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, much of the political philosophy driving current interest in computer-supported public deliberation (e.g., Gastil and Levine) is also relevant to understanding how ordinary people go public. I anticipate that future work in community literacy will explore the complex relation between local democracy and innovative technologies in further detail.
2 Definitions and Distinctions
The question How is it that ordinary people go public? is predicated on a prior distinction—that of ordinary people. Iris Marion Young included herself among the ordinary residents of Pittsburgh who together agitated for a citizens’ review board to monitor police conduct. She opened Inclusion and Democracy with a “story of ordinary democracy in action” to illustrate that “more-marginalized citizens with fewer resources and official status can sometimes make up for such inequality with organization and time” (3).1 Welch, too, is interested in how “ordinary people [. . .] go public” (470, 476). For her, it’s the legacy of class struggle that puts most academics and students, their parents and other workers in the same ordinary boat (478–79). Magaly Lavadenz takes ordinary further still in her study of transcultural repositioning within immigration raids. Ordinary refers not to the status of citizen or authorized worker as defined by the state, but rather to the fact that all of us (our students, ourselves, the community residents with whom we work) are neither political figures, nor celebrities, and yet—and here’s the important part—we, in our humanity, are full and representative people in the local publics in which we participate.2 “The public sphere,” as David Coogan points out, “does not exist in any meaningful way apart from our own rhetorical investments in it” (“Counterpublics” 462).
Furthermore, the term ordinary signals a difference between how ordinary people show up in politicians’ and celebrities’ public discourse and how we ourselves actually go public. In politicians’ public address, the “ordinary person” (Wells 329) is typically “a prop” (330), “the mouthpiece of monologic public policy” (330). Similarly, the ordinary person is cast as the mere recipient of the celebrity’s public appeal, as demonstrated in the photo op that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie staged for their newborn to turn America’s attention to poverty and disease in Namibia (Smith 61). Interested in how ordinary people piece together “scraps of discursive space” to go public, Susan Wells is among those who have oriented rhetorical study toward the public discursive practices of ordinary people (326). She and her students go public, for instance, to appoint a minister, to improve the safety of a neighborhood, to expose incidents of police brutality.
Community literacy has made the enterprise of going public central to our own and our students’ rhetorical education. Studies in community literacy ask, what does it take for ordinary people to go public? What constitutes situated-public literacies? How might we, as activist rhetoricians, best work to improve the quality of contemporary public life? By forging mutually respectful institutional partnerships? By structuring intercultural inquiry? Or, by designing forums for deliberation to inform wise action? How can a better understanding of ordinary people going public help us, as educators, to figure out “what [. . .] we want from public writing” and to design educational experiences that college students use to develop their own rhetorical acumen (Wells 325)?
This volume suggests that the community of community literacy might be best understood in terms of these discursive sites where ordinary people go public. From a rhetorical perspective, then, community refers not to existing geographic locales as the idea of a neighborhood would suggest (Barton and Hamilton 15) but to symbolic constructs enacted in time and space around shared exigencies—in other words, local publics. People construct these communities—at once discursive and physical entities—around distinct rhetorical agendas that range from socializing children into appropriate language use (e.g., Trackton’s street theater) to eliciting stakeholders’ perspectives on a shared problem (e.g., Pittsburgh’s community think tank) to demanding respect under conditions that yield little of it (e.g., Angelstown’s shadow system). And people draw upon a whole family