Heller’s Until We are Strong Together. Both images characterize local publics in relation to their sponsoring institutions; thus, the comparison highlights issues of institutional sponsorship and sustainability. The cultural womb and the garden also enact a rhetoric of transformation in which a local public serves as an “inspired context” for literacy learning (Willinsky 153). The chapter shows that in locations of stress and scarcity, such local publics transform lives through spiritual renewal and transform literacies by revamping familiar practices for new purposes. Somewhat ironically, then, this condition of stress and scarcity—what Brandt calls an “economy of efficiency”—contributes both to a local public’s vibrancy and its vulnerability. The chapter highlights the need for mestiza publics (Anzaldua), capable of supporting the demanding and necessary cultural work of intercultural communication (Fraser 125), intercultural inquiry (Peck, Flower, and Higgins 209), and border crossing (Higgins and Brush 695).
If the cultural womb and the garden featured in chapter 5 use literacy to enact democratic values and practices, the images featured in chapter 6 show just how tenuous the connection between literacy and democracy can be. The chapter features images of local public life at the intersection between private lives and public institutions. Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community is an ethnography of Springside, a working-class neighborhood in England, in the 1990s. Here David Barton and Mary Hamilton depict the private-public intersection as a link. They show that while a community group might use its literate repertoire to enact democratic values one moment, the group’s practices may violate tenets of democracy the next. In Ellen Cushman’s The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community, the local public is a gate—the discursive and physical space between the gatekeeper, on the one hand, and the community resident, on the other. Of all the gatekeeping encounters Cushman documents in the industrial city she calls Quayville, only one affords anything resembling democratic access. Indirectly, Cushman’s ethnography asks, what would it take to teach gatekeepers in training to enact professional identities as knowledgeable advocates and fair judges? (Long “Rhetorical Education”).
Chapter 7 features local publics as partnerships between the community and the university: the community-organizing effort in Goldblatt’s “Alinsky’s Reveille: A Community-Organizing Model for Neighborhood-Based Literacy Projects” and the community think tank in Flower’s “Intercultural Knowledge Building: The Literate Action of a Community Think Tank.” These images pose two distinct rhetorics for local public life. On the one hand, a rhetoric of consensus guides Goldblatt’s recent effort to help a group of community leaders in North Philadelphia formulate a shared strategy for a literacy initiative called Open Doors. Based on the community-organizing discourse of Saul Alinsky, consensus transforms a problem into an issue for collective action. In contrast, the community think tank is, in part, a response to the frustrations Pittsburgh residents have voiced with community-organizing practices (Flower, “Intercultural Knowledge” 250; Flower and Deems 97). For this think tank, the goal for deliberation is not consensus among group members but the transformed understanding of individual participants made possible through the structured process of collaborative inquiry. The comparison highlights the prevalence of conflict in local public life, as well as tools for maximizing its potential in rhetorical invention. Most of all, the chapter asks: toward what ends do we, as ordinary people, deliberate in local public spheres? And, if the ultimate rhetorical art is intervention: what practices are available (or invent-able) to help us ordinary people get there?
Chapter 8 features a local public that defies formal public institutions: the shadow system in Ralph Cintron’s Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life and Rhetorics of the Everyday. The shadow system mimics the commonplaces so important to mainstream institutions—throwing them back onto the mainstream in forms the mainstream itself no longer recognizes. Furthermore, the shadow system shelters as its identity the difference between the mainstream’s symbol system, on the one hand, and its own mimicry of that system, on the other. In the chapter, I use the shadow system as a lens to read two studies of defiant local publics perhaps more relevant to readers than the street gangs in Cintron’s study: Perry Gilmore’s 1991 study of girl “steppers” confronting teachers’ judgments about them as learners and Phaedra Pezzullo’s 2003 study of the Toxic Link Coalition’s (TLC) toxic tour exposing corporations responsible for producing and profiting from carcinogenic chemicals. The chapter highlights how structural features of a guiding metaphor (such as Cintron’s shadow system) may make visible complex discursive activity and power relations. The chapter also considers conditions under which a shadow system—which perpetuated the logic of violence in Angelstown—may open up a discursive space for trust, tolerance of ambiguity, and human connection.
Chapter 9 takes students as the primary focus of attention and asks: how do students go public? As educators trained in rhetorical theory and practice, how can we best support them? The chapter organizes a set of best pedagogical practices around literacies featured in the previous chapters, including interpretative pedagogies that adapt textual interpretation—English departments’ stock in trade—to community contexts; institutional pedagogies that prepare students for future careers as technical communicators, human service workers, and medical professionals; and performative pedagogies that yoke inquiry, wisdom, and action and—as we’ll see—also push against the very borders of contemporary rhetorical theory. Culled from exemplary rhetoric courses, research projects, and literacy programs, the practices do not rest in easy relation to one another, but rather pose any number of quandaries for educators. The chapter maps alternatives, indicating the kinds of choices and trade-offs educators must make when supporting students’ public action.
Following the format for this series, chapter 10 then provides a glossary of terms, and chapter 11 offers an annotated bibliography of selected texts relevant to community-literacy studies.
What This Book Doesn’t Do
This book doesn’t address blogs, virtual urbanism, crowd sourcing, or citizen media. Instead, this book focuses on local publics that are at once physical and discursive—places where people go public face to face and soul to soul. There are important political reasons for focusing on local rather than virtual publics as Nancy Welch reminds us:
Virtual reality is not a sufficient counter to or substitute for increasingly privatized and regulated geographic space. While it’s true that information technologies and the virtual communities they create played organizing roles in such historic events as the student takeover of Tiananmen Square and the global demonstrations against a second Gulf War, it was the physical taking of Tiananmen Square that made possible its transformation into a space representing democracy (Mitchell 148). And it was to prevent such a material transformation that New York City cops herded thousands of frustrated protestors into pens on February 15, 2003, far from the rally they’d traveled miles to attend. (487–88, emphasis added)
However, this is not to say that work in community-literacy studies resists digital technologies. In fact, community literacy embraces the potential of multimodality—particularly the “praxis of new media”—to create alternative discourses that respond to complex socio-cultural exigencies (“Toward a Praxis” 111; cf. Comstock 49–50; Hull and Katz; Long, Peck, and Baskins). Pittsburgh’s CLC has sponsored a number of computer interventions to support various forums for intercultural inquiry (Lawrence; Long, Peck, and Baskins; A. Young and Flower). Similarly, the enormous success of Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth (DUSTY)—University of California at Berkeley’s computer-based outreach project—is testament to the synergy that Glynda Hull and her colleagues have harnessed between digital technologies and children’s eagerness to compose stories of identity. Concern for social justice that drives The Struggle and the Tools has compelled Cushman to design not only interactive software programs for critical literacy educators in K-12 classrooms but also digitally mediated “third spaces” for collaboration among college students, community members, herself and her colleagues (“Toward a Praxis”). Likewise, Grabill designs his technical writing courses to explore how community-based Web-tools can help “to democratize data” (“Written City” 129). Computer supported pedagogical practices are treated in chapter 9.
Ultimately,
