The CLC projects take a different tack by making room for the rhetorical power that urban teens bring to the table. Flower poses this goal as a question that turns on the meaning of literacy:
How can a literacy program that works with black youth, for instance, balance this presumption [what is it?] with an awareness of the indirect but analytical tradition of African-American vernacular, the logical structures embedded in street talk (Labov 1972), or the rich expressive literate practices such as signifying (Gates 1988; Lee 1993), in which white volunteers find they are illiterate (Flower 1996)? (Flower, “Partners” 97)15
DUSTY also emphasizes communicating across borders. But here, learners not only draw from vernacular discourses to describe their social worlds, but they also trade in a wide spectrum of geographic, spatial, and multi-modal genres through which they construct “tellable” selves (Hull, “Transforming Literacy” 33). In fact, youth often trade among these genres and discourses much more skillfully than the participating academics. Through such initiatives, vernacular discourses infuse situated-public literacies, and learners themselves instantiate legitimate public alternatives to rational-critical models of deliberation.16
Pedagogical Practices. Pedagogical practices refers to interventions designed to help college students participate in local public life. When Thomas Deans published Writing Partnerships in 2000, what distinguished community-literacy pedagogy was the emphasis on “writing with the community” in contrast to other service-learning pedagogies supporting college students writing in or for the community. Years later, it is possible to distinguish at least five distinct kinds of pedagogies that fall under the category. (For an extended discussion, see chapter 9.)
Interpretative pedagogies: students venture somewhere new, building relationships to confront and to revise familiar stereotypes (e.g., Canagarajah “Safe Houses”; Coogan “Counterpublics”; Goldblatt “Van Rides”).
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