The Desire for Literacy: Writing in the Lives of Adult Learners by Lauren Rosenberg (review)

What does literacy mean, and why does it matter? Lauren Rosenberg posits that literacy, a term that remains contested, is not merely a set of skills but "a means of knowing and interacting in the world that can be shared" (154). Rosenberg's book is the result of a qualitative study about adult literacy learners' writing practices and their reasons for seeking literacy skills. Referring to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's subaltern class, "that sector of the population whose experience counters the dominant and who are, therefore, shut out from dominant ideological concerns" (3), Rosenberg raises the question of whether those who have been positioned by dominant literate discourses as voiceless and without knowledge can gain the tools not only to be heard and to exercise their voices, but also to challenge the scripts that have been ascribed to them. Observing students at Read/Write/Now Adult Learning Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, Rosenberg focuses her study on four older adults, George, Violeta, Chief, and Lee Ann (pseudonyms), who are no longer in the workforce and who have voluntarily chosen to become literacy learners. She invites us to ask the important question: What are the motivations of these individuals, who have been rendered mute by societal values that equate literacy with intelligence, to become more literate?

Rosenberg offers intimate accounts of these older adults and places them in the role of being teachers, carefully attentive to her own role as researcher and as representative of dominant literate culture. Relating to her participants as a learner, Rosenberg aims to hear their stories without assumptions. While collaborating with her participants, Rosenberg successfully demonstrates a model of creating a space in which both researcher and subject are interchangeable roles. She also sets an example of how theories are formed and articulated, and of how we might reconsider where we place credit for such scholarship. Through careful listening, she seeks to hear how the participants of her study theorize their roles as "nonliterates" and how they describe their experiences of and purposes for seeking literacy education. Rosenberg's research gives voice to those traditionally ignored. Through this approach, these individuals become literacy theorists and help make a methodological contribution to literacy studies.

Rosenberg's primary methodology is narrative inquiry. She uses interviews to explore the relationship between the written and spoken stories of her participants. As they reframe and retell their spoken narratives in their writing, Rosenberg observes how they restore or "restory" themselves in a dominant position of knowing. As these four participants talk about their experiences around literacy, all are aware that they have been positioned as being voiceless and unknowing people. Carefully avoiding power dynamics of researcher and subject, Rosenberg maintains casual relationships with her participants. "What started out as a research study ended up as an engaged conversation" for Rosenberg, who is invested in hearing their stories (21). By sharing their personal stories with her, and by restorying themselves through their writing, these participants place their reasons for becoming literate in direct opposition to a culture that has marginalized them. In spite of their lack of tradition literacy skills, they are adults who have led rich lives full of experiences and who are, in fact, knowledgeable.

In Chapter 1, "Resisting Nonliteracy: Adult Learners Restory Their Narratives," we meet George, an African American man in his sixties learning literacy skills. Rosenberg echoes the Freirean belief that education should be designed by the people based on their own experiences as thinkers rather than imposed on them as a social weapon. She places George in a position of co-author, illustrating that the adult literacy learner participants of the study are ideally suited to teach those concerned with community literacy studies. George knows what it feels like to be embarrassed as nonliterate, and he reaches out to help a woman read a sign in a way that doesn't inflict the same embarrassment on her. In telling his...