Community Literacy And The Rhetoric Of Local Publics

Offering a comparative analysis of "community-literacy studies," COMMUNITY LITERACY AND THE RHETORIC OF LOCAL PUBLICS traces common values in diverse accounts of "ordinary people going public." Elenore Long offers a five-point theoretical framework. Used to review major community-literacy projects that have emerged in recent years, this local public framework uncovers profound differences, with significant consequence, within five formative perspectives: 1) the guiding metaphor behind such projects; 2) the context that defines a "local" public, shaping what is an effective, even possible performance, 3) the tenor and affective register of the discourse; 4) the literate practices that shape the discourse; and, most signficantly, 5) the nature of rhetorical invention or the generative process by which people in these accounts respond to exigencies, such as getting around gatekeepers, affirming identities, and speaking out with others across difference. COMMUNITY LITERACY AND THE RHETORIC OF LOCAL PUBLICS also examines pedagogies that educators can use to help students to go public in the course of their rhetorical education at college. the concluding chapter adapts local-public literacies to college curricula and examines how these literate moves elicit different kinds of engagement from students and require different kinds of scaffolding from teachers and community educators. A glossary and annotated bibliography provide the basis for further inquiry and research. ABOUT THE AUTHOR After completing a postdoctoral fellowship through Pittsburgh's Community Literacy Center and Carnegie Mellon University, Elenore Long continued to direct community-literacy initiatives with Wayne Peck and Joyce Baskins. With Linda Flower and Lorraine Higgins, she published LEARNING TO RIVAL: A LITERATE PRACTICE FOR INTERCULTURAL INQUIRy. They recently published a fifteen-year retrospective for the COMMUNITY LITERACY JOURNAL. She currently directs the composition program and Writers' Center at Eastern Washington University. ADVANCE PRAISE . . . "COMMUNITY LITERACY AND THE RHETORIC OF LOCAL PUBLICS is the perfect entry to the exuberant practice of literacy in community. It brings contemporary research to life-in people, stories, and purposes. And it documents the amazingly diverse ways ordinary people go public. Moreover, Elenore Long's imaginative theoretical framework lets us understand and critically compare alternative images of local public life-from the literate worlds of church women, writing groups, and street gangs to the performances of community organizing, street theater, and local think tanks. Long's analytical and profoundly rhetorical insight is to compare community literacies in terms of their framing metaphors, privileged practices, and processes of rhetorical invention. And that is perhaps what makes the final chapter such a pedagogical powerhouse-a brilliantly critical and concrete guide to supporting our students and ourselves in local literate action." -Linda Flower, Carnegie Mellon "Elenore Long's COMMUNITY LITERACY AND THE RHETORIC OF LOCAL PUBLICS begins to articulate a history for community literacy studies, and such a history is essential for helping us figure out where we are going with this area of inquiry. Long provides a new set of tools as well, and her local publics framework, in particular, will prove valuable to researchers and teachers alike." -Jeff Grabill

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement explores the critical practice of intercultural inquiry and rhetorical problem-solving that encourages urban writers and college mentors alike to take literate action. Author Linda Flower documents an innovative experiment in community literacy, the Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh, and posits a powerful and distinctively rhetorical model of community engagement and pedagogy for both marginalized and privileged writers and speakers. In addition, she articulates a theory of local publics and explores the transformative potential of alternative discourses and counter-public performances. In presenting a comprehensive pedagogy for literate action, the volume offers strategies for talking and collaborating across difference, forconducting an intercultural inquiry that draws out situated knowledge and rival interpretations of shared problems, and for writing and speaking to advocate for personal and public transformation. Flower describes the competing scripts for social engagement, empowerment, public deliberation, and agency that characterize the interdisciplinary debate over models of social engagement. Extending the Community Literacy Center’s initial vision of community literacy first published a decade ago, Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement makes an important contribution to theoretical conversations about the nature of the public sphere while providing practical instruction in how all people can speak publicly for values and visions of change. Winner, 2009 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award

Offering a comparative analysis of “community-literacy studies," Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics traces common values in diverse accounts of “ordinary people going public.” Elenore Long offers a five-point theoretical framework. Used to review major community-literacy projects that have emerged in recent years, this local public framework uncovers profound differences, with significant consequence, within five formative perspectives: 1) the guiding metaphor behind such projects; 2) the context that defines a “local” public, shaping what is an effective, even possible performance, 3) the tenor and affective register of the discourse; 4) the literate practices that shape the discourse; and, most signficantly, 5) the nature of rhetorical invention or the generative process by which people in these accounts respond to exigencies, such as getting around gatekeepers, affirming identities, and speaking out with others across difference.

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement explores the critical practice of intercultural inquiry and rhetorical problem-solving that encourages urban writers and college mentors alike to take literate action. Author Linda Flower documents an innovative experiment in community literacy, the Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh, and posits a powerful and distinctively rhetorical model of community engagement and pedagogy for both marginalized and privileged writers and speakers. In addition, she articulates a theory of local publics and explores the transformative potential of alternative discourses and counter-public performances. In presenting a comprehensive pedagogy for literate action, the volume offers strategies for talking and collaborating across difference, forconducting an intercultural inquiry that draws out situated knowledge and rival interpretations of shared problems, and for writing and speaking to advocate for personal and public transformation. Flower describes the competing scripts for social engagement, empowerment, public deliberation, and agency that characterize the interdisciplinary debate over models of social engagement. Extending the Community Literacy Center’s initial vision of community literacy first published a decade ago, Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement makes an important contribution to theoretical conversations about the nature of the public sphere while providing practical instruction in how all people can speak publicly for values and visions of change. Winner, 2009 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award

The Public Work of Rhetoric presents the art of rhetorical techné as a contemporary praxis for civic engagement and social change, which is necessarily inclusive of people inside and outside the academy. In this provocative call to action, editors John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan, along with seventeen other accomplished contributors, offer case studies and criticism on the rhetorical practices of citizen-scholars pursuing democratic ideals in diverse civic communities—with partnerships across a range of media, institutions, exigencies, and discourses. Challenging conventional research methodologies and the traditional insularity of higher education, these essays argue that civic engagement as a rhetorical act requires critical attention to our notoriously veiled identity in public life, to our uneasy affiliation with democracy as a public virtue, and to the transcendent powers of discourse and ideology. This can be accomplished, the contributors argue, by building on the compatible traditions of materialist rhetoric and community literacy, two vestiges of rhetoric's dual citizenship in the fields of communication and English. This approach expresses a collective desire in rhetoric for more politically responsive scholarship, more visible impact in public life, and more access to the critical spaces between universities and their communities.

Offering a comparative analysis of "community-literacy studies," this volume traces common values in diverse accounts of "ordinary people going public."

In the spirit of models of argument starting with inquiry, this book starts with a question: What might it mean to teach argument in ways that open up spaces for change—changes of mind, changes of practice and policy, changes in ways of talking and relating? The author explores teaching argument in ways that take into account the complexities and pluralities young people face as they attempt to enact local and global citizenship with others who may reasonably disagree. The focus is foremost on social action—the hard, hopeful work of finding productive ways forward in contexts where people need to work together across difference to get something worthwhile done.

With growing anxiety about American identity fueling debates about the nation’s borders, ethnicities, and languages, Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries provides a timely and important rhetorical exploration of divisionary bounds that divide an Us from a Them. The concept of “border” calls for attention, and the authors in this collection respond by describing it, challenging it, confounding it, and, at times, erasing it. Motivating us to see anew the many lines that unite, divide, and define us, the essays in this volume highlight how discourse at borders and boundaries can create or thwart conditions for establishing identity and admitting difference. Each chapter analyzes how public discourse at the site of physical or metaphorical borders presents or confounds these conditions and, consequently, effective participation—a key criterion for a modern democracy. The settings are various, encompassing vast public spaces such as cities and areas within them; the rhetorical spaces of history books, museum displays, activist events, and media outlets; and the intimate settings of community and classroom conversations. Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries shows how rich communication can be when diverse cultures intersect and create new opportunities for human connection, even while different populations, cultures, age groups, and political parties adopt irreconcilable positions. It will be of interest to scholars in rhetoric and literacy studies and students in rhetorical analysis and public discourse. Contributors include Andrea Alden, Cori Brewster, Robert Brooke, Randolph Cauthen, Jennifer Clifton, Barbara Couture, Vanessa Cozza, Anita C. Hernández, Roberta J. Herter, Judy Holiday, Elenore Long, José A. Montelongo, Karen P. Peirce, Jonathan P. Rossing, Susan A. Schiller, Christopher Schroeder, Tricia C. Serviss, Mónica Torres, Kathryn Valentine, Victor Villanueva, and Patti Wojahn.