Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement

2. Taking Literate Action

44 2 Taking Literate Action The Community Literacy Center mentors we left in the previous chapter stood poised at the beginning of an experiment in civic engagement. Like them, the CLC itself would need to articulate in principle what it was discovering in practice. Standing in the context of other work in composition, critical literacy, and service-learning, it began to shape itself around a distinctive local public rhetoric with position statements like the one below. Such statements are good for thinking with. They force you to articulate what matters most and how those things are related to each other. They stand as a sort of hypothesis that can be constantly challenged by the reality you are trying to describe, which in turn keeps taking you deeper into the mystery and requiring of you a new naming. Community literacy is a form of literate action that allows: • everyday people within the urban community to take rhetorical agency in their lives and for their community; • everyday people from places of privilege to participate in the struggle for understanding and social justice. Community literacy depends on the social ethic and strategic practice of intercultural rhetoric to: • draw out the voices of the silenced and the expertise of marginalized people; • draw people normally separated by difference into new roles as partners in inquiry; • recognize and use difference in the service of discovery and change, transforming rather than erasing its conflicts and contradictions. Definitional statements like these also ask us to unpack their terms of art, which is what this chapter hopes to do. And yet, when you begin to unravel the tangled skein of experiences, meanings, and contradictions that make Taking Literate Action 45 up such a hypothesis, you begin to feel the limits of formal definition, of theorizing that aspires to a cleanly drawn, internally self-consistent edifice of words and ideas. So in this chapter, I would like to unpack some of the meanings of community literacy in action, not merely by defining terms but by instantiating them. That is, by exploring a complex instance of literate action for what it can tell us about three themes of community literacy that figure prominently in its definition and by asking: What does the rhetorical agency of everyday people mean? How does it work? How does a strategic practice shape an intercultural rhetoric? And if inquiry is the goal, what are its outcomes? This instance comes from early in the history of the Community Literacy Center, initiated by a project called Risk and Stress. The story it tells about the meaning of agency, strategic rhetoric, and inquiry is partial and situated as well as biased by the values and questions I bring to the telling. It is also provocative. And precisely because it is a local, situated account of one way in which literacy does work, it challenges us to take on the work of observation -based theory building.1 Risk, Stress, and Respect The Risk and Stress Project (as it was initially called) was sparked by a conversation with an activist with multiple community identities. Ian Rawson was a gently irreverent deflator of cant and a social visionary with a commitment to service.2 Despite his academic bent to anthropology, he would have been a great community organizer if he had not already been a vice president for policy at the major tri-state hospital across the park from the Community House. Rawson’s outspoken and rather ironic position, given his job as an institutional spokesperson, was that health was not created by hospitals, which only dealt with illness, but by communities. Posing the Problem in Theory—The Manifesto Conversations with Rawson and other health-care providers followed by some homework helped us pose this problem in a first-draft manifesto for inquiry. This text, which became material for mentors and a funding proposal , argued that communities are not only sources of health or stress but are also rhetorical forums for understanding what concepts, such as health and stress, actually mean, in practice, if you are an urban teenager. However , when the pilot project and dialogue with the teens began for real, this conceptualization took a new turn. The initial problem statement of our manifesto, excerpted in the appendix with its hands-on logo, contrasted A Community/University Collaboration 46 the comfortable middle-class assumptions about growing up in a healthy community with the reality we were recognizing in our own urban neighborhoods...