Like many other artifacts from community-literacy studies, the meaning and function of the local public framework reside not only in the definitions of its terms but also in relation to the larger history of efforts in rhetoric and composition to span the distance between the situated and the public. The next chapter recounts this history as a response to two of the most pressing questions that the field of rhetoric and composition has faced over the past thirty years: How do ordinary people best exercise their language rights? And how does local democratic discourse actually work? To that history, we now turn.
3 Locating Community Literacy Studies
To what can we trace this interest in how ordinary people go public? How did it come to pass that community-literacy studies put a new unit of analysis—the local public—on the table in order to pursue this interest? Topics come and go all the time in academic fields, so what about this one let it take hold? What roles have sites such as Pittsburgh’s CLC played in the history of community literacy, particularly in relation to building the kinds of observation-based theories and practices that scholars have needed to get this line of inquiry off the ground? These are some of the questions that the previous chapters raise.
In response to these questions, this chapter argues that the history of community literacy is tied up in efforts to define the local public as an object of inquiry and a site for rhetorical intervention. What has attracted community-literacy scholars to local publics is the promise they hold of enacting (never perfectly, always provisionally, and sometimes never that) what Flower has called “a rhetoric of engagement” grounded in relationships and focused on rhetorical action (Community Literacy 1).
As you would expect, the ethical visions that inspire community-literacy scholars’ interest in local publics vary. Flower anchors her vision in Reinhold Niebuhr’s “‘ethic of love and justice’ [. . .] a “spirit of stubborn generosity [ . . . that] acknowledges the undeniable—the social and economic substructures of power, racism, of identity that will not be erased by goodwill” (“Negotiating” 51, 60). Coogan anchors his vision in West’s “‘love ethic’ that is neither sentimental nor culturally separatist” (“Counterpublics” 463). Affiliated with Karl Marx, Cushman’s vision upholds “reciprocal relations” as a standard for “ethical action in the research paradigm to facilitate social change” (Struggle 28). Rooted in Ernest Bloch’s utopian ideal, Paula Mathieu’s street-based literacy projects enact “hope”—a gesture that seeks to move out of abstractions about a better world toward actions devised to change the current world (Tactics 18). Inspired by Alinsky, Goldblatt’s vision is “the promise of true mutual benefits for postsecondary schools and their off-campus partners” (“Alinsky’s Reveille” 294).
For all the differences in their language, politics, and theoretical orientations, these scholars are drawn to the potential of local publics to dismantle university/“white” privilege and to reconfigure writing instruction outside the academic classroom in terms of mutual learning, linguistic and cultural diversity, and rhetorical action. In sum, scholars’ interests in local publics have coalesced around the connection between vernacular literacies and public life—a connection that contends with the inherent ambiguity of language rights discourse and all the complexity of public-spheres studies.
Two Prior Accounts
People have been writing in their communities for several hundreds of years (Howard).1 Yet compared to invention—the topic of the first book in this series—with its two-thousand-year history, the history of the discipline’s interest in community literacy is strikingly brief, transpiring over the last few decades. Significant portions of this history have already been told. In Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere, published in 2002, Christian Weisser positioned community literacy in terms of larger social then public turns in the field at large. One of the earliest visionaries was Michael Halloran who in 1975 and then in 1982 sounded the call to revitalize rhetorical education by reclaiming the classical attention to public discourse. In relation to this call, Weisser mapped a now familiar disciplinary history in which cognitivism, expressivism, and social constructionism gave way to one another respectively and then to the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire and to Freiristas’ “activism in the academy” (116). In relation to this history, Weisser identified community-literacy programs as valuable sites where college students develop their capacities for going public (48).
More recently, in the third chapter of Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Engagement, Flower has recounted the historical context of the CLC as it relates to the development of cognitive rhetoric. The CLC was an experiment in the rhetoric of engagement, the practice of learning to “speak with others [. . .] for something” as an engaged response to collaborative inquiry (79). Flower’s account positions the CLC in relation to some of the same process-movement, cognition/society debates that Weisser detailed, but for Flower the promise of this disciplinary discussion has lain not in the power of cultural critique to inform public pedagogies (where Weisser took his history) but in the discipline’s capacity to develop working theories to articulate rhetorics of performance capable of supporting both personal and public discovery and change (R. Young, Becker and Pike). That, for Flower, is the power of Freire’s pedagogy—its contribution as a working theory of politically charged literate action and reflection. Likewise, for Flower what is especially valuable about the renewed interest in Aristotelian and sophistic rhetorics is that they restore traditions of praxis (theory and action) and phronesis (contingent judgment) that can be employed to meet the contemporary demands of intercultural inquiry for productive working relationships and wise action.
As Flower explains, the CLC was founded in 1989 as an attempt to enact a theory-driven, context-sensitive rhetoric, grounded in the legacy of the African American freedom struggle, in the commitments of social activism as embodied in the settlement house tradition, and in the problem-solving orientation of cognitive rhetoric (Flower Community Literacy). Based on Wayne Peck’s observations of the inventive, transactional purposes to which the everyday people in his neighborhood put literacy, the CLC tested four principles of literate social action: a dedication to social change and action; support of intercultural inquiry and collaboration; a commitment to strategies for collaboration, planning, argument, and reflection that are intentionally taught and deliberately negotiated; and a commitment to a mutually beneficial community-university partnership that supports joint inquiry (Peck, Flower, and Higgins 207–18). The CLC posed “[t]he question [of] how to create an atmosphere of respect, a commitment to equality, and an acknowledgement of the multiple forms of expertise at the table” (210). In response, the CLC envisaged the alternative public discourse of the community problem-solving dialogue—what Flower has termed more recently a vernacular local public (Flower “Can You Build”; Flower, “Intercultural Knowledge” 252; Higgins, Long, and Flower 16–18).
Over the years that community literacy was coming into its own, scholars outside rhetoric and composition sounded two calls that would shape the direction of community-literacy studies. One of these calls urged literacy scholars to situate the study of literacy in the public realm in an effort to study language rights; the other call urged public-sphere scholars to test their theoretical propositions in the crucible of “actually existing democracy” in order to build a more nuanced understanding of the limits and potential of democratic practices (Fraser 109). While literacy scholars and public-spheres theorists responded to these calls within their own disciplinary arenas, community literacy emerged as another site of inquiry, one attentive to the new scholarship in both sociolinguistics and public-spheres studies. As a constructive response to these two calls, community-literacy studies has coalesced in a distinctive way around the democratic potential of vernacular local publics. In this account, I locate community-literacy