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  • Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times by Amy J. Wan
  • Daniel Bernal
Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times
Amy J. Wan
Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 2014. Print. 232pp.

Strong in theory, rich in history, and far-reaching in its implications, Producing Good Citizens will soon become a staple for scholars, activists, and pedagogues alike who are interested in the complicated intersections of literacy and citizenship. In this historicized work, Amy Wan explores three main sites of citizenship training during the 1910s and 1920s—federally-sponsored immigrant Americanization programs, union-supported worker education training, and college-mandated first-year writing courses. Wan’s book starts with a brief introduction to citizenship theory, moves into archival research of each training site, and concludes with applications of her methodology to present anxieties over citizenship, particularly in relation to the Patriot and DREAM Acts. Through her book, Wan complicates citizenship as a discursive construct and demonstrates the limits of what literacy—and citizenship—can do for students as well as “the limitations put upon students by not only the idea of citizenship, but also its legal, political, and cultural boundaries” (178). Wan’s powerful, timely argument and her final challenge to educators and scholars alike should not be ignored. Together, Wan invites us to consider what is meant by the invocation of citizenship in the classroom, to analyze the habits of citizenship that are encouraged by our practices, and to connect our citizen-making processes to other more politically and materially situated notions of citizenship.

In her use of “citizenship,” Amy Wan builds on Danielle Allen’s Talking to Strangers (2004), Barbara Cruikshank’s The Will to Empower (1999), and Bryan Turner’s introduction to Citizenship and Social Theory (1993). Wan, along with these scholars, expands the concept of citizenship from mere legal status to a “kind of credential with legal and cultural purchase” (6). In this manner, Wan justifies the exploration of citizenship construction in not only legal spaces, but also in classrooms, workplaces, and community spaces. She cites Harvey Graff ’s The Literacy Myth (1979) and Deborah Brandt’s Literacy in American Lives (2001), assessing that, while literacy might deem an individual worthy of certain resources (i.e. passing first-year composition in order [End Page 120] to graduate) it in no way guarantees social, economic, or political access. While this tendency to falsely conflate what Sharon Crowley describes as the “economic inequality and racial discrimination with a literacy problem” (qtd. in Wan, 7) might seem obviously erroneous, Wan is interested in its origins, pervasiveness, and rhetorical power. Ultimately, she concludes that this “literacy hope” serves to perpetuate systemic inequality.

Nevertheless, the invocation of citizenship production is also constantly leveraged to justify the usefulness of higher education, and especially the writing classroom. In this way, the ideals of citizenship support literacy instruction by proving that students are becoming the right kind of citizens who are doing the right kind of learning. Citizenship is referenced in student learning goals precisely because education is recognized as one of the traits of citizenship demonstrated by good and useful citizens. For example, Kathleen Yancey in her 2009 NCTE report calls for compositions that “foster a new kind of citizenship” (7). Yancey desires to empower students, “citizen writers” (1), to use twenty-first century writing skills to take action in a digital world. Wan also references other scholars such as Ellen Cushman (1998), Elizabeth Ervin (1997), and Michele Simmons (2007) who similarly characterize the writing classroom as a space that can “reinvigorate democratic and participatory citizenship through writing that relates to the public” (Wan 21). But Wan takes issue with these high-sounding arguments. She asserts that this undefined and “ambient awareness” (22) of citizenship plays a role in shaping the types of citizens that are produced. She writes, “The desired skills—public writing, public engagement, citizen critique, critical literacy, or technology—become inextricably, although often silently, linked to the imagined ideal of the ‘good citizen’” (22). This is dangerous because educators’ subconscious and unsifted views of what kind of people students should become may “conceal other ways of being a citizen” (Wan 22). Wan’s work attempts to get...

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