Elenore Long--"Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics" Ch. 1-4

Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview

Going public and the public turn of rhetoric and composition foreground public engagement.

"The purpose of this book is to pull together alternative theoretical accounts of public engagement...Second, the promise of public engagement calls reader located in relative institutional privilege to speak wisely and persuasively for social change" (4).

The question how do we go public shifts the focus away from the academy and academy driven scholarship to the combined private-public world outside institutional space.

Where normal people "go public" are called local publics. 

Most of this chapter outlines the focus of the later chapters and sets the foundation for the book's thrust: how one goes public, what does it mean to turn to the public, what does that reveal, what problems come with the public turn, and why the book focuses on physical versus virtual public spaces.

Chapter 2—Definitions and Distinctions

The question how do we go public shifts the focus away from the academy and academy driven scholarship to the combined private-public world outside institutional space, so in public engagement  “ordinary people go public.” Wait! Who you callin’ ordinary?

·      ordinary: not political; not celebrities; people participating in a public sphere that their participation in creates

Community literacy undergirds the ability to “go public.”

·      community: NOT geographic; symbolic spatially and temporally constructed “shared exigencies.” synonymous with local publics.

Five Point Local Public Framework Heuristic (used to compare researchers’ going public and what stemmed from that)

1. Metaphor: How researchers conceptualized, structure, and define. The metaphors act as research heuristics, revealing in their connectivity ways of theorizing local publics.

2. Context: physical location and social/cultural characteristics that give meaning to local discourse.

·      Location: the politics of place; the term is rather plastic and can shift depending on what it modifies (attitude, knowledge, literacy, etc.)

3. Tenor of the Discourse: linguistic affectation that “encodes attitudes, relational cues, and power differentials” (21). Learning tenor can help “perform specific literacies in the tenor of a given local public” (21).

4. Literacies: “organize how people carry out their purposes for going public” (22).

5. Rhetorical Invention: “how a discourse permits people to respond to exigencies that arise within its discursive space” (22). So, what we write about when we write about a local public?

Chapter 3—Locating Community Literacy Studies

This chapter provides an overview of how literacy has changed and how that change affects the way people go public.

“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” (25).

Different scholars use different verbiage to rationalize their aims, which “coalesced around the connection between vernacular literacies and public life” (26).

Historically, community literacy is quite young, emerging from Halloran in 1975 and gaining ground with Freire’s pedagogy and Pittsburgh’s Community Literacy Center. However new it is, CLS engages Aristotelian and sophistic rhetorics that utilize praxis and build on contingent judgment.

Though separate from literacy and public sphere disciplines, Long argues that community literacy borrows from both areas in its own distinctive space to study going public and intervention design.

The mid-20^th century worldwide literacy scare placed literacy in the public arena. However, scholars wrongly assumed literacy was generalizable, cross-cultural, trans-communal skill (autonomous model). People like Freire disagreed with the conformist take and argued instead for a literacy that allowed people to “participate in the transformation of their world” (30).

1980s—New Literacy studies movement: focus literacy studies anthropology and ethnography. Replaces UNESCO’s autonomous model.

1990s placed literacy in public domains, literacy and language shifted toward social, fluid, adaptable, and rhetorical.

In this shift, scholars wrote descriptively about literacy’s surface features (sociolinguistics) and how communities culled their literacies together to tackle pressing social issues. Features of situated public literacies help people go public: performance, collaboration, problem-posing lenses, institutional affiliation, and they contain non-affiliated alternative discourses.

Studying participatory democracy via community literacy, scholars like Fraser and Hauser pushed back against Habermas’s elitist, exclusive, and panoramic theories of democracy in favor of local publics that contain marginal discourses, which enrich and legitimate participatory democracy. Long provides a list of programs that engage vernacular literacies and local publics. They do so by helping local publics write for/about themselves, partner with communities to write with them, and/or create technes for public engagement.

Chapter 4—An Impromptu Theater: A Local Public That Turns Its Back on Formal Institutions

This chapter outlines Heath’s “analysis of community life in 1970s Trackton. Heath uses the metaphor of a stage where improvised, contingent performances take place within the local public.

The dramas that took place depended on the stage and the contexts of the moment (paycheck=treats; plaza=social hierarchy sorting).

Conditions of difference—geographic, social, economic, political, etc.—defined the borders between Trackton and its surroundings.

The stages also allowed children learning their community literacy ways to practice and negotiate power dynamics.

Performance in the plaza allowed Trackton residence a way to perpetuate their difference from similar ethnicities that displayed “snobbish” socio-economic characteristics. Though varied in their nature—aggressive play, girl talk, matriarchal stories—“Trackton’s residents used these literacies both to call into being and to access their local public” (60).

Heath’s conclusions about Trackton allow Long to draw four conclusions about local publics:

1. Local publics can be physically geographic and constrained within metaphysical space (shared ideology).

2. Local publics can be safe, familiar spaces for members who depend on its individual integrity.

3. The operative metaphor used in the research can be revealing but also constricting (e.g. Trackton as “closed community” elides race relation complications)

4. Performative practices are especially effective in creating publics.

****Class Notes from Jim Webber

Ideological model of literacy: Literacy isn't learned or defined in a vacuum. Community literacy doesn't transfer from one context to another.

Heath argues that Trackton is a public sphere. Their languages and performances are "world-making." Intentions were for inclusion of language (think Students' Rights to Their Own Languages). Think of Heath's work as a language response to Habermas.

Publics aren't just out there. They are called into being through performances.

Dewey's public (placed/defined) in the political sphere.
Long/Heath's public focus more on community life, culture, and the maintaining of standing to participate in a community.

Discourse (Burke): symbolic acts