Keyword Essay: Place-Based Literacies

Practicing community outreach and research—alongside writing community scholarship—requires an attention to place in the present, as a literal site of practice with material conditions. It also requires an attention to place in the past and future, as an imaginary as well as historical engagement of what a place once was for people and what it has yet to become. Literacy work is, as Paulo Freire describes, a “constant unveiling of reality” (8) toward the end of creating “revolutionary futurity” (10). Explained in more concrete terms, when “people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world and with which and in which they find themselves” then they can begin to transform their reality, both ecologically and socially (Freire 9). Community work and scholarship continually unveils reality to change and shape it, and this process is a form of place-making.

It is hard to separate the words of education and community scholars from the locations through and in which they write; location is not a backdrop for abstract theories of literacy, but it is the source of those investigations. For example, rural Nebraska and its prairie shapes Robert Brooke’s reflections on place-conscious education as a way to create responsive citizens (Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing); Harlem’s crowded streets after a show at the Apollo are the rhythms behind Valerie Kinloch’s arguments for a critical stance toward gentrification and loss of black culture (Harlem on Our Minds: Place, Race, and the Literacies of Urban Youth); and the urban community college campus with an open admissions policy—its students formerly academic outsiders, now moving from their worlds of work, to home, to school—underlie Ira Shor’s calls for a critical pedagogy that works to transform social inequalities (Critical Teaching and Everyday Life). It is not hard to think of several other place-based writings and educational theories in composition and community literacy scholarship.

This discussion of community literacy work and place reminds us of how Anne Ruggles Gere drew attention to the “extracurricular”—or places beyond the university—where we find literacy at work. In her article, now over twenty years old, she writes, “They [writers] may gather in rented rooms in the Tenderloin, around kitchen tables in Lansing, Iowa, or in a myriad of other places to write their worlds. The question remains whether we will use classroom walls as instruments of separation or communication” (91). The answer, if I can be so bold as to claim one, is now here—the “extracurricular” is becoming the curricular as more educators are advocating for place-based literacies under names like service-learning, place-conscious education, ecocomposition and ecopedagogy, and urban and rural literacy studies. These subfields, of course, are not one in the same as they draw on scholarship from different disciplines with different methods and different ways of making (and counting) knowledge, and yet, there is a central theme here—the study of place as unveiling and shaping social and ecological reality.

Place-based literacies and their attention to how location creates possibilities for world-revealing and world-making practices, particularly in the sense of community development and literate practices, are now a dominant theme in pedagogy, community work, and scholarship. David Gruenewald, in his article “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place,” offers a definition of the aims of place-based literacies that best describes its world-revealing and making potential when he writes that place pedagogies should “(a) identify, recover, and create material spaces and places that teach us how to live well in our total environments (reinhabitation); and (b) identify and change ways of thinking that injure and exploit other people and places (decolonization)” (9). These two aims are what he sees as the goals of place-based education (a) and critical pedagogy (b), and—as his title implies—he wishes for a convergence of these pedagogical approaches rather than to separate them. This synthesis is helpful because it accounts for how place is continually changing and how we need to be aware of and a part of this...