Literacy as Conversation

Learning Networks in Urban and Rural Communities

Eli Goldblatt,David Jolliffe

• Editorial: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780822987659
• Categoría: Langues et linguistique
• Categoría: Linguistique

In Literacy as Conversation, the authors tell stories of successful literacy learning outside of schools and inside communities, both within urban neighborhoods of Philadelphia and rural and semi-rural towns of Arkansas. They define literacy not as a basic skill but as a rich, broadly interactive human behavior: the ability to engage in a conversation carried on, framed by, or enriched through written symbols. Eli Goldblatt takes us to after-school literacy programs, community arts centers, and urban farms in the city of Philadelphia, while David Jolliffe explores learning in a Latinx youth theater troupe, a performance based on the words of men on death row, and long-term cooperation with a rural health care provider in Arkansas. As different as urban and rural settings can be—and as beset as they both are with the challenges of historical racism and economic discrimination—the authors see much to encourage both geographical communities to fight for positive change.

PART I

Introducing Our Terms

1

How to Read This Book and Why

David Jolliffe

This is a book of essays about communities, learning networks, and literacy. And in that sentence sit two chunks of terms that are necessary for potential readers—and we hope they are many, from a wide array of professional and personal walks of life—to preview before launching into the book.

First of all, to get a grasp of how to read it, consider that Literacy as Conversation is “a book of essays.” The two authors, Eli Goldblatt and David Jolliffe, have known each other for nearly three decades, and we ourselves have engaged in more hours of conversation about our work in community literacy than we can possibly count. Both of us have written articles, chapters, and books designed to be read primarily by our colleagues in departments of English, rhetoric, writing studies, and education; by graduate students—current or former—in those fields; and perhaps even by undergraduates interested in these areas. Our intention in Literacy as Conversation is not to exclude any of those readers but to expand our desired audiences beyond the boundaries of our previous works. We fervently hope that the book will be read not only by academics in higher education but also by teachers and administrators in K-12 schools, by school board members, by professionals in not-for-profit organizations that strive to influence quality-of-life issues, by government officials and policy makers who aim to effect positive changes in communities both rural and urban, and by “everyday folk” who share our interest in the ways reading, writing, and conversing can influence the empowerment and enrichment of citizens, now and in the future. We want all of these folks to resonate with the concept of literacy that we sketch out here and flesh out in the rest of the book.

With this hoped-for audience in mind, we consciously decided to write with more of a person-to-person approach than one typically finds in academic treatises. We have written what we call “honest-to-goodness essays”—so designated to contrast them with thesis-driven, argumentative, analytic academic articles. The noun essay comes from the French verb essayer, which means “to try”—not “prove” or “argue.” The great progenitor of the genre was the sixteenth-century French writer Michel de Montaigne, whose 107 wonderfully discursive and often rambling essais invite readers (and to an extent lead them) to forge conclusions, sometimes tentative ones, about the thorny subjects that occupied Montaigne’s mind: friendship, for example, or vanity, or lying, or sex, or aging. Montaigne’s essays allow the reader to participate in the mind’s ongoing thinking, not its completed having thought.

The essays in this book may not be completely open-ended, discursive essays in the mold of those written by Montaigne. But ours are certainly not essays like those school-based composition instruction has taught students to write for the past three centuries—texts with a quick “hook” for an introduction followed by a thesis statement that announces the piece’s central idea and then maps its development—a genre that generally shows itself in “grownup” form in academic articles, chapters, and books. The essays in Literacy as Conversation fall somewhere between these two poles, but if we had to stake a spot on the continuum between them, I’d say we fall closer to Montaigne than to Sheridan Baker (1962) or Jane Schaffer (n.d.), two modern pedagogues who teach the glories of the sharply focused, thesis-driven academic essay—which in the Montaignian sense is not an essay at all but more of a theme or a position paper.

Three stylistic features emerge from our decision to write honest-to-goodness essays. First, we invite our readers to participate in the thinking, the rumination, and the conversations that have undergirded our work with community literacy, so our essays are shot through with the personal: anecdotes and narratives abound. Second, the first-person pronoun is unabashedly present. If you’re the kind of reader who is put off by discovering I, me, we, us, my, mine, our, and ours in a book published by an academic press, you might want to simply put Literacy as Conversation aside. We hope, however, that you’ll stay with us as we speak out of our own experiences. In that spirit, we include a short chapter that enacts a conversation between the two of us because we want to emphasize that the book grew from hours of talk between us, talk with those we’ve worked with over the years, talk with colleagues and friends and our life partners. Third, we try hard to keep citations and references to a minimum. Those who know the literature on literacy will recognize ideas and theoretical orientations from many authors, but those coming to our book from other fields and endeavors should not be bothered by too much academic language (our reference to Montaigne aside). The introductory essay on definitions necessarily refers to other literacy scholars, and we do throw in an occasional footnote throughout, mostly to indicate places readers might explore if they are intrigued by one or another detail.

No doubt, the terms in our opening sentence that most strongly need unpacking come at the end of it: communities, learning networks, and literacy. These terms invite the question, “why should you read this book?”

Literacy as Conversation represents our collaborative effort to accomplish three goals. First, we show the fecund territory of community-based projects we have traveled for the past several years, in the hope that our readers might feel compelled to explore similar terrains and develop their own initiatives. Communities come in many sizes and shapes, and sometimes the people in them don’t even recognize themselves as a social unit. In our experience, activities that bring people into collaboration can define a “community” for the participants. Second, we characterize the multivalent terms communities, learning networks, and literacy by showing how they are defined and fleshed out in two seemingly different but actually similar community contexts: urban North Philadelphia and largely rural Arkansas. Third, and above all else, we urge our readers to see the human energy, both individual and collective, that sits at the center of vibrant community literacy projects.

This energy is a hallmark of what we mean by literacy as conversation, a conceptualization that we introduce in the next two chapters and illustrate in the essays about Philadelphia and Arkansas that follow. To us literacy is more than tests and test scores, and we are frustrated by the discourse of many fields that insists on seeing it this way. Taking a cue from our friend Deborah Brandt, we see literacy as embedded in ongoing conversations that enable people to do things to make their worlds better (Brandt 2014). People want more than to succeed in school and get a decent (or better) job. They want to build relationships with their children and grandchildren by reading stories to them at night. They want to participate in their churches and their civic organizations. They want to help feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless. Literacy engages human beings in significant conversations that lead to action, involving them with the world of the word, connecting them to intellectual resources sometimes called technology or theory, information or knowledge, insight or wisdom. These resources grow and morph as their users develop agility and flexibility with the world of words. Scholars and observers of our culture seldom see literacy as integral to the actions of people who want to solve problems. Literacy as Conversation aims to correct this shortsightedness.

The stories in this book focus on “ordinary people” growing the abilities to read, write, think, and converse while at the same time helping to improve the quality of life for themselves, their families, their neighbors. As these stories demonstrate, literacy learning doesn’t only happen in an official space like a school. We use the term learning network to name the web of public institutions, nonprofit organizations, and neighborhood centers that regularly sponsor activities in which people learn literacy through action and through human interaction, even if literacy is not the stated mission. We invite you to immerse yourself in these stories—to experience literacy as conversation.

2

How to LEARN and What to Do about It

Eli Goldblatt

My wife and I taught in Temple University’s Rome program during the fall 2013 semester. When we returned to Philadelphia after seven months of exploration and wonder, we were both more than a little lost. We each taught our classes and fulfilled our duties on campus, but so much of our minds were back in our beautiful and tumultuous temporary home, where we had lived near the Colosseum and taught around the corner from the Piazza del Popolo. In Rome I worked with Italian teacher Daniela Curioso to develop a program in which American college students visited English classes in an Italian high school named Liceo Statale Terenzio Mamiani once a week. Suddenly, in November, my students and I witnessed the Italian teens take over their school in protest against austerity cuts in the budget that had left their building in disrepair. Mamiani was a grand but neglected hulking pile that reminded me of unloved Philadelphia high schools built in the early twentieth century. It was great fun talking politics with Daniela and other Italian colleagues, who took the protest as a manifestation of normal political life, and my American students, who were aghast at the audacity and aggressiveness of youths otherwise well behaved by contemporary American standards of obedience and decorum in class. But now I was home, and I wanted to bring that sense of active challenge to the static institutions in my region and that sense of inquisitiveness I had felt in Rome back to the American urban landscape I thought I knew so well. How was I to reengage with my own city now that I had been paid to spectate so deliciously far away?

The answer came in the early morning as I was coming out of a dream. In sleep I’d been gazing at the word learn, and I realized it could stand for Literacy Education Audit of Resources and Needs. A crazy, wonky thing to dream on a spring morning, but strangely it gave me hope. I realized that I was thinking in the wrong direction about initiatives I could start or people I could meet. Before I started anything, I needed to assemble two active lists: one naming the issues that were most pressing in Philadelphia neighborhoods related to literacy and a second enumerating all the organizations, churches, programs, and projects that could address those needs. Once I was fully awake and could scrutinize the gift of this insight, I saw that really I already knew many elements on both lists. Although I had often worked with academic programs and nonprofits on SWOT analyses—Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats—I had never taken the process so personally before. The dream shocked me into looking at agencies and urgencies right before my eyes. The dream challenged me to explore my own city anew, with humility, curiosity, and gratitude. Yes, the city had needs, but it also had a tremendous catalogue of resources.

When I told my friend David Jolliffe about my dream, he recognized his own version of LEARN in Arkansas. Since he had accepted the Brown Chair in Literacy at the University of Arkansas–Fayetteville in 2005, he had been developing literacy projects in the northwestern corner of the state as well as in the Delta, the eastern region that borders the Mississippi River and Tennessee beyond. On trips through the state with David, I’d witnessed him listening to residents about needs they wanted to address, and he regularly sought allies with whom to form productive coalitions. We had long talked about doing a book together that identified similarities and differences of literacy projects in our two environments—mine decidedly urban and his primarily rural. LEARN presented itself as a way to lay out comparisons and contrasts, to pose literacy not as a problem in need of solution but as an ongoing process of human communication, inquiry, advocacy, and collective identity that is always situated within systems, institutions, and polarities: public and private, nonprofit and business, educational and recreational, oppressive and liberating. Because our experiences have usually been with programs outside the grounds of traditional schools, we focus our book especially on sites of informal learning, or ways through which a great range of people develop literacy abilities in out-of-school and non-standardized activities.

LEARN isn’t a formalized method, nor is it particularly new. It’s asset mapping with a personal flavor, more DIY than Department of Education. I described something similar in my earlier book Because We Live Here, focusing on the links and disjunctions of writing instruction in schools, college programs, and nonprofit community centers in Philadelphia. But that was an earlier time in the city and in my career, when I still framed literacy primarily in terms of formal programs and certified instructors. For this book, we wanted to recognize and highlight the power of literacy learning where most people don’t look for it—in gardens and art studios, theaters and local health clinics, any place where people are making and doing together. LEARN is meant to identify gaps and strengths in literacy education available to residents of all backgrounds and means. We use this acronym because—after years of watching programs succeed and fail, receive funding or wither for lack of resources—we want to rededicate ourselves to the basic insight that an activist or public educator needs to search out what’s going on and what people want before designing “innovative” curricula and building pedagogical castles.

We also want to emphasize learning rather than teaching in our discussion of literacy. Each of us has taught for more than forty years, and we have a deep commitment to teachers and teachers in training. The name LEARN, however, adopts the verb that matters most in any educational environment. Our most potent influences have been educators who focused on people learning while doing meaningful activities in group settings: John Dewey and Paulo Freire, Ann Berthoff and Peter Elbow, David Bartholomae and Linda Flower, Keith Gilyard and Ellen Cushman, Elaine Richardson and Carmen Kynard. The purpose of this book is to make literacy learning outside of traditional classrooms more visible, from docent tours in museums and workshops in art centers to vocational training at work sites, health-care information campaigns, and gardens in vacant lots where immigrants raise vegetables they remember from home. We recognize that today people of all ages are learning about reading and writing, or learning about the world through symbol systems and codified knowledge, in ways that revise our old classroom image of second graders reading primers aloud in tracked groups called the Blue Birds or the Penguins.

We write this book in order to assemble a picture of literacy in action and movement for our two locations, with the hope that our efforts will model a more comprehensive understanding of any region’s literacy health and potential. We chose Philadelphia and Arkansas simply because we know them best, and we trust that readers will LEARN about their own regions in their own ways. We have come to see that one promising outcome of LEARN is to identify and enhance what we call learning networks of literacy sponsorship. All too often, literacy learning happens in centers or programs isolated from other places where informal or formal learning can or does occur, and an explicit focus on networks can encourage cooperation and circulation that would increase the effectiveness of literacy experiences for all participants. Before we can describe networks that support literacy, however, we need to define what we mean by literacy.

What Is Literacy?

We hope in this section to define literacy based on the New Literacy Studies orientation toward this human behavior as a “social practice”—embedded in interaction and purpose rather than frozen in rigid rules and specified skills. As David noted in the previous chapter, we also hope to describe literacy in a way that does not require readers to be scholars or educational experts. Despite the rise of literacy studies in anthropology, linguistics, and English in the 1960s and intense research on both reading and writing in education schools and composition and rhetoric programs in the last forty years, the term literacy still commonly conjures up elementary lessons in sounding out words and forming block letters. While literacy scholars discuss their subject with nuanced terminology, public debate searches for simple and direct ways to measure literacy rates and articulate standards in school and civic life. We need a way for researchers and policy makers to confer effectively.

UNESCO (2019) defines a “functionally literate” individual in a rather circular way: a “person who can engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective function of his or her group and community and also for enabling him or her to continue to use reading, writing and calculation for his or her own and the community’s development.” This definition strikes us as having the virtue of recognizing that literacy is not only a quality associated with an individual but a range of functions and activities that connect individuals to their community. Still, we need a less bureaucratic-sounding definition, one reflecting people’s daily lives, to serve as a foundation for a discussion of literacy learning in urban and rural out-of-school environments.

Over the last twenty years, the US federal government has made an effort to measure and compare literacy rates in the American adult population. In 1992 the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) sponsored the National Adult Literacy Survey, and in 2003 NCES sponsored a second comprehensive measure of adult literacy called the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. Both of these surveys asked participants in their homes “to spend approximately an hour responding to a series of diverse literacy tasks as well as questions about his or her demographic characteristics, educational background, reading practices, and other areas related to literacy” (Kirsch et al. 2002). Based on the results, participants were scored on three scales: prose, document, and quantitative literacies. The National Adult Literacy Survey surveyed more than thirteen thousand adults and the National Assessment of Adult Literacy surveyed more than nineteen thousand across the country and in state and federal prisons. Then in 2012–2014 NCES administered the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, an instrument that investigated “basic skills and the broad range of competencies of adults” in thirty-three countries (“What Is PIACC?” 2018). The program had four domains for assessment: literacy, numeracy, problem solving in technology-rich environments, and reading components. The program added the feature of testing participants on laptop computers, though it also offered a pencil-and-paper version for those unfamiliar with computers.

These broad standardized tests are useful in giving us some baseline information about relative rates of literacy. They are properly rooted in the recognition that literacy is complex, involves rhetorical knowledge about genre and audience, and requires cognitive abilities to solve problems embedded in everyday situations. Such testing also allows a relatively large sample size so that valid inferences might be drawn. Yet approaches based on standardized tests don’t help us understand the habits of mind that learners across age groups and ethnic identities most need to develop, nor do they suggest intrinsically rewarding activities that could motivate reluctant or al...