Situating the Study of Literacy in the Public Realm
Over time, the call to situate the study of literacy in the public realm would come to mean studying people using literacy in a multiplicity of decidedly public domains—not commercial nor academic ones, but institutional sites representing versions of some greater good, such as the medical system designed to promote health or human service agencies organized to strengthen the larger “social fabric” (Cushman, Struggle 45). Eventually, this call would direct literacy scholars to conduct research in the community. In sociolinguistic parlance, community designates that subset of the public domain mediating between “the private sphere of home and family [ . . . and] the impersonal institutions of the wider society”; thus, community is the realm that ordinary people most readily experience as “public life” (Crow and Allen 1). In the 1970s, it was a new idea to situate the study of literacy in any locale whatsoever—and it was toward this effort that the call was first sounded.
The call to move the study of situated literacies into the public realm was international in scope. It began as a critique of assumptions about literacy so pervasive and bold that they governed most notably the international, multi-organizational, multi-million-dollar initiative that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) sponsored in the 1950s to eradicate illiteracy world wide (Le Page 4): the vernacularization project.2 Today, literacy scholars use the phrase the autonomous model of literacy to encapsulate these assumptions. In short, the autonomous model took literacy to be a generalizable skill that fostered levels of abstract thinking and critical analysis unavailable to the oral mind (Goody; Havelock; Ong). The model assumed that, as a generalizable skill, literacy could be packaged and transported from one setting to another for equal effect. It drove the overstated claims of the great divide: that literate people are more intellectually agile (for instance, able to separate fact from myth and to glean abstract principles from concrete experience) than people who do not read and write. The model also supported the view that a country needs to cross a certain threshold of literacy in order to ensure the functioning of its institutions and to achieve economic autonomy (Le Page 9). According to this model, everyday people “went public” to the extent that they developed the literate skills necessary to participate in the economic mainstream of their countries. Thus, the vernacularization project (which aimed to teach people in developing countries to read and write in their mother tongues) was a means toward an end—the most efficient means, that is, to teach people to function in a given country’s standard language.3
Among the first to call for and conduct research to interrogate the claims of the autonomous model were Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole. From 1973 to 1978 they directed the Vai Literacy Project in Liberia. Rather than describing general features of literacy, Scribner and Cole found it necessary to refer to literate practices, defined as “a recurrent, goal-directed sequence of activities using a particular technology and particular systems of knowledge” (236). Situated as they were within specific domains of activity, literate practices—from letter writing to reciting the Qu’ran to “doing school”—let the Vai accomplish different things in different contexts for different purposes, but these practices didn’t add up to sweeping changes in cognitive ability or socioeconomic status.
Freire was another early, outspoken critic of UNESCO’s conception 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