate response to pressing social and existential exigencies is not only relevant to Barton and Hamilton’s Lancaster Literacy Project, but it also provides a tighter frame than the sociolinguistic one that Tabouret-Keller used to describe the situations in which “ordinary people” in the IGLSVL’s study practiced their language rights. The women in Dakar who assumed responsibility for their household finances (Tabouret-Keller 324), the farmers in North Cameroon who responded to newly mandated land-management practices (Gerbault 183), the Portuguese immigrants in France who invented a vernacular immigrais to aid communication under hostile social conditions (Gardner-Chloros 216)—in these instances everyday people pooled their literate resources to respond to pervasive and complex manifestations of poverty and disenfranchisement that UNESCO has long attempted to eradicate. Likewise, it was the rhetorical nature of such community problems that compelled Lorraine Higgins and Lisa Brush to position their research of personal narratives in the public realm. Their 2006 study “Writing the Wrongs of Welfare” examined “how subordinated rhetors [former and current welfare recipients] might enter into the public record their tacit and frequently discounted knowledge about poverty and welfare” (697).
As Peck’s study indicates, as scholars in rhetoric and composition situated literacy studies in the public realm, their scholarship also developed theories of local public discourse. This is even the case, for instance, for scholars who positioned their work as a deliberate departure from some of the earlier community-literacy scholarship. In the first chapter of Angels’ Town, Cintron noted the insufficiencies of sociolinguistic theory to get at “the broader cultural examination [he] aspired to” (10). Thus, he called his 1997 analysis of street life in an industrial city outside Chicago a “critical ethnography” by which he “bec[ame] a rhetorician of public culture” and “Heath as a theoretical lens [was] replaced by Michel de Certeau” (10). Throughout Angels’ Town, Cintron drew upon de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life to account for the repetitive and unconscious aspects of everyday life that fuel how culture is both produced and consumed. Likewise, Cushman framed The Struggle and the Tools within the same French political philosophy, quoting, for instance, de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life in its opening lines. Focused on the private-public nature of the gatekeeping encounter, Cushman developed a theory of dueling dualities by which everyday people’s hidden transcripts spar with the public transcript to unleash the noisy wrangling between political binaries. In important ways, European political philosophy has let rhetoricians infuse their observations of literacy in the public realm with NLG’s concern for issues of power and ideology. By drawing on political philosophies such as de Certeau’s, literacy scholars have helped to characterize community literacy as a distinctive multivocal, multimodal local public discourse.
Features of Situated-Public Literacies
Taken together, studies of literacy have identified distinctive features of the situated-public literacies that people use to go public. These studies confirm that—as Tabouret-Keller observed—although the vernacular-vs.-standard distinction carries important information, other features may be more instrumental in helping ordinary people go public. Some of these most prominent features are described below.
Situated-public literacies are performative. Heath needed a language of public performance to describe what was distinctive about the situated literacies she observed in Trackton. Here, youngsters’ street performances called a public into being around the rituals that defined community life—and in the process, children learned their community’s ways with words. Performance is a “magic[al . . . ] verbal art” capable of conjuring up discursive space, explains ethnographer Richard Gelb (323). Performance transforms passersby into members of a public who bear witness to performers laying claim to the integrity of their own lives as well as to their rightful share of resources needed to sustain those lives (Gilmore 79–80). Performance links the material and the symbolic (Cintron, Afterword 381), often challenging the status quo by mixing humor and critique for political, as well as dramatic, effect (Farr and Barajas 23).
Situated-public literacies are also collaborative. This feature means that situated-public literacies need to be nurtured in supportive environments like the women’s writing workshop in Heller’s Until We Are Strong Together or the workshop for Mexican immigrant mothers in Janise Hurtig’s “Resisting Assimilation.” These and other ethnographic studies of literacy workshops highlight the importance of facilitators who support the nascent ideas of inexperienced writers. Just as importantly, they identify the invaluable role that these same writers play for one another as readers and members of a local public, taking one another’s ideas seriously and responding to them with respectful candor. To the extent that community-literacy scholars share a common crie de coeur, I would think it’s their shared commitment to collaboration (in any number of configurations) as a joint response to socio-political mechanisms that otherwise exclude ordinary people from the processes of public dialogue and decision making. Collaboration is a means by which ordinary people make their voices heard. Collaborative also refers to the complex ways that multiple readers and writers, speakers and listeners may move among interchangeable roles within complex networks to co-create literate texts (Moss Community Text; Comstock 59).
Situated-public literacies often strike a problem-posing stance. It was Freire who most eloquently articulated the humanizing consequences that follow from theorizing local public discourse in praxis. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire advocated problem-posing teams (or culture circles) where participants learned to read the world as a site of colonialism and class struggle. Freire’s method motivated “members of the community to exchange ideas, to understand a specific problem, to find one or more solutions to it, and to determine a programme with a timetable, using specific materials” (Gerbault 153). Freire’s pedagogy has informed ethnographic efforts to document situated-public literacies (Sleeter and Bernal 240–58). Its problem-posing feature is prominent in the adaptations that re-invent for American classrooms Freire’s pedagogy designed for resilient peasants (Finn; Shor and Pari). The problem-posing feature of situated-public literacies has also compelled scholars to augment Freirian pedagogy with additional problem-solving rhetorics, including John Dewey’s civic ideals (Coogan, “Community Literacy” 106); Alinsky’s community-organizing principles (Coogan, “Service Learning”; Faber; Goldblatt “Alinsky’s Reveille”) and Flower’s social-cognitive rhetoric (Peck, Flower, and Higgins; Flower
