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123 5 Images of Empowerment The rhetoric of making a difference is the work of empowered people. But empowerment, like the notion of community, can mean a set of very different things in practice. It all depends on how you answer three key questions: Who is being empowered? To what end? By what means? To build a working theory of empowerment, the Community Literacy Center had to recognize competing images that leaders and mentors alike brought to this work if we hoped to build a negotiated meaning that would be persuasive and workable for the whole group. The first question to ask is, who is being empowered by whom? For instance : • Are the poor, excluded, marginalized, and oppressed, themselves wresting power from the rich, the privileged, the powerful? • Or are the normally silenced and excluded being given membership and agency by someone (e.g., community organizations, educators, social services, philanthropies, and the like)? • Or are the privileged developing their own capacity to resist, serve, and act on the behalf of others? • Or are excluded and privileged people achieving together the moral and/or material power of solidarity? If you are a minority student, a mentor, or a college teacher looking for your place in one of these scripts of empowerment, it matters a great deal who the principal players are imagined to be and how (or whether) they are expected to relate to one another. For instance, the scripts of identity politics, on one extreme, and charity, on the other, often build strong ideological walls between the players who regularly exclude outsiders or Others from the role of agent. Theoretical Frameworks and Working Theories 124 In scripts for educational and rhetorical empowerment, the plot is also shaped by how you name your end-in-view. That is, what are the newly empowered being empowered to do? Are they empowered to • participate, gain discourse membership, or cultural competence within the dominant group? • speak up for one’s self or culture with a “special” personal voice? • speak against forces of marginalization with a newly aroused critical or cultural consciousness? • speak with others in a dialogue of intercultural inquiry? • speak for values, commitments, and change out of solidarity with others? Finally, the meaning of empowerment cannot be separated in practice from the means you use to translate ideas into outcomes. Here, the critical question becomes, what kind of scaffold are you building to support the process of empowerment you envision? This chapter considers some ways these scripts of empowerment play themselves out in rhetoric, composition, and communication studies and in the scaffolds we build to support different scripts. All of these forms of empowerment (and others of a more political style as well) play a necessary role in the larger drama of social action. Empowerment depends on speaking appropriately, speaking up, and speaking against as well as speaking with. None has a corner on the rhetoric of making a difference, but each may call for decisive choices, and we need to be more self-conscious about the outcomes and trade-offs. In particular, I want to ask why our dominant educational paradigms have so much trouble supporting an intercultural empowerment—one focused on solidarity, speaking with others, and speaking for values. I want also to raise the educational and moral dilemmas that the enterprise of literate empowerment presents, not to engage in critique for its own sake but to explore the committed, inevitably fallible ways we can try to negotiate decision, such as: • Can I presume to participate in the empowerment of anyone else? (On the other hand, can I presume that my choice to ignore or evade the question is really neutral if it preserves a status quo that disempowers someone else?) • How can the privileged—in particular—actually support the empowerment of cultural others? • How can educators (who by their actions cannot avoid the question) help scaffold a process of empowerment for students and community partners? Images of Empowerment 125 Scripts for Empowerment Speaking Appropriately—Empowerment through Communicative Competence In the script of intercultural communication (a well-defined subfield of communication studies), the players in need of help are designated as strangers —the immigrant, the exchange student, the business associate in a foreign culture. In Communicating with Strangers, communications scholars William Gudykunst and Young Kim lay out the dilemma (1997). Strangers trying to carry on their public or professional lives in a strange land are exchanging messages or signs or codes...

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