Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement: Chapter 2 notes

Click this link to view my notes for this chapter in google docs. You may view and print but not edit. You may also read the notes after the jump. Please feel free to leave comments.

Community Literacy: Chapter 2

• CLC needed to learn to articulate in principle what it discovered in practice
• in context of other work in critical literacy it began to shape itself with “position statements”
• Community Literacy is a form of literate action
• gives people agency
• allows people to participate in struggle for social justice
• Community Literacy depends on the social ethic and strategic practice of intercultural rhetoric to
• draw out voices and expertise of marginalized groups/people
• create partnerships between people normally separated
• use differences to create change
• three of community literacy
• Rhetorical Agency
• Strategic Practice
• Inquiry
• lessons from Risk and Stress Project
• teenagers need to be “expert working partners”
• begin an inquiry with a sense of a problem, but not too attached to it
• find out how the marginalized group (in this case, teens) actually experience the problem (p46)
• bringing more voices to the table: although teens have an inside perspective, “they don’t have and inside track on truth or certain knowledge of what must be done” (p49)
• teens are more likely to complain and blame
• situations need contributions aimed at jointly solving a problem
• the purpose should not be just to vent
• rival hypothesis thinking:
• present additional perspectives by generating hypotheses that rival one another, testing hypotheses by considering possible rivals to them
• asks people to think from a perspective other than their own
• Rhetorical Agency (p52-53)
• an uncritical view of agency may be that agency is uncontested personal freedom
• definition of personal agency may be influenced by outside forces such as the media
• The text gives an example of what Shirley, a female black teen, had to say about a problem of racist cops harassing black teens and not white teens for the same issues (p47-52)
• Shirley’s agency was as a witness: she gave her interpretation of the situation
• hirley’s interpretive act essentially redefines the problem in a why that shapes the discussion and sparks the next level of “inquiry”
• Shirley becomes a rhetorical agent by going public through the Community Literacy Center where she shared her experiences with others
• understand “agency” as a rhetorical action in a way that
• poses problems,
• redefines assumptions, and
• opens path for inquiry
• Strategic Practice
• popular notion of how to take agency—exercise your will—is simplistic
• popular notion of how to engage in “intercultural dialogue”—demonstrate a desire to help and develop a relationship with the “other”—is also simplistic
• the goal is not  to transcend differences, the goal is to figure out how to use differences as a resource (p54-55)
• “community literacy replaces this popular notion of how to achieve dialogue with the more guided, purposeful, and heuristic stance of rhetoric and intercultural rhetoric” (p55)
• traditional roles of informed vs. uninformed, professionals vs. client is difficult to overcome
• three questions that challenge:
• what is your point or purpose?
• how might your readers respond to this?
• what text conventions could you use here to achieve your purpose?
• telling the “story-behind-the-story” (p56)
• reveals hidden logics
• interpretative reasoning behind actions
• reveals marginalized agency
• challenges stereotypes
• provides local knowledge situated in context
• Seeking rival hypotheses
• complex questions do not have single answers
• intercultural inquiry tries to weave rival perspectives into a plan for action by
• generating multiple, competing and complementary options
• allowing local knowledge to test these options
• strategic means taking a self-conscious, heuristic (hands-on) approach to dialogue itself, rather than achieving an outcome
• Inquiry as Literate Action (p 59)
• does not target a specific outcome
• but what are the outcomes of inquiry? (p60)
• in example above, it opened up a rhetorical space for dialogue, a “Local Public” and
• transformed our knowledge and representation of the problem
• creating a Local Public
• Shirley’s imagined audience became a literal audience
• writing played a role in the inquiry process as inquiry lead from talk to texts, which lead to further inquiry and articulation
• The move from knowledge to understanding, in this example, is not certain, but is desirable and necessary for transformative change (p67)
•