Institutional pedagogies: students learn professional research methods to elicit and to represent the interests and expertise of community residents (e.g., Grabill and Simmons; Swan).
Tactical pedagogies: students learn to circulate their own public writing that challenges the status quo. These often boisterous public acts activate shadow systems that mimic and critique the dominant culture (e.g., Mathieu Tactics; Pough; Welch).
Inquiry-driven pedagogies: students learn to deliberate pressing social issues with community partners; they circulate documents that serve as catalysts for social change (e.g., Coogan “Service”; Flower “Literate Action”; Flower and Heath; Long “Rhetoric”; see also www.cmu.edu/thinktank/docs/29.pdf.pdf).
Performative pedagogies: students learn to engage as rhetors with others to gain the practical wisdom required to build inclusive communities for effective problem solving (e.g., Coogan “Sophists”; Flower Community Literacy; Lyons; Simmons and Grabill).
Taken together, these pedagogical practices stress that for college students, going public entails not only crafting one’s own public arguments (Charney and Neuwirth), but also assessing one’s institutional position and from that position listening to and representing the expertise, interests, and agency of others (Flower Community Literacy; Simmons and Grabill; Swan).
Techne for Designing Local Publics. Historically, the kinds of problems that have brought universities and communities together are the tenacious, structural issues of poverty, illiteracy, and social fragmentation. In response to problems of this magnitude, universities have often assumed their expertise, research agendas, and curricula could be readily exported to the community. Not so. History is rife with examples of failed experiments and disappointed working relationships. Conversely, community practices have their own limits that can shut down active inquiry into complex problems. One of the central challenges of designing local publics is figuring out ways to encourage participants to suspend default strategies that have thwarted community-university partnerships in the past so that participants may put their differences into generative dialogue and productive working relationships that support rhetorical action. As a model for personal and public intercultural inquiry, Pittsburgh’s CLC drew upon the pragmatism of Dewey and upon the principles of cognitive rhetoric to design problem-solving strategies for eliciting situated knowledge, engaging difference in dialogue, and evaluating options as tools for collaborative rhetorical action.
In 1997, when Flower argued for making collaborative inquiry central to service-learning initiatives, she said the point isn’t for universities to deny their power, skills, and agency (“Partners”). Rather, the challenge lies in figuring out how to offer these resources to community partners in ways that are genuinely useful. Writing in the Service-Learning in the Disciplines series published by the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), she emphasized collaborative inquiry grounded in “the logic of prophetic pragmatism and problem solving” (101). She laid out a plan by which university faculty teaching “‘ordinary classes’”—not necessarily those involved in “a long-term stable collaboration such as the CLC”—can sponsor community problem-solving dialogues. Such dialogues “bring together students, faculty, community leaders, and everyday people [. . .] around the kind of issue that is both (1) an open question with no single answer, and (2) a problem with immediate and local impact on lives” (105).
If Peck, Flower, and Higgins defined the central challenge and promise of community literacy (Grabill, Community 89), in a series of subsequent publications, scholars cast their own interpretations of the most pressing challenges that such partnerships pose and the techne—or rhetorical interventions—that would allow activist rhetoricians to respond deliberately and wisely to these challenges.
Writing Community Literacy and the Politics of Change in 2001, Grabill argued that the most effective rhetorical intervention would attend to issues of institutional power. Invoking the ideological model of literacy, Grabill emphasized that institutions have power, and through this power they imbue literacies with their meaning and social value. So the most responsive community-literacy program would ask community residents to help shape the programs in which they wish to participate. Drawing on Iris Young’s political philosophy, Grabill designed an intervention called participatory institutional design to support a “group-differentiated participatory public” (I. Young qtd. in Grabill, Community Literacy 123).17 Drawing on his background in usability testing and human-centered design principles, Grabill commended community leaders at the Harborside Community Center in Boston for designing and hosting forums for client involvement during which participants themselves named the literacies and kinds of instruction that would be meaningful and efficacious for them. Grabill commends participatory institutional design as a systematic approach for drawing out “the expertise of participants, particularly those thought to lack such expertise” (119).
In 2002, Brenton Faber published Community Action and Organizational Change. He argued that if universities are to reclaim their relevance “to the publics and constituents they represent, serve and support” (5), university researchers need to work as change agents “forming academic and community alliances” (13). Such change agents could effect the greatest change by supporting stories, particularly the narratives organizations tell about the work they do and the purposes they serve. When such stories are intact, organizations may use them to launch practices that “challenge oppressive practices” and “work towards [. . .] positive social change” (11). Faber stresses that as “critic, consultant, and [. . .] community activist,” the change agent “play[s] a self-conscious, direct role in change [ . . . and has] a real stake in the projects” of the partnering organization (12–13). Like the observation-based theory behind the CLC’s approach to rhetorical problem-solving, Faber’s rhetorical intervention is an “empirical-yet-activist discourse of change and community action” (6, emphasis added).
Also in 2002, Linda Flower and Julia Deems directly addressed the key question that Habermas’s theory of the public sphere had raised: how does difference figure into democratic deliberation? Should it be bracketed, as Habermas suggested? Suppressed in search of a common good? If participants do put their differences on the table, how can these differences serve as a resource for intercultural knowledge building, rather than the source of competition and strife? “Conflict in Community Collaboration” reports findings from a literacy project called Argue that brought together a group of landlords and tenants. With Lorraine Higgins as project leader, the participants addressed a set of related concerns, ranging from irresponsible tenants and negligent, insensitive landlords to unkempt and abandoned buildings that eroded property values and neighbors’ sense of safety. The project introduced a rhetorical intervention called collaborative planning which committed participants “on the one hand, to articulating conflict—vigorously representing a competing perspective on inner city landlords or tenants—and on the other, to supporting and developing each other’s position in planning and writing a useful document” (99). Unlike strategies that forge consensus, collaborative planning provided a method for “identifying and elaborating on new and unheard positions” (104). The intervention structured and supported negotiated meaning making, placing “writers within the midst of multiple, social, cultural and linguistic forces [that] introduce competing attitudes, values, and bodies of knowledge” (107).
But how would a writing teacher or program administrator go about forging partnerships in the first place? Peck, Flower, Higgins, and Deems described a partnership several years in the making. Grabill recommended his design principles to existing organizations—a United Way organization and other community centers. Faber marketed himself as a change-management consultant to organizations actively seeking his services and looking to change. How could university types—aware of the complex terrain on which they are about to tread—initiate such partnerships? Two studies, published in 2005 and 2006, respectively, depicted activist rhetoricians in the process of public making, using rhetorical interventions to chart their way through complicated rhetorical terrain and then commending their interventions to others. Though Goldblatt and Coogan set their
