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97 6. Connecting Literacy to Sustainability: Revisiting Literacy as Involvement Kim Donehower When Deborah Brandt’s Literacy as Involvement (1990) was first published and reviewed, it was considered mainly in terms of what it might offer classroom pedagogy. Reviewing the book for the Journal of Advanced Composition, Patricia Bizzell worries that “[while] I share Brandt’s sense that the best position is one drawn against E. D. Hirsch‍[. . . .] Brandt’s pluralism is a weak alternative to, and hence a weak defense against, Hirsch’s canonicity. She says little about how the opening of standards in the academy is to be accomplished” (1991, p. 319). Masahiko Minami, reviewing the work for the Harvard Educational Review, describes it as “a thought-provoking book that demonstrates the need for educators . . . to consider the significance of a plurality of literacies” (1991, pp. 232–33). But as Bizzell notes, getting this kind of change to happen in the minds of educators, particularly K–12 educators, is difficult—perhaps even more so in the current educational climate.1 In this essay, I argue that Literacy as Involvement deserves a second life for what it might say about literate life not in classrooms but in the “extracurriculum” (Gere, 1994) and, more specifically, the ways that extracurricular literacies can influence sustainability. Brandt’s project in Literacy as Involvement is to repudiate what she calls the “strong text” view of literacy, which she attributes primarily to Walter J. Ong and to the earlier works of Jack Goody, David R. Olson, and Deborah Tannen. The name “strong-text” comes from a privileging of texts over the actual processes of reading and writing. Brandt states, “Literacy, from [the strong-text] perspective, is said to entail a suppression of ordinary social involvement as the basis of interpretation and a reinvestment in the logical, literal, message-focused conventions of language-on-its-own” (p. 13). In proposing “literacy as involvement” as an alternative, Brandt privileges the processes of reading and writing over texts: “From a process perspective, literacy does not take its nature from texts. Rather, texts take their natures from the ways that they are serving the acts of writing and reading” (p. 13). Instead Kim Donehower 98 of dialing social involvement down, Brandt argues that message and involvement are inextricably linked: “[M]‍essage originates in involvement. . . . [It] is, inescapably, an embodiment of involvement. . . . In fact, the other partner on [Tannen’s] seesaw with involvement is not message but silence or inaction” (p. 68). Brandt’s is an active, activist literacy, a literacy that does things—social things. In Literacy as Involvement, she offers an instrumentalist view of literacy not as a tool for individual achievement but as a means “to sustain the processes of intersubjective life” (1990, p. 103). This vision is particularly useful for considering literacy’s role in rural sustainability. Literacy levels have long been considered markers of the health of a community. But the benefits of literacy for the survival of rural towns have generally been described in terms of economic development and the ways that mastering new technologies of literacy can “bring rural communities into the 21st century” and allow them to “compete on a global stage.” While reading and writing can certainly contribute in these areas, this view of literacy-as-mastering-a-technology is a strong-text vision. Brandt’s work lets us make other kinds of claims about the role of literate practices in sustaining rural communities. Making these other kinds of claims is my goal as I work with literacy data I collected in the town of Hammond, North Dakota, in 2008–9.2 As rural communities go, Hammond is doing pretty well, managing to keep its population at a fairly stable level and its residents mostly employed. Local leaders assert that Hammond could easily increase its population were there more housing stock—homes, not jobs, are the problem of the moment. Other communities in the area are not faring so well. A short drive to Virgil, eighteen miles away and once a hub for the region, shows empty buildings, lifeless streets, and a diminished population—a sharp contrast with Hammond ’s tidy homes, large, well-kept school, and active main street. I chose Hammond because, in addition to its success at sustaining itself, it has unusually high levels of literate activity for a town of its size. There are numerous book clubs, religious-study groups, an active association of local historians, a reading incentive program for children, and a school library, town...

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