Reflections Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing and Service Learning Volume 13, Issue 2, Spring 2014
Editor: Cristina Kirklighter, Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi
Associate Editor: Willma Harvey, Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi
Assistant Editor: Jessica Pauszek, Syracuse University
Book Review Editor: Tobi Jacobi, Colorado State University
Editorial Board: Hannah Ashley, West Chester University Nora Bacon, University of Nebraska-Omaha Adam Banks, University of Kentucky Melody Bowdon, University of Central Florida Jan Cohen-Cruz, Imagining America/Syracuse University Ellen Cushman, Michigan State University Linda Flower, Carnegie Mellon University Eli Goldblatt, Temple University H. Brooke Hessler, Oklahoma City University David Jolliffe, University of Arkansas Linda Adler-Kassner, University of California, Santa Barbara Joyce Magnotto Neff, Old Dominion University Kristina Montero, Syracuse University Patricia O’Connor, Georgetown University Nick Pollard, Sheffield Hallam University Luisa Connal Rodriguez, South Mountain Community College Barbara Roswell, Goucher College Lori Shorr, Office of the Mayor, Philadelphia Amy Rupiper Taggart, North Dakota State Unviersity Adrian Wurr, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Copyright © 2014 New City Community Press
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
Member CELJ Council of Editors of Learned Journals http://reflectionsjournal.net
ISSN: 1541-2075
Cover Photograph by Richmond Times-Dispatch
Design by Elizabeth Parks, http://www.elizabethparks.com Reflections, a peer reviewed journal, provides a forum for scholarship on public rhetoric, civic writing, service learning, and community literacy. Originally founded as a venue for teachers, researchers, students, and community partners to share research and discuss the theoretical, political and ethical implications of community-based writing and writing instruction, Reflections publishes a lively collection of scholarship on public rhetoric and civic writing, occasional essays and stories both from and about community writing and literacy projects, interviews with leading workers in the field, and reviews of current scholarship touching on these issues and topics.
We welcome materials that emerge from research; showcase community- based and/or student writing; investigate and represent literacy practices in diverse community settings; discuss theoretical, political and ethical implications of community-based rhetorical practices; or explore connections among public rhetoric, civic engagement, service learning, and current scholarship in composition studies and related fields.
Submissions: Electronic submissions are preferred. Manuscripts (10–25 double-spaced pages) should conform to current MLA or APA guidelines for format and documentation and should include an abstract (about 100 words). Attach the manuscript as a Word or Word-compatible file to an email message addressed to Cristina Kirklighter at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi ([email protected]). Your email message will serve as a cover letter and should include your name(s) and contact information, the title of the manuscript, and a brief biographical statement. Your name or other identifying information should not appear in the manuscript itself or in accompanying materials.
All submissions deemed appropriate for Reflections are sent to external reviewers for blind review. You should receive prompt acknowledgement of receipt followed, within six to eight weeks, by a report on its status. Contributors interested in submitting a book review (about 1000 words) or recommending a book for review are encouraged to contact Tobi Jacobi at Colorado State University ([email protected]).
Articles published in Reflections are indexed in ERIC and in the MLA Bibliography.
Contents Reflections: Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing and Service Learning Volume 13, Issue 2, Spring 2014
1 Editor’s Introduction Cristina Kirklighter, Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi
8 “Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?” An Interview with Dr. Edward Peeples Candace Epps-Robertson, Michigan State University
28 Plowing Fertile Ground in Farmville: Acknowledging a Rhetoric of Conversation Heather Lettner-Rust, Longwood University
47 Recognizing One Another in Public: Reconsidering the Role and Resources of an Enclave Veronica Oliver, Arizona State University
71 Helping to Build Better Networks: Service-Learning Partnerships as Distributed Knowledge Work Guiseppe Getto, East Carolina University Kendall Leon, Portland State University Jessica Getto-Rivait, Northcare Health Services
96 Review: Democracies to Come: Rhetorical Action, Neoliberalism, and Communities of Resistance Moira Ozias, University of Oklahoma 101 Review: PHD to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life Mariana Grohowski, Bowling Green State University
106 Review: Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love. Kelly Langan, West Chester University of Pennsylvania Editor’s Introduction
Cristina Kirklighter, Texas A & M University – A white double consciousness would not involve Corpus Christi the move between white and black subjectivities or black and American perspectives, as DuBois and Fanon developed the notion. Instead, for whites, double consciousness requires an ever present acknowledgment of the historical legacy of white identity constructions in the persistent structures of inequality and exploitation, as well as a newly awakened memory of the many white traitors to white privilege who have struggled to contribute to the building of an inclusive human community. —Linda Martín Alcoff, The Whiteness Question
recently attended the Rhetorical Society of America (RSA) conference I in San Antonio and had the pleasure of listening to Linda Alcoff ’s key note address. The above quote I found on her website and speaks, in part, to this issue. If I could give this issue a name, it would be the Serendipity Issue (by the way, serendipity is one of the most difficult words to translate in the English language). Perhaps, a good
1 Reflections | Volume 13.2, Spring 2014 translation would be this is the issue of fortunate coincidences, discoveries, and collaborations. Candace Epps-Robertson e-mailed me a few months ago to say that she wanted to interview a Civil Rights Activist, Dr. Edward H. Peeples, from Virginia, as part of her many years of research with Prince Edward County, Virginia’s school segregation and Civil Rights activism. Candace grew up in Farmville located in Prince Edward County, went to graduate school in the Northeast as did Peeples, and both did extensive research on Prince Edward communities focusing on Civil Rights. Although they are decades apart in age, Candace is African American and Dr. Edward Peeples is Southern white, they are dedicated researchers and activists in studying this rural Virginia community.
Also, this Editor grew up in Northern Virginia during the 60’s and 70’s. As a child in the late 1960’s, I attended Stonewall Jackson Elementary school in Alexandria, Virginia. Every school day, I passed a portrait of Stonewall Jackson, a Confederate General. I recall one day when the principal singled me out as I entered the school, pointed to the Stonewall Jackson portrait, and asked me who that man was on the wall. I remember those stern blue eyes waiting for me to give her the answer this eight year old did not have. With tears in my eyes, she proceeded to tell me in an angry voice why the school was named after General Jackson and admonished me for my ignorance. Years later, I wondered if she had met my brown skinned Honduran mother and my Southern white father from Tennessee. Perhaps, she proceeded to make sure I knew the Southern white history she deemed important for me to learn. Years later, I would read this quote from Candace’s interview with Dr. Edward Peeples that spoke to my Elementary school principal, “the preponderance of my whiteness education took place in Richmond, and the basic message was the same. I can recall sensing as early as about age five how much race mattered to adults.”
At the RSA Reflections booth, Shirley Wilson Logan from the University of Maryland stopped by, and we talked about the title of this interview, “Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?” This is an important question for Southerners like Epps-Robertson, Peeples, Logan, and this Editor. It is an important question for our Associate Editor, Willma Harvey, who grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi during
2 Editor’s Introduction | Cristina Kirklighter the 60’s and 70’s, as well as someone who went through Hurricane Katrina. And, I anticipate it is an important question for many of our reader activists who will find hope in one of the last lines of the interview, “So when prospects seem dim and thoughts of despair and foreboding creep into our head, it is comforting to know from history that the struggles for human equality and dignity are a multi-century movement, and we are really never alone.”
At Farmville’s Robert Russa Moton Museum’s website http://www. motonmuseum.org/, it reads “The Student Birthplace of America’s Civil Rights Movement.” When we often think of student activism and community building, urban communities usually come to mind. The research on rural student activism and how it develops and thrives is not in many journals or books, and it should be. Farmville was indeed the “Student Birthplace,” as Heather Lettner-Rust points out when “On April 19, 1951, a black ninth grader in a squalid segregated school, initiated a student strike of the educational inequities.” More than 60 years later, Heather is working with her college students at Longwood University in Farmville, educating them on this past student activism. She also helps them develop ways of researching and connecting, in meaningful conversational ways, with their local Town Council by having them invite the Council to a dinner after doing extensive research on them. The only agenda for the dinner was for the students to get to know their Town Council. Lettner-Rust argues that medieval French rhetorician Madeliene de Scudéry’s “On Conversation,” focusing on the rhetorical power of private conversations in politics, was quite applicable to Farmville today. Southerners in rural communities value relationships that grow in trust through these types of conversations. These dinner partners made up of students and the Town Council were comprised of conversations centered on “the civic mission of the town.” Students were able to achieve Scudéry’s rhetorical motive of achieving positive civic relationships through polite conversations.
Through these dinner exchanges, students began to perceive themselves less as students and more as citizens of the town. The results of these conversations were that students joined town committees, created town council biographies on their website, and proposed ways to “increase pedestrian and bike traffic downtown”
3 Reflections | Volume 13.2, Spring 2014 by suggesting places for bike racks. What we witness in both the interview with Dr. Peeples and this article are specific ways of getting to know communities in Southern rural settings to build relationships and get things done whether it be helping with Civil Rights Activism within African American rural communities or strengthening small town and university ties. Those ways are often grounded in invitations to conversations that lead to improving these communities. Rural communities indeed have something to teach us as do those who research these communities. Candace and Heather were unaware of each other’s research on Farmville before this issue, and they now correspond. Serendipity happily strikes again.
We’ll leave the South now and head North to Chicago with Veronica Oliver’s article “Recognizing One Another in Public: Reconsidering the Role and Resources of an Enclave.” When I taught Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, I used to have students read the 1940 Supreme Court Case Hansberry v. Lee and the Chicago Racial Restrictive Covenants documents, so students would understand what African Americans residents endured during this time. This historical context of this play is critical for today’s students. Cabrini- Green is part of that history, as Veronica Oliver points out in her article, “Recognizing One Another in Public: Reconsidering the Role and Resources of an Enclave” when she provides the historical context via David Fleming: “Construction of these public-housing units began in 1941 in response to the continual migration of African Americans from the South and returning veterans after World War II.” Whereas in the past, it was more difficult to study how African American residents in Chicago developed coalitions to fight against Restrictive Covenants, today, with Cabrini-Green, Oliver and others have an opportunity to analyze “the digital paper trail of residents of the Cabrini-Green public-housing complex.” What such digital paper trails provide is a way for Oliver to demonstrate the complexities of how Cabrini-Green residents succeed in “building a network of interconnected coalitions” and use their enclave as the central point of publicity to counter how others outside this community publicly represent them in negative ways. Oliver takes to task contemporary public sphere theorists like Catherine Squires with a particular emphasis on public-housing residents’ use of “publicity” and “public artifacts” focused on their location and their acute knowledge of developing inner-community coalitions and beyond. These residents’
4 Editor’s Introduction | Cristina Kirklighter testimonies on the cabrini-green.com website helped counter the negative dominant discourse of their community. As Oliver concludes in her article, “Residents of Cabrini-Green prove exemplary in their capacity to exploit their own position, one vexed by institutional racism, to expose not only local but also wide-reaching systematic inequalities.” With my daughter now living in Chicago, this article is particularly meaningful to me and a visit to Cabrini-Green is in order.
We’re moving farther North as we enter Michigan in “Helping to Build Better Networks: Service-Learning Partnerships as Distributed Knowledge Work.” In one of my undergraduate classes last semester, I asked students to create blogs focusing on how community literacy organizations used social media. I was amazed at what they found all over the world. Coincidentally, what came around about this time was a manuscript focused on a relatively new focus on service-learning, where “service-learning teachers are turning to digital media production as a new method of service.” And, the manuscript subsequently came back with excellent reviews and here we are with this article. This couldn’t be serendipity happening once again. What I particularly liked about this article is the empowering elements for students as they bring their community expertise to the stakeholders while simultaneously acknowledge the “community networks that pre-exist them.” The article creates a nice blend of the scholarship focusing on “emerging technologies in service-learning and community-based projects” with how this scholarship is enacted within FYC service-learning courses at Michigan State, particularly with an illustrative example of Eric, “an elementary school art teacher who creates digital documentaries with his students.” Such illustrative examples are important for our journal, and we encourage this blend of scholarship with real applications. It is what a journal devoted to public rhetoric, civic writing, and service- learning should do.
Now, on to the Book Reviews with Moira Ozia’s review of Democracies to Come: Rhetorical Action, Neoliberalism, and Communities of Resistance. The opening of this review fits nicely with many of the article/ interview themes in this issue: “Community literacy workers and publicly engaged teachers of writing have long been concerned with questions not only of learning, but also of social change, equity,
5 Reflections | Volume 13.2, Spring 2014 and justice.” Certainly, we see this in Candace’s interview with Dr. Edward Peeples and his activism within and outside his classrooms. Indeed, Heather Rust’s quote from Freire that calls out universities who are “foreign” to its cities, speaks to the need for a book such as this one that critiques universities, as well as other locations in their “benevolent” elements that end up “reproduce[ing] capitalist and colonist orders.” Instead Riedners sees the importance within this work of students engaging in difference and educators employing reflective praxis to question power structures.
I’m particularly pleased that we had the opportunity to review Sister Elaine Richardson’s book, PHD to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life. When I was a graduate student, I read Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, and it changed my perspective on the value of lived experience in academic writing. If you’re wondering why my introductions to these journal issues have a personal flair, well Victor Villanueva is largely responsible, as well as Montaigne, Lynn Bloom, Ruth Behar, and a few others. As Mariana Grohowski says in her book review, writing the personal helps us see in Richardson’s memoir someone who is not “an agentless victim but as one who learns best from lived experience.” The hard road with drugs, prostitution, early motherhood, etc. teaches one to survive and thrive in oftentimes challenging academic environments. Language, culture, and history need to take a more prominent place in academia and, maybe, books such as Elaine’s, demonstrate how integrating one’s lived experiences into all three, benefits our colleagues and our students. If more of this took place in universities and colleges, we might just witness more collegial environments in and out of the classroom.
Last but certainly not least, we end with Steve Park’s Gravyland. Many of you may know Steve as the former Editor of Reflections and the fine job he did while in this position. I’ve known Steve for years, and we’ve worked on a few projects together. What I like about Steve is he’s quick to tell you what he’s done wrong and work to change the situation for the better. I suspect this is a driving force on why he’s been successful and why Gravyland is such an important work in demonstrating how he has worked to empower community members’ voices in Philadelphia. As Kelly Langan states, he “generously gives
6 Editor’s Introduction | Cristina Kirklighter the community sixty pages in his book “for their own writing.” In other words, it’s not just about him; it’s about the multiple voices of the communities he has served. Unfortunately, in academia, we see many faculty who do not get the work we do in communities (work that Steve has devoted most of academic career to). There are some of us in academia who believe in Freire’s quote from many years ago appearing in Heather’s article “A University foreign to its city, superimposed on it, is a mind-narrowing fiction […] The university that is foreign to its context does not speak it, does not pronounce it.” Gravyland “speaks it” and “pronounces it” and for this, we are grateful. I leave you with these thoughts and enjoy the issue.
7 “Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?” An Interview with Dr. Edward Peeples
Candace Epps-Robertson, Michigan State University r. Edward H. Peeples’ career as an activist and academic spans some Dforty years and reads like a how-to on combining scholarship and activism. Just as amazing as his career was the journey to it. Growing up in the south entrenched in Jim Crow, one might assume that Peeples would have continued down the path of the status quo; however, his memoir, Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey thorough Segregation to Human Rights Activism (University of Virginia Press, 2014) recounts his story of learning whiteness and then standing firm against them.
Ed Peeples was born on April 20, 1935 in Richmond, Virginia. Most of his formative years were spent in Richmond, the former home to the capital of the Confederacy. Here, Peeples would attend public schools, watch his parent’s interactions with blacks, and learn how race mattered: “…the preponderance of my whiteness education took place in Richmond, and the basic message was the same. I can
8 “Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?” | Candace Epps-Robertson
Dr. Candace Epps-Robertson and Dr. Edward Peeples recall sensing as early as about age five how much race mattered to adults” (12). His “whiteness education” was certainly not bound to the four walls of his home, and Peeples learned early on that the purpose of Jim Crow and the very institution of race, was tied to power and control, not biology. Reflecting on the psychological impact of segregation, Peeples recounts “Jim Crow did not segregate us whites bodily from blacks as much as it partitioned our minds from their reality” (14). Peeples would spend the rest of his life working to break these partitions.
Peeples would return to Richmond in 1953 to enroll in Richmond Professional Institute (RPI) after a brief period of time spent working in Ohio after high school graduation. Little would he know, but RPI would be a space where he would gain exposure to ideas, theories, and perhaps most importantly, people, who would challenge everything he’d learned about the performance of race. Peeples credits part of his consciousness- raising to a sociology professor, Dr. Alice Davis, who knew how to ask questions about race, societal standards, and injustices, and guide her students into fruitful debate. If the seeds for his commitment to racial justice were sewn in his early years through observations of his family and community, then one could say that he began to bud as an activist during his time at RPI: “As such mind-
9 Reflections | Volume 13.2, Spring 2014 expanding experiences at RPI took hold, so did my will to act upon them” (46).
A committed and enthusiastic young RPI student athlete, one of his first activist moments would occur on campus. In his memoir he recounts the story of when the Gallaudet College basketball team came to RPI for a game. Gallaudet’s bus driver, a young black man, was refused entry to the cafeteria for a meal after the drive. Peeples made a phone call to the business manager of the college and tried to appeal on the driver’s behalf. The response he received was that because of the law (segregation), the driver could eat the food but could not go through the cafeteria line nor eat in the cafeteria. Peeples credits this moment as his tipping point:
Hanging up the phone, it occurred to me that the linchpin of segregation was the “separate but equal” doctrine, the contention that the wall between the races entailed no inequalities for blacks. Here was a classic example of the absurdity of this claim. As a twenty-year-old white southerner I finally saw the lie in utter clarity. (49)
What he would do next would in many ways become the blueprint for his activism, he surveyed the situation, took stock of his resources, and acted: “If they would not treat our guest with the dignity he deserved, I could at least raise the price of segregation” (49). Peeples took the driver to a classroom and would then go back into the cafeteria line three times, to gather all of the choices the driver would have had if he’d been able to go through the line himself. He delivered the driver’s meal telling him, “It’s all yours, all three trays are yours. It cost them three times more to do you this way” (50). Peeples would spend the next few years as a student, basketball player, and nurturing his growing interests in social justice.
After a brief time in the Navy, Peeples would return to Richmond in September of 1959 to work for the Department of Welfare. His commitment to social justice was not tempered by a full time job as he still found time to participate in the growing number of sit- ins, demonstrations, and protests against segregation. Peeples would decide to pursue graduate school as a means of further developing
10 “Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?” | Candace Epps-Robertson his skill-set as an organizer and seeker of social justice. He sought an interdisciplinary Masters program in human relations and in 1961 was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. While he relocated for his studies, one of his largest social justice battles was brewing back at home.
Just sixty miles southwest of Richmond, Prince Edward County refused to fund its public schools and closed them for five years, 1959- 1965 to resist integration. The white community responded with the creation of a private segregationist academy. Efforts in the black community ranged from crash courses, church relocation programs, to a one-year Free School established by the Kennedy administration. Despite the distance, Peeples began working in Prince Edward, conducting interviews with ardent segregationists and collecting data on the disparities between the black and white communities. His 1963 Master’s thesis, “A Perspective of the Prince Edward County School Issue,” was the first study conducted of the social condition of the community that was not sympathetic to segregationists. He also became a documentarian, taking hundreds of photos in the county to document the disparities between black and white schools. His work in Prince Edward was not limited to the academy; he assisted with the organization of a grassroots organization, the Richmond Committee of Volunteers to Prince Edward, a group that sought to bring recreational activities to the children. His work in Prince Edward also included supplying allies of the black community with information he was able to gather from white segregationists who assumed he was on their side. His stories of the time he spent in Prince Edward are filled with the terror and hope that marked so much of the Civil Rights Movement.
Upon the completion of his Master’s degree, Peeples would teach sociology and anthropology courses at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. Intrigued by the developments he saw in interdisciplinary programs in the behavioral sciences, he would attend the University of Kentucky for his doctoral degree. Despite the move to Kentucky and the opportunity to cast a wider net for jobs, Peeples would return to Richmond.
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Returning to the very place that ignited his spirit for social justice, Peeples found himself in the frontlines of developing a university when a merger between Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia would birth Virginia Commonwealth University. Peeples recounts this as a particularly exciting moment: “Beginning in the summer of 1968, a little army of pioneers set about the grunt work of building a new university…We just plunged into it trusting our collective experience and best instincts. We dreamed big and worked hard” (145). Peeples would relentlessly crusade to recruit black students and faculty to this new institution, but his work would not stop there. The mere admittance of black faculty and students was, of course, not enough to change the minds and actions of the Old South, and when problems and issues arose, Peeples continued the fight.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Peeples at his home in Richmond. We sipped sweet tea, and he told stories about working against racism, oppression, and working for goals that are larger than one’s self. I listened to his stories and had the pleasure of asking questions and learning from someone whose very life embodies many of the theories we read about social justice work and community engagement. Dr. Peeples’ work and scholarship carry important messages for those in rhetoric and composition who are committed to anti-racist pedagogies and community engagement. His story is one of perseverance and a relentless critique of the institution of race. For those of us committed to social justice, his life and work remind us that the journey can start, and often should, right in our own backyard.
Candace Epps-Robertson (CER): Ed, we share lots of connections. We are Southerners, Virginians, and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) graduates, although it was Richmond Professional Institute (RPI) when you were there, but for those who don’t know the story that was told so poignantly in your book, Scalawag, can you tell me about how you arrived at this moment? How did you come to write your book?
12 “Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?” | Candace Epps-Robertson
Edward H. Peeples (EHP): Well, I had been an activist and an academic, and among my writings were stories I’d written. I’d accumulated several dozens of them. I was first an activist in Prince Edward County during the school closing era and ended up becoming a documentarian of the school closing era and writing a Master’s thesis on the school’s closing. This was the first treatise of the school closing that was sympathetic to desegregation, and it was finished in April of 1963. That thing lay fallow for a long time, and I also took photographs of all the schools at the time. I won’t go into the detail of the Prince Edward school closing, but nobody would look at the photographs, nobody would look at the thesis except a very few insiders who were sympathetic to the problems of the black families in the county and the children. But by 2004, it was the fifth anniversary and people started to turn toward it and turn toward my other knowledge about race relations, the Brown decision, and so forth. A succession of media, even national media, local media, students, organizations, and all kinds of people started showing up at my door. My material ended up online thanks to Ray Bonis and others at the VCU libraries archive, and the Cabell library. I became well known through that Prince Edward material online.
One day I got this letter from Nancy MacLean. She was the Chair of History at Northwestern University and she said, “Can I come see you?” She showed up on my front steps, and I welcomed her in and we became friends. She asked to see some of my stories. She looked at them and apparently she thought this deserved to be a book. She accounts for this in the Introduction of the book in better detail than I, and she said in so many words that she would adopt me as her oldest graduate student. I don’t think she’s ever had any graduate students in their seventies, but she did, and for seven years we worked together, and she beat me about the ears and head until I learned the lessons of writing a narrative, and she was beautiful about it! She’s a brilliant woman and has written other books and some to come that are going to have, I hope, a tremendous impact because they are about white supremacists ideology and its perseverance out of the segregation era into modern conservatism. She is a person I admire. Later on we added Virginia historian James Hershman who is well known in Virginia for his understanding of Massive
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Resistance and segregation, just a wonderful person and brilliant scholar on these events. He wrote the Afterword. Together McLean’s Introduction and his Afterword put my memoir, my little tale of woe and joy, in context with social movements in the contexts of the events of my time in Virginia.
CER: Many times when I first started my academic research on Prince Edward, which would have been around 2008, no matter who I spoke with they all asked: “Have you met with Dr. Peeples?” As you know, my mother’s family is from Prince Edward County, so I grew up with these stories, with this history. I knew about the school closings from my family’s lived experiences, but I didn’t know your scholarship existed.
EHP: Is that right? Did you know R.C. Smith’s book?
CER: I did know that book.
EHP: He was working on it while I was working on my thesis. I did contact him, but we never got together because we were preoccupied. His came out a couple of years later and he didn’t dwell on the same things I did. He was a journalist from, I think, the Norfolk newspaper. I didn’t have resources. I got a nice, little, tiny grant from the University of Pennsylvania. I don’t know if the story is in the book about Martin Chworowsky finding me the money, because he knew I wouldn’t do any other Master’s thesis. It’s a good thing I did. I had to borrow a car, didn’t even own a car, my father-in-law loaned me a car. I spent a lot of time on the road between Philadelphia and Prince Edward and Richmond and Farmville but not only Farmville. I think that people forget that two-thirds of the population doesn’t live in Farmville. All the programs were centered in Farmville and so the rural folks were isolated. I interviewed all over the county for my Masters thesis and took pictures of every school because whites told me that having built the more modern brick high school for blacks had made separate but equal now equal, and of course, it didn’t. Even the dollar amount spent on the facilities was not equal, and I took pictures of every one of them. I had to get a lawyer to get the data from the State Department of
14 “Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?” | Candace Epps-Robertson
Education. They didn’t want us to know. I passed this on and collaborated a lot with Dr. Rupert Picott, head of the Virginia Teachers Association, which was the black teachers organization. He was a powerful and remarkable man. He was a great hero of mine, and he funded me to do some of this stuff. When I say funded, I mean like three hundred dollars, but that went a long way. I was able to hire students part time to go down to the Department of Education to transcribe data, which we used and published online eventually, and it sold people on the fact that equality had not come with separate but equal.
CER: Can we back up for a minute? Often, when people learn about my research and work in Prince Edward, they ask what draws me to Prince Edward. For me, there are two answers. Number one, it is home, and two, as an academic interested in race, language, and community engagement; the history there is phenomenal. If you would, tell me what drew you to Prince Edward in the first place?
EHP: Well, like you say, in summary of what you say there, it is a museum piece for the American trial on race and that attracted me. I love my Virginia. I love everything about it, except it’s like having a spat with your lover. You can love somebody and still hate what they do: “Pick up your clothes. Quit letting things hang around. Put that back where it belongs.” When I think of democracy and the way Virginia was during segregation I think, let’s put that back where it belongs, straighten up in here.
I was attracted to cleaning up my own house. I’d been in the Navy, and it made an impression on me. There was a big billboard outside of the base in North Chicago where just outside the gate that said, “Power for Peace.” Now, I was told the reason we needed power for peace was because I was supposed to defend our country as we roamed the globe to defend democracy. I went to the military, and they didn’t send me abroad, I served at home, but when I came home I was embarrassed. I’d been serving in a military that was supposed to extend democracy around the world and what was happening in my own state was inconsistent.
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Farmville/Prince Edward is also part of central Virginia in many ways. For the longest time people in Prince Edward would come to town (Richmond) to shop. They’d come in for lunch and stuff like that. As a boy I always went through Farmville on the way to Lynchburg. My mother, if I was good, would take me to get ice cream in Farmville, so it was no strange place.
When I went down there (Prince Edward) as a volunteer, the story is in the book, it’s too long to retell now; I grew attached to certain people. I saw how resilient they were, how they showed such courage in the face of such humiliation and deprivation and so you couldn’t help but leave a little love there and take a little love back with you. I volunteered to organize the Prince Edward County Volunteers of Central Virginia and got my friend Ruby Clayton Walker to help. She came from humble beginnings in New Kent County and was the star of her community and never stopped being a star in my mind. We partnered in so many things. Her roommate at Virginia State University was from Prince Edward County, and so the circles were intertwined. Prince Edward was still part of my neighborhood.
CER: You say something a few times in the book when you talk about your experience in Prince Edward, and you say that you had to learn how you were going to enter the space and the conversation as a white man. That’s something that I don’t have any experience with, being a white man…
EHP: (interrupts) Well, it ain’t all that great! (Laughs)
CER: But oftentimes when I first began going into Prince Edward, if people didn’t recognize me by my family’s name, or if they picked up on me being an academic, first, they were often suspicious. They want to know what I’m there for and what I want to do. I wonder if you could talk a bit about what that experience was like for you, realizing that for the average black person in Prince Edward County you didn’t look like an ally. How did you reconcile with that?
16 “Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?” | Candace Epps-Robertson
EHP: Yeah, most of the people who made trouble for the African Americans there had pale faces, you know. Yes, you’d be suspicious. Well, first of all, I knew from my experience in organizing that you don’t just descend on somebody, anybody, and land in on their turf and start telling them what to do. So I went to my good friend, Reverend Gene Pickett, a Unitarian minister, who was a great hero of mine for standing up against closing schools. See, they wanted to close every school in Virginia. He lived a life under terror. We think of Virginia as a gentile place, but you couldn’t have convinced him or his wife from the bomb threats on the telephone at the First Unitarian Church, which was on the campus of VCU. I went to see him, and he, of course, affirmed the important principle: don’t descend on anybody without an invitation. So I waited for some ideas about how to meet people and so forth. One day, Helen Baker was representing the American Friends Service Committee, and she was a community organizer. She was African American and a Virginian, from Suffolk. She came to the Richmond Council on Human Relations and told the story of what they were doing, the American Friends Service Committee, and I said, “Helen, what can folks like us in Richmond who have little resources, do?” She said, “Come down and we’ll get you started.” So I organized the group (Volunteers of Central Virginia), and she put the signs up and introduced me to people.
I got deeper and deeper into the community and met Reverend L. Francis Griffin. I grew to know Rev. Griffin early on, and we began to sometimes meet here in Richmond and have lunch. There wasn’t any place we could go and sit down together, so we’d go to Thalhimers, go get a deviled crab, and take it down to the Capital Square and sit down on a bench. Then the cops would come along and ask us to get up. They didn’t arrest us or anything, but they didn’t like its unusual nature for me to be sitting with a black Reverend General. What white cop wouldn’t want to protect their own against a famous [black] Reverend General who had been a decorated hero in WWII? (Laughs)
CER: He was quite a force in Prince Edward County.
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EHP: Quite a force all over Virginia. He inspired us all. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) youth council had a tribute to him, and they asked me to talk about “A Day with Rev. Griffin,” and I was honored to do that. What a man he was. He was an intellectual. He and I would talk about the books of the day. He read sociology and anthropology; he’d done it all. He was not just a country preacher. He could whip out the Bible and create big sounds with it, but he was also an intellectual. I loved him dearly. He’s my next proposal for a spot on Monument Avenue!
CER: What I’m hearing from you and the experience in Prince Edward is that you had to learn to listen to this particular community.
EHP: Oh yes. I already knew I had to listen. I knew the principle and I applied it here.
CER: I know from reading your book and from our conversations that there were other social justice efforts you organized and other ways you demonstrated your commitments to equality. Can you talk about some of those?
EHP: Well, one of them that I think was important was during the post civil rights era, if there was such a thing. There are scholars that argue that the civil rights movement is a long, long continuum. When the 1970s came, the various separated caucuses developed, the Black caucus here, the Women’s caucus there, the Disabilities caucuses here, the Latino caucuses there, and the LGBT caucuses, the question arose: Don’t we still have common concerns? I’d always been in favor of solving the caucus landscape with a coalition. I conceived of this as a coalition in which we would come together when we could and go our separate ways when we couldn’t. I proposed it to the Richmond Council on Human Relations (RCHR), and I laid it out at Main Street Grille, which was radical central. RCHR was a chapter of the Virginia Council on Human Relations (organized around 1956), which was the state organization of the South wide Southern Regional
18 “Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?” | Candace Epps-Robertson
Council, which was organized much earlier. I’ve forgotten the date. We ended up organizing the coalition, and I think the story is told in the book. It lasted for twenty years under the able leadership of Wayne Young for a decade, a hillbilly community organizer, (he’s mentioned in the acknowledgements), and then Beth Marschak who’s been a leader in so many progressive things in our community. I think the Council played a role for about twenty years.
I advised the people who were organizing The Peace Education Center initially, but I didn’t build the structure. It took a lot more to do that. I couldn’t be seen as being a part of creating that, although I did connect people. People would always call me and say, “Edward, who do I talk to?” I would always have a list; in fact I keep a long list, a binder that has every name of every activist that I’ve ever known, in particular in Virginia, but elsewhere across the South, because I roamed the South for other things like the Encampment for Citizenship. There’s two chapters in the book about its influence on me and my influence on it, I guess you might say. It was very important in training and leadership, and there’s a lot of famous people who have been a part of it. I was greatly inspired by it. I traveled the South recruiting kids for that and also a variety of other things. There is no such thing as “a guy” organizing anything, but one of my skills was talking people into cooperating.
CER: So you are a rhetorician, also? (Laughs)
EHP: Is that what it is? (Laughs)
CER: Yes, that’s a part of it!
EHP: Within a lot of contexts, I organized stuff, but it usually was after an assessment of a need, and of potential, and of resources known.
CER: That seems to be a most useful formula for thinking about community engagement.
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We’ve talked about who you are as an activists, and your work as an organizer. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about who you were in the classroom. One of the stories from the book that will forever haunt me was the story you tell about the Klansman coming into your classroom. You write, “Suddenly my gaze fixed on a large figure sitting in the back row wearing a white robe with a St. Andrew’s cross over the heart, eyes peeking out at me through a tall white pointed hood” (111). That hooded figure is supposed to represent doomsday and terror, but you raised some really interesting points about using that as a teaching moment. I don’t know what I would have done in that moment. Could you talk about that instance and who you were in the classroom? You seemed to be very radical for that particular time period.
EHP: Well, I tell you. To be radical in those times means you had to practice living with terror. You had to be acquainted to living with terror and threat in order to know what the likely outcome was going to be. In other words, when that person came in there, I already had been threatened many times. I’d gotten calls on the phone and this, that, and the other, and was personally accosted, so I just kind of felt that nothing was going to happen. It was in a confine, and there must have been compliance in the room with this act. Somebody let him in and I just said to myself, “I’m not going to let it rule me.” I’ve always had a habit of taking situations and converting them into teaching moments. I did that as a parent. You can’t be naive about what’s going to happen to you, You’ve got to be ready for surprises. One of the things you learn about being yourself, you call it radical, I call it being myself, is that there is a whole spectrum of how people deal with you when you are an unusual individual. There’s the cold shoulder, the marginalization, the scowling, verbal insults, losing your economic security, kicking you out of your apartment, all the way over to assaulting you physically. That’s the spectrum deployed in making a totalitarian system work. If people in the society do any one of those and it’s aided by the silence of the well-meaning people, I’ve forgotten what King and other philosophers said about people who are indifferent. But that’s the way white people in the South were. There were a certain number of white people who were sick with racism, who needed to have white supremacy to fill a void. There’s a kind of a racist
20 “Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?” | Candace Epps-Robertson
for whom it’s so intrinsic to their nature that they just couldn’t learn anything about it, but there’s always some exception in every group that we like to generalize about, and the vast number of white people in the South were ignorant about race, but well meaning. In other words, they would be outraged to see a beating, but they would never step in. I think I treated that in the book a little bit. They also didn’t approve of most of the outrageous behavior. I knew from talking to people in Mississippi at the time of the Klan there, that they didn’t approve of the Klan, but they didn’t know how to stand up to it. The government and politics didn’t know how to stand up against it, and some of them, like Bull Connor, was probably one of the sick racists. I guess I’ve kind of gotten away from the original point, but I was trying to make these distinctions between people, the real crevice of social psychology was race, and I sought to be a teacher in that respect.
If you’re asking about survivability in the classroom well, I didn’t survive all the time. I got canned! I tried to teach a course on race relations at RPI; I think it’s in the book, when I had in a black minister, and he was my guest. He told a story about how he as a young man had to leave the South to go North for opportunity, for education, and he came back, fortunately because he was a brilliant man, a famous local minister, your family would have known him. He also taught at Union Theological School.
CER: Yes, I remember this story. The Chair of the Sociology department complained about your having a black man come and speak to your class, and your request to teach that course again in the spring was denied.
EHP: So I didn’t survive all of those things, yeah I wasn’t happy about it and it was disgusting and I felt hurt that I wasn’t appreciated.
In class I had one advantage; I was the guy who gave the grade. Now, I never used it that way. I accepted students, and as I said in the book, I tried to avoid being heavy-handed. I always thought the classroom would be a safe place, but you would have to contend with data. The great thing about my field is that the data was all self-evident. If all you do is pull out the differential
21 Reflections | Volume 13.2, Spring 2014 statistics in health, race, ethnicity, and gender, and it speaks for itself. I didn’t have much of a job to do, so the students were civil to me and also, the society was changing a bit and they were hearing it from elsewhere. So I was just another voice about it, but it was a wild time. As time went on, people started to see what I was all about, and it became more comfortable for me. I never had people stand up and scream at me or anything like that. There was a certain civility in the university that people respected, and of course, they ultimately knew that they couldn’t go but so far with the guy who gave the grade. That’s sort of how I was looked at as a teacher. Of course, I knew a lot of people did hate me, like other faculty. They literally hated me, and I got a lot of silent treatment for many years. That marginalization was what gentleman do. You know, they don’t wear hoods, their hoods are colorful, and they wear them at graduation. There’s a lot of intellectual racism. They call it intellectual, born out of these think tanks. Think of the stuff they pump out and that’s where the average Joe is getting.
Also, I had a lot of self-doubt. I mean, am I right to be doing this, at this pace? I felt right about it, I didn’t know whether we could win, that was an early feeling of mine. It took a lot for King and some of the others to convince me that we were going to win, because everything around me was always saying we were losing. Desegregation was always loosing because if you made a little break through here, there’d be kind of a rush of the water into it to do it over. The sixties and seventies were like that. When they got to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the subsequent four or five years, we had a lot of intense realignments, and then the whites got a second breath and started stepping it up again.
The interesting thing was the right wing think tanks (or thoughtless tanks as I would put them) started creating devices to speak about race that were euphemism and code words. They were really pumping it out, and they were calling themselves intellectuals. It was out of the tradition of James Jackson Kilpatrick and many others. Kilpatrick went to work for the National Review for Buckley. Buckley at first was open about white supremacy, until he finally saw it was embarrassing, and he
22 “Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?” | Candace Epps-Robertson
hid it and quit allowing it to be said and tried to act like it wasn’t an issue. The same with Kilpatrick. He started to mop up around the mess he’d made, and so they devised this new ideology, and guess who’s writing about it? Nancy MacLean! She’s already written part of it. It’s in her last book, and its going to be great, because it will take us right into this 21st century where white supremacy 3.6 is the operating system.
CER: One of the reasons why I tell people that the story of Prince Edward is so important from a historical perspective is because just as you said, some of these arguments are still being made. I was looking at some old speeches from Senator Harry F. Byrd, and the type of fear mongering he was using to generate an audience and followers is the same thing we hear on the news today, “This is about citizenship!” “If you’re a patriot, then you’ll act now!” There’s a particular type of citizenship that’s being advanced there.
EHP: I want to remind you that this [Virginia] was the seedbed for all of the recalcitrance in the other states. How did they learn to close schools? How did they open segregation academies? How did they learn to write pamphlets? All the other things came out of Kilpatrick, who was the education director for a state agency. The agency had a euphemism that it was for liberty and freedom and all that, but what it meant was it was the cause for preserving segregation. The more militant one in Mississippi was created based on Kilpatrick’s model. It was all over the South; everywhere I went there were a lot of references to Prince Edward. We were the factory for all of the products that were used around the South; it was a leader in the Revolutionary period in the way it was; it was a leader in the slavery era in the way it was; it was a leader in the Civil War in the way it was; and it was a leader in the way it was in Reconstruction; it was a leader in the way it was in what other people call the Progressive Era, which wasn’t progressive with respect to race or eugenics, and then it was a leader in Jim Crow. So, we are the mother of precedents, not just presidents, I’m using a “c” when you may be using a t, if you know what I’m talking about, so we’re the mother of precedents with a “c” and it’s always been that way. (Laughs)
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Some of the students starting in 1969-70 were ready for something different, and I hope I conveyed that in the book. In this crowd of civil rights interests kids, there were as many whites as there were blacks.
CER: Any work that deals with the eradication of racism and racist ideologies can be both physically and mentally draining. You talk about having to learn to live with terror, but mentally, it can take a toll on you as well. I’m curious, what has helped to sustain you all of these years. What keeps you going?
EHP: There is acute and chronic illness associated with defense of justice. In the acute you run away and go sleep on somebody’s couch, go and watch some mindless television, or you read a novel. I don’t do those things because I get relief from Prince Edward terror by coming home and watching a documentary on Mussolini! That’s my escapism! (Laughs) My wife teases me about that, she says, “What are you going to do tonight? Watch Mussolini?” It’s escapism from the immediate thing. I don’t have to worry about Mussolini; they got him.
The acute is that you really do need to get out of the situation a little bit. You have to be mindful of yourself as an instrument. You’re an instrument of change if you look at yourself that way and for the long term, you have a lot of things to stay healthy for. The question is sometimes connected to the kind of person you are. Are you a person who is optimistic? Are you a person who’s pessimistic? Are you sarcastic? Do you look at things with sarcasm? You have to fashion solutions for yourself around the kind of person you are, but you do need relief. You need to rest. In Prince Edward, I would get so sick of hearing the white supremacist spewing out that after a few days, it would accumulate and I would get so morbid about it, and so pessimistic, and it would wreck my perspective about being on a journey toward something. I just thought of it as a hopeless chasm of wild animals. I’d come down to Richmond and sleep on somebody’s couch and have a crab cake or something and then I’d go back. I only needed one night, and then I could do it a little bit more. I think I have the kind of personality that I see it as everything is a
24 “Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?” | Candace Epps-Robertson
test, and I’m not sure all of the reasons why I hold up, but I guess I persisted. I’m close to eighty now, and ever since I was eighteen, this has been central to me, and I never seem to lose interest.
CER: You talk about how Virginia set so many precedents with regard to resisting integration. I wonder if you could talk about your dreams or hopes for Virginia with regard to becoming a leader for dismantling race. What can we do, given our history that might pave the way for other communities to confront and challenge race?
EHP: Once we were the mother of presidents, the best offered at that time. Today we are the mother of precedents, among the worst offered in our time. The question is, will we do better? It is hard to believe that we can with the prevailing leadership on life support provided by the plutocracy; the present celebration of ignorance by so many; and the dismal voter apathy. It may be that the leading role that Virginia once played in American history is ending. We have become a state where we simply want to be different like everybody else. So perhaps the best we can do now is to say we are all from Bland County. Who then, among our eight million, will step up and prove me too cynical?
CER: I hope we will. We’ve got a legacy of fearless leaders to follow. Ed, what message do you hope people take from your book?
EHP: I hope the stories told in my book somehow show how an ordinary guy with the help of a handful of patron saints rose above his beginnings and then outside the spotlight, found a way to make justice seeking a way of life. And if it could happen to me, why can’t it happen to many more? But some are reluctant to become engaged for a variety of reasons, one of which may be because they think that there is but one way to be a justice seeker. Not true. There is a job for everyone in the justice-seeking endeavor. Never mind that you think you don’t have the skills, education, resources, free time, courage, patience, fortitude, strength of character, self-confidence, speaking or writing ability, or you are not the right color, ethnicity, gender or social status. There are every imaginable combination and permutation in
25 Reflections | Volume 13.2, Spring 2014
justice seeking settings crying out for some kind of intervention. And there are infinite ways to weave this activity into one’s life. I pray that my book illustrates this.
But as one who has seen more than 60 years of what it takes just to change what was in my time, I know that public demonstrations and the appearances of high profile celebrities cannot in themselves end patterns of injustice. It is what happens after the Martin Luther Kings leave town. Only relentless pursuit of knowledge of the inner workings of injustice and the constant witness and action with these facts by a critical mass of dedicated local largely unknowns can, in the end, break the grip of the enemies of egalitarianism.
Justice seeking is not often a hard and lonely journey, nor are the rewards timely. So when prospects seem dim and thoughts of despair and foreboding creep into our head, it is comforting to know from history that the struggle for human equality and dignity is a multi-century movement, and we are really never alone. All the heroines and heroes of the ages stand with us.
Dr. Candace Epps-Robertson is a Virginia native who traces her roots back to Prince Edward County. She is a graduate of Syracuse University’s Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Program. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures at Michigan State University where her research focuses on social histories of rhetoric, African American rhetoric, and Critical Race Theory. Much of her current scholarship focuses on the school closure period in Prince Edward County, Virginia in the wake of Brown v Board of Education. Candace has a forthcoming article in Literacy and Composition Studies (March 2015) examining pedagogy as activism in The Prince Edward County Free School, 1963-1964. Her book manuscript, about the five-year school closure period in Prince Edward, examines the arguments and methodologies segregationists used to close the schools and the counter rhetorical responses made by grass roots organizations. In addition to her scholarship, she is active with The Robert Russa Moton Museum, a space dedicated to remembering and healing in Prince Edward County.
26 “Where is the Finish Line in the Race Race?” | Candace Epps-Robertson
WORKS CITED
Peeples, Edward H, and Nancy MacLean. Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism. Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Print
27 Plowing Fertile Ground in Farmville: Acknowledging a Rhetoric of Conversation
Heather Lettner-Rust, Longwood University This article analyzes the importance of conversation employed by students working with community stakeholders in a civic writing seminar. Acknowledging Lloyd Bitzer’s seminal work on the rhetorical situation and Burke’s concept of identification provides a strong background of the students’ understanding of the civic sphere; however, medieval rhetorician Madeleine de Scudéry’s (1683) provocative treatise, “On Conversation,” reminds us to expand the arena of civic discourse. Scholar Jane Donawerth’s recovery of Scudéry’s treatise suggests the power of private discourse as more useful than public rhetoric. This article concludes that theorizing the rhetorical situation alone proves inadequate to energize young rhetors’ discourse needed to engage public civic agencies and actors to action.
A university foreign to its city, superimposed on it, is a mind-narrowing fiction.[…] The university that is foreign to its context does not speak it, does not pronounce it. —Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart, p. 133
Have a conversation–a real conversation–with the friends who make you think, with the family who makes you laugh. —Eric Schmidt, CEO Google, Boston University Commencement Speech 2012
28 Plowing Fertile Ground in Farmville | Heather Lettner-Rust
ublic rhetoric, civic writing, and service-learning are among the many dynamic fields of growth for composition studies. PIn turn, public rhetoric and civic writing are indebted to the scholarship regarding pedagogy of service-learning in the fields of first year composition and professional writing. One of the motivations we share, as Thomas Deans explains in Writing Partnerships: Service-Learning in Composition, is “the prospect of students writing for an authentic audience beyond the classroom” (67). Writing for an authentic audience is invaluable work for any course, but in particular, writing seems a given for civic writing courses. Yet, how many students in civic writing or civic engagement courses actually immerse themselves in the audience for whom or to whom they are writing? With the relatively recent focus on writing for civic engagement seen by the growing number of commercially published textbooks for this select field, my concern is students who are left inventing their civic audience entirely.
Recognizing that visiting a civic public sphere is a complex endeavor— How do you locate ‘them’? Who are ‘they’? Is there a centralized ‘them’?—if our civic writing courses don’t find ways to immerse or at least invite our students to meet a civic body or audience, then our pedagogy runs the risks of asking young civic rhetors to invent the audience, never meeting or knowing them outside of digital spaces. While this invention might be a useful exercise for many civic writing classes, do we want to leave our students at such an early stage of enculturation. The focus of this article is a course in which students hosted a dinner with our town council thereby easing the students’ entrance into a foreign discourse community.
THE FERTILE GROUND OF FARMVILLE Longwood University is located in Farmville, a small rural Southern town, population 8, 216 (when the university is in session) in the heart of Virginia. This community owes it roots to farming, shipping, and history. For years its business was selling tobacco in large mid- 19th century warehouses, which now houses a sprawling furniture company. Farmville was a shipping town for goods moving from the mountains by rail and by bateau to port cities. General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia spent time in Farmville before the surrender in Appomattox. While there was no plundering by Grant’s army or
29 | lasting scars of the Civil War, the next century’s civil rights struggle remains a visible presence. On April 19, 1951 Barbara Johns, a black ninth grader in a squalid segregated school, initiated a student strike in protest of the educational inequities. Days later, she wrote a letter to NAACP lawyers, Oliver Hill and Spotswood Robinson, in Richmond, inviting them to Farmville to see the situation. The strike was the first of its kind for educational rights and eventually led to a lawsuit Davis vs Prince Edward Board of Education joining other lawsuits resulting in the Supreme Court decision of Brown vs the Board of Education (Smith). However, one action by local civic bodies left a deeper mark on the town. The Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors chose to join the state’s Massive Resistance effort against integration. We closed our public schools from 1959 to 1964. The “lost generation of Prince Edward” (Smith) is still recovering from illiteracy, poverty, and unemployment. Today, the school stands preserved as the Robert Russa Moton Museum, at the other end of town.
Our community is a blend of all these histories and haunts with the students literally in a 69-acre triangle at the center of the small town. Its size and location do not correlate to open doors for young eager citizens who live here for roughly eight semesters. From the town’s perspective, we might be still be the girls’ school on the hill. In 1839, Longwood’s first evolution was Farmville Female Seminary Association, a private, religious institution. It offered “English, Latin, Greek, French, and piano. The tuition fees were $20 for piano, $15 for higher English, $12.50 for lower English, and $5 for each foreign language” (Shackleford, 1955, p.3). By 1884, we shifted our mission to developing white female public school teachers as a State Female Normal School. We were “[t]he first teacher-training institution in Virginia . . . established by the Legislature” (Tabb, 1929, n. p.) Though we now have many more majors in the school in addition to our education department, we can still be seen as the college on the hill. Thus, understanding the audience(s) of these young rhetors began with research about the town and their current and past issues.
THE RHETORIC OF CIVIC ENGAGEMENT The call to understand audience to produce effective discourse is not a new one. In fact, when considered in light of the history
30 Plowing Fertile Ground in Farmville | Heather Lettner-Rust of composition, courses in writing for the public sphere are quite established. Graduates of the first American universities were required to ‘declaim’ their new knowledge to a public of the classroom, university graduates, or townspeople in speeches given around graduation (Murphy; Berlin; Johannesen). This tradition is a reminder of the early Greek academies of Isocrates, Plato, or even the Sophists, who charged their students with regular practice of public presentation to develop the art of (rhetorical) discourse and eloquence. Lately, American colleges have returned their curricular emphasis to public or civic engagement.
If the original call in composition sprang from Susan Wells’ seminal “Rogue Cops,” this course represents a re-growing call to action in composition to address the needs of students writing beyond the academy (see, e.g., Ervin; Shirley Wilson Logan’s response in 2006 to “What Should College English Be?”; Parks and Goldblatt; Weisser; and Welch, among others). In 2010, Mike Rose made a call for public writing instruction in graduate programs:
We could offer training—through a course or some other curricular mechanism—in communicating to broader audiences, the doing of rhetoric. . . . Students would learn a lot about media and persuasion and the sometimes abstract notion of audience. And they would understand rhetoric, the rhetorical impulse and practice, in a way that is both grounded and fresh. (p. 291-292)
The ‘doing’ of rhetoric is perhaps a call that undergraduate and graduate courses have come to know in service-learning, civic writing/engagement, and public rhetoric courses (Coogan; Deans; Herzberg; Rivers and Weber). And many are the calls for higher education to address the needs of their graduates for skills to participate in a healthy democracy (see ADP, AACU, Jacoby and Associates, and the work at Tufts University to name just a few).
My home institution joined this growing trend in 2001 with a mission to build “citizen leaders who are prepared to make positive contributions to the common good of society” (longwood.edu/ president/4731.htm) The capstone course (within which dinner arose) was designed to produce rhetorically sound writing for civic
31 | change by third and fourth year students at the precipice of exiting the university. With an eye towards civic issues, students are to work for the common good—writing and speaking for the good of the community.
A unique feature of the course is its interdisciplinary population. As a capstone experience, the course works by imitating the mixed population of a civic body.
No one person is the expert on every issue. Students are invited to contribute knowledge from their newly-found disciplinary expertise, listen deeply to each other, and transform their understanding of a public civic issue with an integrated perspective. This classroom laboratory is designed to model the speaking, listening, and composing of civic knowledge that should happen in any good civic organization.
My approach to staying “grounded and fresh” (using Mike Rose’s phrase), inviting the complexities of community work in this course, is to stay local. In past semesters, I have asked students to start with what they know, their own hometown, or something they have access—to our small college town. Students find a civic public issue to address it, either by advocating for a change or the status quo. This is a complex task but one that I have helped students navigate many times. As you can imagine, these performances--theirs and mine--are quite challenging. Over the years, student rhetors met with varying degrees of success. Some of the projects included encouraging recycling in restaurants, dissuading town officials from demolishing an historic church, soliciting donations of used toys and books for disadvantaged families, and collecting soccer equipment from the local youth soccer league for distribution in South America. Only one of these projects broke through to their stakeholders.
I was frustrated that students didn’t seem to get much ‘done.’ They had researched their chosen civic issue, the stakeholders involved, and the constraints that work for and against the student-rhetor in the issue. As Phyllis Ryder suggests, I moved students from their desks to the street in ways that entertain a study of not only multiple perspectives in public issues but of multiple publics they’ll encounter.
32 Plowing Fertile Ground in Farmville | Heather Lettner-Rust
We completed audience analysis grids which required students to label the audiences’ motivations, the exigencies as the audiences perceive it, and then what appeals students intended to use in fitting with the grid. I encouraged them to go home and walk the streets to find research not available on a database. Those who chose our town were encouraged to walk the streets, stop by the town manager’s office, or talk to people in the local stores.
As for a rhetorical education I initiated in the course, we attended town council meetings analyzing the rhetorical strategies of the speakers and the rhetoric of architecture and place. I held class in downtown spaces—on the sidewalk in front of First Baptist Church, the church Martin Luther King Jr. visited and the basement of which students gathered to organize pickets and protests, the steps of the courthouse that shuttered the schools during Massive Resistance, and students spoke with citizens involved in our Downtown Main Street improvement committee at our local coffee shop.
In one particular exciting case, a group of students, a team of students in nine majors, decided to raise funds for our local Civil Rights Museum and created the video, Rosa Parks Sat Down and Barbara Johns Stood Up (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRplXttn5xA). The students researched the museum’s history, met with the staff at the museum, and received approval to film the museum after hours. On their own time, they scripted, storyboarded, offered their ideas for class peer review, and shot the film. It was a humbling experience to watch the students energy and enthusiasm. The targeted audience was Oprah Winfrey. But the students’ research of Oprah was limited to her autobiographical interview, and the students video was not specifically tailored to Oprah. When this article went to press, the video had only 1,081 views. The distance between audience and rhetor was too large, after all our work on audience. Since this video, the Moton’s six galleries have been completed with grant funding.
A few of the other student rhetors with other projects would be heard; some were accepted into meetings with stakeholders, for which they and I were thrilled. “They actually listened to my idea!” “I just met with the superintendent of the county school and the Director of Finance about the grants I researched!” For many students, this
33 | foray into the public, civic sphere seemed to be an exercise, a fruitful one, but just an exercise.
THE POWER OF CONVERSATION Students’ heightened sophistications comes from reading the town as a text, reading town history deeply, and also by starting relationships that begin with ‘being there’ and ‘reading there.’ With this importance of ‘being there,’ I decided to have the entire class focus on our town.
I learned that finding and creating an entry point for civic action is less about inventing a reason to talk to town council and more about understanding stakeholders, constraints of the situation, and listening carefully. Being there, being aware, and entering this rhetorical situation requires more than simply analyzing rhetorical strategies. It takes a relationship, especially when students are to enter the public sphere and ‘perform.’ One recent event added to the kairotic moment for students to engage with town officials.
In 2011, Farmville was accepted into the Virginia Main Street program. The four points of this program, Organization, Design, Publicity, Economic Restructuring, centered on grassroots efforts to revitalize blighted areas (Robertson). This program had been brought to town by a collective of citizens and business owners who banded together after a series of letters to the local editor in the span of a week the summer of 2010 complaining about vacant storefronts, lack of parking, and the general economic direction of the town (Cook; Jamieson, Johnson et al; Paul; Watson). For the students to understand this bottoms-up approach, we read these letters and a collection of articles about Main Street programs; one in particular helped them see that citizens bringing citizens to the table can be done by facilitating workshops and charettes (Silverman, Taylor, and Crawford). We also read about urban demolition of historic black neighborhoods to make way for urban renewal in the nearby town of Charlottesville (home of University of Virginia) when citizens weren’t involved (Herman). Our goals were far more humble than saving historic neighborhoods or facilitating charettes, though I thought about it.
34 Plowing Fertile Ground in Farmville | Heather Lettner-Rust
Thus, I began to have the students focus the students more on the discourse and the actors in the town. We studied public policy decisions as they spun out in local town council meetings. We attended monthly civic meetings. The students had a subscription to the local paper to develop a working knowledge of town stakeholders and the context of issues. Stakeholders in this town hold many positions, so it’s important to read many parts of the slim paper to see where they appear, especially the reprint of the front page from 50 years ago, which is currently rebroadcasting the closed schools in the county. Learning about stakeholders, we found out the mayor joined the town council in 1976 and has been mayor since 1998. He was also a former fire chief of Farmville. One town council member (deceased recently) was the police chief during Robert Kennedy’s visit in the 1960s. The vice mayor, also my postal carrier, is a member of the First Baptist Church on Main Street (which Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy visited). In addition, the vice mayor was denied five years of education during Massive Resistance.
This particular semester, however, became a game-changer. I was introducing the complex relationship of the town and the university to the students as we prepared to attend the town council meeting that night. I informed the students that the town council met in the town manager’s office room for dinner before the public meeting, and I had tried to get the previous semester’s students into the dinner and was told there wasn’t enough room for the students and the council. One student boldly suggested we invite the council members to dinner.
Because I see value in ‘doing rhetoric’ in addition to using rhetoric for criticism, I told them I would find money for this event if they would go forward with this idea. And they did. They designed the invitations, planned the menu, secured parking, and escorted the members into a private dining room on campus (actually, the oldest dining room in town). The next month we had dinner during which council members were seated with four to five students at their own table. They met civic leaders that night.
They made lasting impressions. In fact, the next week’s editorial was about the potential energy from students at Longwood University that is untapped in town. 35 |
From the left, Mayor Sydnor Newman, seniors Wynne Walters, Lauren Smiley, Councilman Tommy Pairet, senior Meagan Greene. Picture by Ken Woodley, Editor of Farmville Herald, who was also seated at the table. 9.15.2011
The students were keenly aware of who they were speaking with. However, in many cases, this was the first time they sat face-to-face with a public official. It was the first time they sat for an extended time without asking a favor, suggesting an idea, or merely interviewing that candidate for information. For Lauren Smiley, a future teacher of high school mathematics, dinner was about seeing the town from an emic perspective: “I was able to see another side of Farmville instead of keeping within the bubble of Longwood University. We were able to share experiences we’ve had in Farmville and talk about new ideas we would all like to see for the town of Farmville.” For Blake Jarrell, a psychology major, there were larger implications: “The dinner got me interested in local politics and showed me that getting to know public figures can make long-lasting communication ties.” Some students made connections with town leaders which assisted them in civic projects the rest of the semester.
After the dinner, we attended the town council, and a student used the guest speaker option to thank them formally for their time. At the conclusion of the town council meeting, a council member reinforced the importance of the dinner. The March 9, 2011 minutes read: “Council member Whitus thanked [the] University . . . students
36 Plowing Fertile Ground in Farmville | Heather Lettner-Rust for hosting this evening’s dinner. He said the open dialogue was a wonderful idea, and he looks upon it as a way to build stronger ties between the Town and the University” (Hricko). A week and a half later, the town manager of 37 years, Gerald Spates, wrote me a letter stating:
In all the time I have been Town Manager, this was the first time I can remember having such a relaxing event, with such a fine group of young people. I think the Council members enjoyed this dialogue with your students. Your students are very well- informed, and it gave me a sense of satisfaction that our future with students like these, is in good hands.
The following successes in civic engagement represent the students’ ideas fertilized and harvested by understanding the town’s needs first. This work developed not from students’ well-researched, though objectivist interpretations of the town’s exigencies as Bitzer suggests, but from their perception of the town’s exigencies from the stakeholders’ point of view (Grant-Davie) gained by engaging in the relationship-building process of eating and having good conversations.
Five students joined the town Re-Districting Committee voluntarily that night at the town council meeting after hearing town council discuss this work and realizing the importance of this committee to the town and the civic body for future elections. Two students wanted other citizens to know the town council members in a more familiar way. Considering this opportunity to get to know their council and seeing the town website’s simple listing of contact info by the picture, they wanted personal and professional information listed in the town website. They interviewed each town council member (a logistical challenge, to say the least because the members’ employment ranges from full-time to retired and their ages from 50s to 80s) and wrote brief biographies for the town government website (http://farmvilleva.com/government/town-council-members). Those website biographies are up today.
Two other students wanted to increase pedestrian and bike traffic down town to increase spending at small businesses and to attract
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potential students to our university. Because the town had spent money on decorative brick and lights for downtown, they knew the town wanted more foot traffic. After they met with the town manager, they researched pedestrian traffic patterns to suggest places for bike racks. The students advised him on locations for bike racks downtown, making a map to mark the locations for future committee discussions.
Some of those bike racks are in place today. This one centered in the photo is placed by the old railroad station which welcomes pedestrians and horses on a new rails-to-trails system.
Finally, one student made a motion in the student government association (SGA) legislative committee to have a student member regularly attend the town council to maintain another line of communication between the students and the town. During this student’s successful run for SGA President, one of his initiatives was to strengthen the students’ ties with the town. While there isn’t a student representative currently at town council meetings, the SGA President did experience success later. The following winter students vandalized property by setting fire to a couch in the middle of a snow-covered street. A local fire engine got stuck in the snow while attempting to leave one emergency scene to attend to this one. This
38 Plowing Fertile Ground in Farmville | Heather Lettner-Rust action cost the town money and damaged the university’s reputation with the town. The SGA President sent a letter of apology to his previous invitee, the Town Manager Gerald Spates. The letter was warmly received (and well-written).
THE MEDIEVAL CONNECTION Because the civic projects developed so easily, my assumption was that something must explain the phenomenon. Chancing upon medieval rhetorician Madeline de Scudéry for another research project helped to unpack the power of that night.
Writing from inside 17th century French court, Scudéry’s rhetoric of conversation addressed a new vision of political power as private rather than exclusively public. She knew from being privy to the French court and as a woman operating within the salons of the day that there was much potential in the quiet interplay of conversation. Furthermore, she knew the fatal consequences of speaking imprudently in the public spheres of France and Italy. While one might draw parallels between the collective political power in medieval France and the collective power of a few hands in our town (we do have a sister city in France), it is certainly not fatal to speak publicly! And yet, it is certainly true that in a small Southern town, friendly conversation can go as far as noble birth or the public rhetoric of landed gentry.
Private conversation has power because it was and is a site of rhetorical skill involving the canons of invention, memory, arrangement, style, and most importantly delivery (Donawerth 310). We learn from Scudéry that conversation well-managed means changing the content and style according to audience. This maintenance will do more to serve the subject at hand than speaking too much or too little. Agreeing that it is impossible to come up with rules for good conversation, she does allow for some principles whose application is subject to the rhetorical situation.
Thus the Conversation ought to be equally natural and rational; though I must say on some occasions, that the Sciences must be brought in on a good grace, and that agreeable follies may
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likewise have their place, provided they be agreeable, modest and gallant. Insomuch as to Speak with reason, we may for certain affirm, that there is nothing that may be said in Conversation, in case it be manag’d with Wit and Judgment, and the party considers well where he is, and to whom he Speaks, and who he is himself. (Bizzell and Herzberg 772)
Scudéry’s description of the complicated civic sphere in private conversation is, I argue, what juniors and seniors are ready for. While it may sound simplistic to suggest they are ready for conversation, to embed their civic concerns carefully within a conversation is a new skill. They have been prepared by the academy to deliver information, less to engage an audience, less to negotiate this material in a more intimate setting.
And in fact, this conversation was a kairotic moment in their academic careers. As Emily Engelking, a pre-service elementary school teacher, wrote: “[W]e were able to break down barriers and get to know each other over a common thread . . . our stomachs. It was an opportunity to learn who the people of Town Council are as well as for them to learn who we are as people vs. just students.” The common thread these dinner partners shared was the civic mission of the town. After an education about the town, Emily’s rhetorical education was polished and mobilized to meet and get to know civic leaders. In line with Scudéry’s advice coincidentally, we avoided harping on the negative or extolling the virtues of the inconsequential like ‘clothing or poorly-behaved children.’ She suggested that good conversation can lighten the room, encourage good will, and reinvigorate those engaged.
We repeatedly stressed to town council members—and they asked— there was no agenda for the dinner. We were simply getting to know our town council. We were not there to “speak strictly according to the exigency of [our] Affairs” (Bizzell and Herzberg 767). We were there to learn more about them, to start a relationship—“to Speak in general, it ought oftener to be of common and gallant things, than of great Transactions” (772). In many cases, this was the first time students sat face-to-face with a public official. Caitlin Volchansky, a kinesiology and exercise science major, expressed an appreciation
40 Plowing Fertile Ground in Farmville | Heather Lettner-Rust for meeting members of the town and understanding the town from an emic perspective, “It was neat to get a policymaker perspective of the town we go to school in. By creating these ties, we’ve been learning so much about Farmville that we never knew.” Like Emily, she also spoke of an appreciation to act without the screen of the school or a professor, “For once, we were given the opportunity to directly communicate with the people of Farmville.” It was during this dinner that students transformed from student to citizen.
Scudéry’s assertion is that Conversation ought to be studied as we do books. Her point is that conversation functions as a book- learning “introducing into the world, not only Politeness, but also the purest Morals, and the love of Glory and Vertue” (Bizzell and Herzberg 767). Glory and virtue may have been a stretch during our dinner with town council, but it did invigorate the course. Had we digressed into complaints or engaged a hidden agenda, we may not have achieved our goal of establishing relationships with civic actors. From that dinner came such good will that we met Scudéry’s claim of the civilizing effect of conversation. Our goal was pure Scudéry in that we had the sophistic goal of pleasing our audience (Donawerth 309). In this semester, dinner shortened the distance between rhetor and audience. This activity facilitated better production of writing and speaking for social change and, interestingly enough, is supported by the work of a medieval rhetorician.
IMPLICATIONS All projects in this civic writing course required students to write for audiences outside the classroom. This “transactional writing” (Petraglia; Spinuzzi), writing that does what it is to do, pushes students to enter contexts with audiences that will receive the work rather than create writing for academic exercise, though exercise is vitally important. I have always required students to produce transactional writing. This time their work actually did what it was intended to do, and my conclusion is that it was helped by the power of conversation and connection.
In the following semesters, this dinner has become a standard part of my syllabus. Placed in the opening weeks of the semester, this dinner has become one of the methods of placing students in the
41 | civic, public sphere. Additionally, they read the bi-weekly local paper. We walk downtown to examine the town as a text, and they are encouraged to think of the visual and material rhetoric of the town scene from their perspective and a resident perspective. We attend each town council meeting, tour the local Robert Russa Moton Museum, and attend another local citizen group meeting. All of this to get them ready to write. At times, I question how much time outside the classroom should be given over within an advanced writing seminar. But for students to move to a citizen-subject position, there must be significant foot work, literally.
Currently, I include the readings of Scudéry to explicitly teach the rhetoric of conversation. We discuss the application of the rhetoric of conversation to rhetorical situations of any duration or location as they meet people in town or on campus. After all, when they enter the town to address civic issues, they have learned through their reading of the local paper and visiting other civic meetings that talking to one person in this town is talking to an invisible history connected by many invisible ties to many other individuals. It’s a lesson I hope they carry with them as the boundaries of town and gown are blurred here and when they enter their chosen home and work communities.
David Coogan’s argument in “Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhetoric” is that the work of service learning is not just about “rhetorical activism.” I would extend the same principle to the work of civic engagement. As he says, it’s about “rhetorical scholarship in the public sphere: a challenge to test the limits of rhetorical theory in the laboratory of community-based writing projects in order to generate new questions for rhetorical theory, rhetorical practice, and rhetorical education” (607). In this article, my aim was to explore the power of conversation for civic engagement—doing rhetoric—and to highlight the need for remembering the power of conversation in a rhetorical education. I conclude the experience and the article with the assertion that creating a personal connection among student rhetors and their stakeholders is well-advised. Personal connection is not a guarantee of success, but making space in our syllabi for conversation ‘filled
42 Plowing Fertile Ground in Farmville | Heather Lettner-Rust with Wit and Judgment’ may help students’ rhetorical education reach a satisfactory end.
Currently, I am putting this new emphasis to work within a different issue in town: hunger. After examining the town demographics, I realized we have a larger issue with hunger than you see at first glance. Of the 8, 216 mentioned previously as the population, almost 3, 000 in the census count are Longwood students. If those living below the government’s poverty threshold in Farmville is 34.6% (US Census Bureau 2010), then in reality that number is much higher. As such, sixty percent of our elementary school citizens are on free or reduced lunch. Having focused students on the complexity of hunger, who shall we dine with then?
Heather Lettner-Rust is an Assistant Professor of English at Longwood University. She teaches courses in the Rhetoric and Professional Writing program while she directs the composition program for the English department. She has published on piloting a civic writing course at Longwood, explaining the foundation of the course to colleagues, as well as teaching and learning in classrooms with video-streaming capabilities in Computers & Composition, Across the Disciplines, Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, and Interchanges in College Composition and Communication. Her current focus is developing interdisciplinary team- taught classes through a civic writing course which embeds students in the community to create a publishable text.
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WORKS CITED
Berlin, J. A. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984, Print. Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to Present, 2nd ed. Boston, MA: Bedford/ St. Martins, 2001, Print. Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 1.1 (1968): 1-14. Ebscohost. Web. 5. July 2011. Coogan, David. “Service Learning and Social Change: A Case for Materialist Rhetoric.” College Composition and Communication 57.4 (2008): 667-693. Print. Cook, Martha. Letter. The Farmville Herald. 23 June 2010: 1B. Print. Deans, Thomas. Writing Partnerships: Service Learning in Composition. Urbana, IL: CTE, 2000, Print. Donawerth, Jane. “As Becomes a Rational Woman to Speak: Madeleine de Scudéry’s Rhetoric of Conversation.” Listening to their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Ed. Molly Meijer Wertheimer, 1997. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. 305-319. Print. Ervin, Elizabeth. “Academics and the Negotiation of Local Knowledge.” College English 61. 4 (Mar., 1999), pp. 448-470, Print. Grant-Davie, Keith. “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents.” Rhetoric Review 15 (1997): 264-279. Ebscohost. Web. 5 July 2011. Herman, Sarita. “A Pedestrian Mall Born Out of Urban Renewal: Lawrence Halprin Associates and Harland Bartholomew & Associates in Charlottesville, Virginia.” Magazine of Albemarle County History (2010): 79-110. Ebscohost. Web. October 2011. Herzberg, Bruce. “Civic Literacy and Service Learning.” Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. ed. Shamoon, Linda K. Rebecca Howard Moore, Sandra Jamieson, Robert A Schwegler. New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2000, Print. Hricko, Lisa. Town Council Minutes, http://www.farmvilleva.com/ government/council-minutes. March 9, 2011, Web. 6 Sept 2011 Jacoby, Barbara. Civic Engagement in Higher Education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass Inc, 2009, Print.
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Jamieson, John. Letter. The Farmville Herald. 25 June 2010: 1B. Print. Johannesen, Robert. L. “Educational Oratory in American Colleges and Universities: An American Survey.” Communication Studies, 13.5, 276 – 282, 1962, Print. Johnson, James, et al. Letter. The Farmville Herald. 2 July 2010: B1. Print. Logan, Shirley Wilson, “Opinion: Why College English?” College English 69.2 (2006): 107-110. Ebscohost. Web. 5. July 2011. Murphy, James. J. (ed.) A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Greece to Modern America. 2nd ed., Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001, Print. “Office of the President: Mission & Vision” Office of the President, Longwood University, 2014, Web. 20 April 2014. Parks, Steve and Eli Goldblatt. “Writing Beyond the Curriculum: Fostering New Collaborations in Literacy.” College English 62.5 (2000): 584-606. Ebscohost. Web. 23 August 2011. Paul, Susan. Letter. The Farmville Herald. 30 June 2010: 1B. Print. Petraglia, Joseph., ed. Reconceiving Writing: Rethinking Writing Instruction. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995, Print. Rivers, Nathaniel and Ryan Weber. “ Ecological, Pedagogical Public Rhetoric.” College Composition & Communication, 63.2, 2011, Print. Robertson, Kent. “Dissecting the Main Street Approach.” Public Management. 85.1 (2003): 16-21. Ebscohost. Web. October 2011. Rose, Mike. “Opinion: Writing for the Public.” College English 72.3 (2010): 284-292. Print. Ryder, Phyllis. “Rhetorical Publics: Beyond Clarity and Efficiency” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture 6.1 (2008) Web. 6 Sept. 2011. Shackelford, Meade. L. “Longwood College: A Pioneer in Both Private and Public Education.” The Ironworker, 19.4, Lynchburg, VA: Lynchburg Foundry Company, 1955, Print. Silverman, Robert; Taylor, Henry; & Christopher Crawford. “The Role of Citizen Participation and Action Research Principles in Main Street Revitalization.” Action Research. 6.1 (2008) 69-93. Ebscohost. Web. Oct. 2011. Smith, Robert C. They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1951–1964. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965. Print.
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Spates, Gerald. Letter to Heather Lettner-Rust. 19 March 2011. TS. Spinuzzi, Clay. “Pseudotransactionality, Activity Theory, and Professional Writing.” Technical Communication Quarterly, 5.3 (1996): 295-308, Print. Tabb, J. M. “Our alma mater: State teachers college,” Bulletin of the state teachers college, Vol. XV, No. 2, Farmville, VA, 1929, Print. Watson, Hunter. Letter. The Farmville Herald. 9 June 2010: 1B. Print. Weisser, Christian. R. Moving Beyond the Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002, Print. Welch, Nancy. Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2008, Print.
46 Recognizing One Another in Public: Reconsidering the Role and Resources of an Enclave
Veronica Oliver, Arizona State University How might current public-spheres theory underestimate the rhetorical potential of an enclave public—portraying, as such theory does, an enclave as an acutely limited resource for rhetorical empowerment (Squires 458)? This is the question this study takes up. To do so, this study analyzes the digital paper trail of residents of the Cabrini-Green public-housing complex in Chicago, Illinois, as the complex fell siege to policy decisions to demolish it. My analysis shows that these residents’ rhetoric defied limited conceptions of an enclave. Specifically, I argue that by building a network of interconnected coalitions and by using its enclave position as a point of publicity, this group’s rhetorical work complicates scholarship on how groups with little citizenship status might vie for public accountability to them as agents recognized for their rhetorical leverage.
urrent scholarship continues to grapple with the effects of urban Chousing policy on civic health, often emphasizing the voyeuristic and clinical approaches taken by outsiders and institutions when speaking of or dealing with public- housing communities (Fagan et al. 697-698; Lucio and Wolfersteig 477-478). Public debate about such sites stands to test and to refine
4747 | rhetorical theory, for such debate both abhors the material conditions that have rendered dilapidated public-housing unfit for habitation and recognizes residents as real people with real histories. In response to this predicament, this essay asks: once a dominant discourse renders a subordinate group “obsolete,” how can that group transform itself as a viable public recognized as capable of deliberating over the policies and institutional practices that affect its members’ lives? To take up this question, I begin with David Fleming’s studies of a housing project in Chicago, IL, called Cabrini-Green (City of Rhetoric and “Subjects of the Inner City”). In particular, I attend to the controversy following the 1993 public-housing decision ruling the Cabrini-Green public-housing area to be “obsolete,” thus forcibly removing residents from their homes.
DISCIPLINARY VERSIONS OF “GOING PUBLIC” AND THE CASE OF CABRINI-GREEN How we, as scholars, define “going public” shapes how we anticipate and recognize certain kinds of rhetorical activity as publicly significant. Few would argue there’s only one way to go public; scholarship speaks to the exuberant ways people do so. That said, our disciplinary lenses do predispose us toward recognizing and valuing certain kinds of rhetorical activity as more publicly significant than others (Long 7). One prominent view prioritizes the representational work involved in going public. According to this view, a person goes public by circulating discourse to strangers—discourse that either represents him- or herself or represents the interests of the group to which he or she belongs (Warner 74-76). Textbooks such as Having Your Say that offer techniques for making one’s voice heard emphasize this version of going public, for instance (Charney and Neuwirth).
It is the representational view of going public that Fleming’s analysis makes available to readers. As Fleming explains, “[p]robably the most frequently used word to describe Cabrini Green is ‘notorious’” (City 152): “[These] projects have been described as ‘warehouses for the poor,’ brick towers built on treeless stretches of land, ‘isolated fortresses in a neighborhood mired in crime, joblessness, and dependence’” (152). Residents publicly exposed and rejected these representations when reporters for social advocacy agencies published
48 Recognizing One Another in Public | Veronica Oliver interviews with them. For example, a 1999 interview published on the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs website quotes Cabrini-Green resident, Barbara Moore: “‘Public housing residents are considered the lowest scum on earth…. It is wrong to stereotype, not everyone is on drugs, not every girl is pregnant or prostituting. Not all guys are carrying guns or stealing’” (qtd. in Fleming, “Subjects” 233). Fleming makes clear that Cabrini-Green residents were well aware of public impressions of them, and as this quote suggests, residents refused falling victim to these representations. All the same, the discourses in which residents represented themselves were “marginal in the overall discussion” (238).
Representing self- or group interests is one among many ways to go public. I theorize here Cabrini-Green residents’ protracted public efforts to reclaim both their homes and their rights to public discourse about their lives. As my starting point, I take Fleming’s analysis of the more than 200 primary documents involved in the Cabrini-Green controversy. In these documents, residents were situated “as speakers, writers, arguers, and critics” (“Subjects” 234). However, within the documents concerning the fate of Cabrini-Green, residents were rendered “consumer[s] of government services” rather than as active, deliberative citizens (Fleming, “Subjects” 238). In these roles, Fleming’s analysis measures residents’ work primarily through two yardsticks: Hannah Arendt’s theory of statesmanship and Jürgen Habermas’s model of rational-critical public deliberation. Based on these measures, the rhetorical work of Cabrini-Green residents was certainly limited. To Fleming’s discussion, I add my own analysis of primary documents that circulate on the Internet concerning the Cabrini-Green case in which residents organized in response to the Chicago Housing Authorities’ (CHA) decision to tear down the housing project. Of the documents I collected, my analysis focuses on a legal document submitted by a Cabrini-Green public-housing resident and residents’ posts on an Internet site dedicated to Cabrini- Green. By extending Fleming’s analysis to include documents from the Internet that fell outside his study, and equipped with empirical studies of rhetors in predicaments similar to those of the Cabrini- Green residents, I consider how such public artifacts both complement and problematize contemporary public sphere theory, particularly Catherine Squire’s taxonomy distinguishing counterpublics and satellite publics from enclaves, the most marginalized of groups.
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As I show below, Cabrini-Green residents accessed deliberation by forging institutional ties and using their own enclave position as a site of counterhegemonic resistance. These public-housing residents’ rhetorical acumen offers scholars in public sphere theory and community literacy a nuanced case study dramatizing how even the most marginalized groups might vie for a publics’ accountability to them.
THE CREATION OF ENCLAVES AS GEOGRAPHICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL SPACES A complex history shaped Cabrini-Green residents’ relations to institutional policy and the wider public (Fleming, City 7). The very construction of Cabrini-Green was rooted in white privilege, the protection of property value, and the bracketing of citizenship standing. Construction of these public-housing units began in 1941 in response to the continual migration of African-Americans from the South and returning veterans after World War II (Fleming, City 3-4). Chicago’s Near North Side had long been considered a slum (2- 3); after the war, the Chicago City Council had institutional authority to shunt poor, African American newcomers to this part of town. As Fleming describes the situation: “Chicago aldermen from white neighborhoods essentially had veto power over CHA decisions” (City 79). By 1962, the continual construction of new apartment complexes would finally bring this area to total “more than 3,600 low-income housing units in seventy-eight buildings spread across seventy acres” (Fleming, City 5), creating a massive socio-economic enclave that for decades would shape notions of public-housing residents, connecting such notions with African-American urban poverty in both literal and ideological terms (Fleming, “Subjects” 209).
Whether the area be a prison, a closet, reservation, or a ghetto, policy that relegates a sector of society to an impacted area already suggests a degree of public obsolescence (cf. Branch; Brandt; Long, Jarvis and Raymond). For Cabrini-Green, this obsolescence intensified over the coming decades as hundreds of residents moved if they could. Fleming explains that by the 1980’s, many African-Americans living in the inner-city left if they could afford to do so, “[…] making the area less crowded but ultimately more dangerous” (City 7). Soon, high
50 Recognizing One Another in Public | Veronica Oliver crime rates and negative media attention came to define this massive, isolated urban area.
Institutional assessments of the mid-late 1990s formally declared Cabrini-Green “obsolete” and therefore worthy of demolition. Depictions of Cabrini-Green as “obsolete” was typical at this time. For example, an article issued by the Open Society Institute described the housing project as “economically obsolete”:
In its recent history, Cabrini-Green itself became an economically obsolete development that symbolized the ills associated with public housing, including joblessness, crime, teenage pregnancy, single parent households, long-term dependency on public assistance, and minimal educational achievement. (Salama 107, emphasis added)
The same descriptor was used in the “CHA Defendants’ Memorandum,” a court case document supporting the demolition and revitalization of Cabrini-Green:
The case concerns a plan by the CHA and the City [of Chicago] to redevelop a portion of Cabrini under the federal Hope VI program […]. The purpose of the statute is to provide housing authorities with grants to rehabilitate and modernize severely distressed or obsolete public housing projects, and to revitalize the neighborhoods […]. (Jones 5-6, emphasis added)
In terms of its material conditions, Cabrini-Green certainly fit the identifying features of a “severely distressed” area, deserving public attention and resources. However, this portrayal neglected the long history of racist institutional practices that placed African-Americans in a cycle of poverty through the simultaneous geographical and social alienation that Cabrini-Green created, thereby subjugating its residents to “the worst neighborhoods, the worst jobs, the worst schools, and the worst government services” (Fleming, City 65). These conditions grew worse over time with the CHA’s continual “lax […] maintenance and management” of the area (84). To be clear, then, on one hand, the decision to demolish Cabrini-Green
51 | was about a material space—a decision to destroy units of high-rise apartment complexes that for decades had fallen into disrepair. On another hand, this was also a symbolic determination to (dis)place a whole community of urban poor deemed “‘severely distressed’” (Fleming, City 7).
Capital and Public Access The rhetoric that associated Cabrini-Green with obsolescence also conflated citizenship rights (the right to speak in public) with property ownership—a conflation at the heart of criticism leveled against public-sphere theory predicated on the Enlightenment- era bourgeoisie. In tension with concerns over Cabrini-Green’s material conditions is the residents’ implied standing as citizens. By implication, the policies that declared the housing complex obsolete also construed residents as no longer a viable public entity capable of civil standing within their own community. But I would argue that their status as citizens had long been compromised by the social contract of public housing—a social contract that casts residents of public housing more as consumers of social services than as citizens recognized with rights and responsibilities (Fleming “Subjects” 238).
Residents of Cabrini-Green had long voiced to the CHA their concerns about the area’s living conditions (Fleming, City 127-28). By the late 1980s, in light of residents’ growing concerns about their future housing, some residents and other community organizers sought an alternative redevelopment plan for Cabrini-Green as opposed to displacement. This plan would take the shape of “protect[ing] and grow[ing] the community already in the area” through the creation of a resident owned and managed “democratically governed, not-for- profit housing co-op” (Fleming, City 11). But these plans had little sway in light of the growing corporate interest in the land on which Cabrini-Green sat (9).
I am convinced that publicly subsidized housing, as opposed to privately owned or rented dwellings, creates a grey area regarding access to public discourse. Historically, property ownership has been tied to citizenship and attendant rights. This is Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s point in their analysis of the bourgeois public sphere model. Negt and Kluge explain how the critical-
52 Recognizing One Another in Public | Veronica Oliver rational model of public deliberation links property rights to the right to speak in public. Specifically, the critical-rational model of deliberation “excludes from politics and the public sphere all those sections of the population that do not participate in bourgeois politics because they cannot afford to” (Negt and Kluge 10). While theoretically the emergent public sphere might have intended an all- inclusive deliberative democracy, in practice it was created by and for bourgeoisie property owners and their capitalist enterprises (10). Although Negt and Kluge’s project critiques Jürgen Habermas’s portrait of Enlightenment era coffee shops, such complications apply to the contemporary situation of public policy and public-housing as evinced in policy decisions concerning Cabrini-Green. As residents of public-housing, as opposed to private homeowners or even renters, Cabrini-Green residents’ voices had little weight in wider public discussions concerned with economic capital developments meant to “transfor[m]” the area (Fleming, City 8-10). To be a resident of public-housing means that your home is owned by the state and, paradoxically, subject to private capital interests. This was true for residents of Cabrini-Green who were literally being evicted from their community at a point when the city recognized that the land underneath the public-housing area was increasing in value (Fleming, City 9). Given the residents’ limited economic resources, it is not surprising that the community of Cabrini-Green had little weight in the policy decisions affecting their homes and neighborhood. For the residents who remained, the decision to transform the area by demolishing the public-housing units carried deep implications for the families who had been living in Cabrini-Green for generations. For, of course, rendering a public-housing project obsolete does not make the people who live there go away.
The decision to demolish and to gentrify the Cabrini-Green area prompted residents—despite severe challenges—to mobilize in order to vie for the city’s accountability to and for them as citizens. For the residents of Cabrini-Green, the possibility of “going public” was surely complicated by material constraints, as well as by a history that circulated others’ representations of them as opposed to their own (Fleming, “Subjects” 209-210). It would be no small undertaking, then, for the residents of Cabrini-Green to recast themselves not only as residents of a defunct and condemned housing project but also as vital public actors.
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Reconsidering Enclave Publics and Their Resource Marginalized groups are often excluded from the discourse of the dominant public sphere. In “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere,” Catherine Squires provides three particular ways that marginalized groups are rhetorically positioned distinct from wider publics: as a counterpublic, a satellite public, or an enclave. A counterpublic seeks out interactions with outsiders; a satellite public purposefully separates itself from the wider public, only occasionally seeking engagement; and an enclave is a “safe space” for a group to gather as a political entity away from the wider public (Squires 448). Squires explains that whether a subaltern political entity emerges as a counterpublic, satellite, or enclave is as much a matter of the risks the entity dares to take in going public in a given historical moment as it is a matter of “the internal politics of that particular public sphere” (448). Here, the choice between safety and risk is calculated on the basis of resources available to the public, on the one hand, and the threat of violence risked for self-representation in wider publics, on the other. Although counterpublics, satellites and enclaves all face risks in going public, encalves are the most at-risk, for they are themselves a limited resource for wider public engagement (Squires 458).
According to Squires, if enclaves do go public, they often perform a “public transcript” (458). By “public transcript,” Squires is referring how the public performance of subordinated groups adheres to actions and behaviors that are demanded by dominant groups for the purposes of “reinforce[ing] their power standing” (467). Here, an enclave can “mimic” public performance, according to Squires, by circulating a public transcript, but this is not the public democratic work of holding power in check, for the public transcript is not up to such work but rather circulates and upholds the status quo—what the dominant public wants to hear or finds acceptable, comfortable. For Squires, enclaves produce “hidden transcripts” which are counterhegemonic “discourses that are hidden from the view of the dominant public and the state” (458). However, Ellen Cushman’s study of inner-city social service recipients complicates the idea that enclaves necessarily completely hide these counterhegemonic discourses. The inner-city social service recipients in Cushman’s study use “hidden transcripts” in safe spaces and also in interactions with social service gatekeepers by way of the “rhetorical and
54 Recognizing One Another in Public | Veronica Oliver linguistic” tool of signification (Cushman 15). As Cushman explains, when dealing with gatekeepers, social service recipients would use signification—the act of phrasing something with layered rhetorical meanings, “allow[ing] a person to simultaneously consent to an assertion of power and signal a counterhegemonic assumption as well” (15). Here, enclaves do go public with “hidden transcripts,” and although these rhetorical acts of critiquing hegemonic practices are not overt, James Scott notes how “thousands of such ‘petty’ acts of resistance have dramatic economical and political effects’” (qtd. in Cushman 19).
Another way an enclave can go public is if there is “a decrease in oppression or an increase in resources,” whereby moving from the limited position of an enclave to a counterpublic with more rhetorical capital (Squires 460). For Squires, then, an enclave shelters a group from dominant publics, but would need to become a different kind of public entity (likely either a counterpublic or a satellite) in order to engage with other publics.
Yet, as a decidedly enclave public, Cabrini-Green complicates Squires taxonomy concerning both the resources available to enclaves and their interaction with wider publics. According to Squires, enclaves have “few material, political, legal, or media resources,” and when they do interact with the wider public, “they are compelled to conform to a ‘public transcript’ which reinforces unequal social positions and frustrates natural impulses to perform reciprocal actions on the oppressor” (458). As an impacted housing project shrouded in staggering crime rates and media coverage, those left behind in Cabrini-Green constituted an enclave. As the analysis below shows, however, Cabrini-Green residents did interact with the wider public, not by performing a “public transcript,” but rather through inner and cross-public coalition building and self-representation, to include offering their enclave status as a point of publicity—a public feature to represent themselves through public artifacts performing their homeplace.
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INSTITUTIONAL LITERACIES: RECOGNIZING ENCLAVE PUBLICS AND INSTITUTIONAL LEVERAGE In addition to the representational view of going public, another version emphasizes institutional literacies that forge circuits of power and mobilize rhetorical action at sites of gatekeeping (Barton and Hamilton 16; Cushman 3). It is such work of Cabrini-Green residents that my Internet research brought to my attention. I argue that what is most significant about the rhetorical work of Cabrini- Green residents is that it transformed them from what Squires would call (and Fleming’s analysis would have us see as) an enclave to a recognized counterpublic that could advocate for Cabrini-Green as a viable public homeplace (Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock 13; hooks 41). In the case of Cabrini-Green, mainstream public discourse rendered this group the remotest of enclaves—veritably “obsolete”—but the group’s rhetorical work transformed them into a rhetorical force to be reckoned with. This transformative rhetorical work extended to the public representation of Cabrini-Green as a homeplace. By enacting the otherwise private nature of homeplace in the public arena of the Internet, residents publicly re-defined the rhetorical importance of such a position, thus complicating what rhetorical space and agency are available from the position of an enclave public.
Below I draw on the working of other scholars’ accounts of local public life in order to better understand how it is that residents of Cabrini-Green were able to go public to protest the appraisal of obsolescence and the consequent demolition of their housing project. This fine-grained reading of the Internet digital paper trail left by residents’ bears witness to their following rhetorical achievements: 1) residents built coalitions capable of mobilizing power; 2) residents used these coalitions to circulate counterhegemonic discourse to the larger public; and 3) they reclaimed Cabrini-Green as a public homeplace. These rhetorical projects aren’t mutually exclusive activities, but rather strengthen and extend one another. By orchestrating these three achievements, residents of Cabrini-Green conducted a protracted rhetorical project to claim their place in public discourse.
56 Recognizing One Another in Public | Veronica Oliver
1. The Residents Built Coalitions Capable of Mobilizing Power In the formation of the bourgeois public sphere, propertied parties came together to deliberate issues of shared concern (Calhoun 7; Fraser 112). The public policy that moved to make residents “obsolete” in deliberations over the “revitalization” of Cabrini-Green worked in a similar fashion. Specifically, part of the drive to revitalize the area was connected to the rise in value of the land beneath this public-housing project (Fleming, City 9), which was clear to Cabrini- Green residents, for as Fleming states, “[w]hat the residents of Cabrini Green had long feared seemed to be coming true: they were about to become victims of a huge land grab” (9). Here, the cross-institutional moves that rendered Cabrini-Green an obsolete public garnered public support to demolish the area. I argue that residents’ recognition of and subsequent response to such moves reveal the institutional literacy this group had developed from years of experience creating inner-community coalitions and building a network of coalitions across publics.
Historically, Cabrini-Green residents have used the legal assistance of advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to challenge the “racially discriminatory policies of Chicago’s federally funded program” (Fleming, City 91), thus exercising the advantage of group affiliations. Moreover, residents have a history of forming inner-community coalitions, such as a “resident management corporation,” created to control rising crime within the area (Fleming, City 168). These two examples indicate that residents were not unfamiliar with networking as a local public and among other publics. When the CHA, backed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), along with a multi-million dollar redevelopment plan initiated by Chicago Mayor Daley, formed as a network of institutions calling for Cabrini-Green’s demolition, residents likely understood the need to cast their own wide coalition net of cross-institutional support. Perhaps the best evidence of residents’ literate competencies for going public is their response to institutions marking their community as “obsolete,” thus worthy of demolition. Specifically, community residents formed their own coalitions and coalition ties across differently situated publics, such as the Local Advisory Council (LAC) made of Cabrini-Green residents; the ACLU, a nationally recognized advocacy organization; and the Coalition to Protect Public Housing (CPPH), another national
57 | advocacy organization consisting of public-housing residents and advocacy groups—with one Cabrini-Green resident serving as president. In short, residents leveraged power to form their own links across publics; the result was a dynamic network of institutional positions working in the residents’ interests.
Creating a cross-public set of coalitions mobilized power for this group of residents in at least two distinct but related ways. On one level, coalition building among different publics helped situate these otherwise disenfranchised residents with public agency through support from politically recognized external institutions. For example, through the ACLU, residents had access to legal discourse. Since public-housing policy is both founded and amended through government institutions and the legal discourse associated with their attendant laws and grants, residents needed access to legal discourse to understand and to access their legal rights. To be clear, it was the very institutions and their laws that created, owned, and operated these public-housing residents’ homes that also determined this community to be obsolete and worthy of demolition. Residents needed legal support when their rights as property dwellers was complicated through a system that largely allotted property and thus attributing agency to federal and state actors (i.e., HUD, CHA and Chicago Mayor Daly). Armed with knowledge of their legal rights and supported by civil rights lawyers (i.e., the ACLU), residents gained access to the legal discourse acknowledged by institutions.
Of course, it is often not rhetorically empowering for subordinated groups to stand in the shadow of other people’s representations of them, for subordinate groups’ reliance on external representation and dominant idioms can “reif[y] their subordination” (Higgins and Brush 696). As Higgins and Brush explain, it is necessary for subordinate groups to “constitute themselves as characters in political drama capable of bridging the chasms of expertise and privilege that separate them from the sites of deliberation and power” (697). Although Cabrini-Green residents did rely on external representation, they controlled their representation through cross- public coalition building (e.g., with the ACLU and CPPH) and self- representation (through LAC).
58 Recognizing One Another in Public | Veronica Oliver
On another level, then, in forming a coalition themselves (i.e., LAC), and linking the image of Cabrini-Green and their LAC to both their leadership role in the CPPH and the well-known advocacy group, the ACLU, the publics and subsequent discourses created by residents resisted more singular and reductive stereotypes of disenfranchised groups. In this sense, residents mobilized power by keeping power in check as they controlled their representation of residents as agents. First, the formation of the LAC situated residents as a cohesive rhetorical entity, one capable of serving as self-governed and self-representative. Second, although residents were often represented in court by the ACLU, they were not solely dependent on outsiders to speak on their behalf through the “expert” discourse recognized by formal institutions (cf. Higgins and Brush 695). Specifically, through the CPPH, residents mobilized power by taking the agency associated with formal institutions more directly into their own hands with a representative resident of Cabrini-Green serving as the organization’s president. In this sense, residents were not only represented by institutions and their discourses, but also served as the voice speaking from a position of institutional authority (as president) to assist this group with additional control over its rhetorical representation. Furthermore, while each of these coalitions (the LAC, ACLU, or CPPH) assisted residents, the combined effort of cross-public association and direct representation offered residents both access to and control over public representation greater than any single organization alone afforded.
2. The Residents of Cabrini-Green Publicly Used these Coalitions to Circulated Counterhegemonic Discourses By forging associations with those with more rhetorical capital (i.e., ACLU), and taking the legal knowledge forged by such an association to create their own institutional self-representation through a nationally recognized coalition (i.e., CPPH), residents were able to establish the wider public’s recognition of them as political actors. And, more importantly, they were also able to circulate counterhegemonic discourses in more directly self-representative ways. Through the CPPH, residents were able to situate institutional representation as self-representation as opposed to passive actors spoken for, or put another way, residents’ voices were situated as active advocacy actors with self-representative rhetorical capital. It could be argued that the CPPH—as a collective group of advocacy associations such
59 | as the ACLU and the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, as well as public-housing residents—might suggest a hierarchical schema with recognized advocacy groups serving as an umbrella over public- housing residents. As Higgins and Brush explain, “[s]ubordinated people […] rarely constitute a public perceived as capable or ‘expert’ enough to contribute anything valuable to public debate” (695). However, the institutional platform of the CPPH offered residents the position of institutional actors through legal and thus institutional discourse, as opposed to being represented by others who own the “specialized, expert discourse“(Higgins and Brush 695).
The rhetorical work of Cabrini-Green resident Carol Steele, then President of the CPPH, reveals how residents recast themselves as institutional experts by linking institutional discourse with representative voices of Cabrini-Green. Below is one petition produced and signed by Steele and sent to the Human Rights Committee, a committee “of independent experts that monitors implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by its State parties,” that exemplifies residents’ positions as institutional actors. Specifically, in “[T]he Written Submission of the Coalition to Protect Public Housing in Chicago, Illinois USA to the Human Rights Committee at its 85th Session (2006),” Steele’s use of legal discourse defies institutionalized notions of public-assistance recipients “as problems, not problem solvers” and thus “incapable rhetors” (Higgins and Brush 695). The text reads:
Article 17 prohibits ‘arbitrary or unlawful interference with... family (and) home...’ and stated that ‘Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks’ (Steele para. 11)...The arbitrary demolition of public housing and the forced evictions of public housing residents from their communities clearly violate Article 17. In the absence of adequate, on sight replacement housing, families are separated and whole communities dislocated. (Steele para. 12)
Here Steele turns the legal discourse of Article 17 back onto the institution that created it, pointing to the already sanctioned evidence that affords public-housing recipients civil rights and thus civic standing. In doing so, Steele pulls out legal verification
60 Recognizing One Another in Public | Veronica Oliver that the discourse used to support the demolition of Cabrini-Green in part acts against the civil rights of residents both individually and as a community, whereby challenging the dominant discourse that rendered this community “obsolete.” When Steele employs legal discourse as a self-representative voice of residents, she simultaneously situates residents from the position of experts with rhetorical capital to be recognized by institutions. On a similar note, Steele’s reference to Article 17 follows the rhetorical moves made by institutional actors such as the CHA whose use of Hope VI, a legal- support program developed by HUD, supported the demolition of the Cabrini-Green area under the guise of serving the best interests of residents. Here, Steele pulls out what can be understood to be a “hidden transcript” embedded in the institutional discourse of CHA (Cushman 103-107). Hidden transcripts here are the policies that purportedly serve the best interests of social recipients but instead serve the interests of institutions at a given time. The hidden transcript circulating just beneath Steele’s text actively criticizes and exposes this hypocrisy, whereby also critiquing the idea of social service recipients as incapable of civil standing within their own community, an “obsolete” public that needs institutions to determine their best interests despite former policies that indicate resident rights.
In his study of Cabrini-Green, Fleming notes how residents represented themselves as rhetorical agents “in legal documents, where they are seen not as poor, black, or socially disordered, but as plaintiffs … individuals who sue someone in a court of law” (“Subjects” 234). Yet Fleming’s discussion still places the larger institutional agency on the lawyers who represented residents as plaintiffs, whereby owning the legal and therefore institutional discourse (“Subjects” 235). From this representational view, marginalized groups speak with rhetorical capital by speaking through others as opposed to owning the institutional discourse wider publics recognize. When interacting with wider publics, Squires notes that enclaves often “conform to a ‘public transcript’ which reinforces unequal social positions and frustrates natural impulses to perform reciprocal actions on the oppressor” (458). However, what the above analysis reveals is that residents of Cabrini-Green did go public through self-representation, not by performing a “public transcript,”
61 | but by publicly circulating a hidden transcript critical of the racist practices that created the conditions of Cabrini-Green.
What is important to understand, then, is how this community used the “local public [as] a gate” (Long 10)—their position as an enclave—in which to access larger publics. Residents of Cabrini- Green worked as members of an enclave to make ties with another coalition with more ascribed rhetorical power (i.e., ACLU). This strategy provided access to the larger gatekeepers (HUD; CHA), and eventually, allowed members like Steele to assert their own agency both through institutional practices (court cases) and as direct institutional agents (i.e., CPPH). Through these networks, residents gained access to publics that distributed their agency as a network of institutions.
3. Residents Reclaimed a Public Homeplace According to Lorraine Higgins and Lisa Brush’s study of welfare recipients’ use of narratives to enter their experiential knowledge into the debate on welfare reform, the careful construction of ethos is necessary for “challeng[ing] dominant representations of themselves” (698). While my previous analysis showed Cabrini- Green establishing ethos to enter the wider public discourse by forging associations with groups with more rhetorical capital (i.e., ACLU) or connecting their self-representation in direct relation with institutional, expert discourse (i.e., CPPH), residents also established ethos by way of supporting the ethos of this community via self- representing this enclave as a community or homeplace.
On cabrini-green.com, a website dedicated to the history of Cabrini- Green, residents enact the otherwise hidden nature of homeplace in the public arena of the Internet, complicating the notion of an enclave as a limited rhetorical space for self-representative agency.
62 Recognizing One Another in Public | Veronica Oliver
Drawing on bell hook’s radical rereading of home, Iris Marion Young notes that “‘home’ can have a political meaning as a site of dignity and resistance” (157). Young elaborates the significance of home in the political experience of African-Americans:
[T]he historic experience of African American women [connects] ‘homeplace’ [as a] site of resistance to dominating and exploiting social structures. The ability to resist the dominant social structures requires a space beyond the full reach of those structures, where different, more humane social relations can be lived and imagined. (159)
For the largely African-American population of Cabrini-Green, such “homeplace” provided a site for constructing identity outside of that which was ascribed—“a place to preserve the specific culture of the oppressed people” (Young 161). It is from posts on their life in Cabrini-Green, added to the Comments section of cabrini-green. com, that residents circulate their homeplace as counterhegemonic discourses, contrasting wider public beliefs that rested on the image of a “notorious[ly]” dysfunctional neighborhood (Fleming, City 152). For example, resident Joan Bennett states:
I am a former resident of both the red and white projects...I was one of the lucky residents...I had 2 parents...father worked 2 jobs...I would not replace my memories of Cabrini...There were many caring, hardworking people that i will cherish the memories of all my life. My sister purchased my parents 1st home in 1969…I still smile when I think of my childhood.
When Bennett states that “I would not replace my memories of Cabrini,” specifically noting the “caring, hardworking people [she] will cherish the memories of,” she supports the idea of an enclave as community, a space to root personal pride, and a space of resistance to outside ascriptions. Furthermore, Bennett’s statements counter the dominant discourse that would replace notions of home with economic value and make economic viability a requisite to human dignity (Young 141).
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Some posts do not entirely elide the very real oppressive features of crime and economic hardship, and yet such posts reveal that Cabrini- Green was more than the sum of the violent acts that took place. Resident Lena Solana left this message on the Comments forum:
I was raised in C.G. from age 10 to age 18. I am very proud to say that it was/ is my true home! I am now a high school teacher and very succesful. Living in Cabrini made me who I am today. Sure it was rough along the way, seeing all of the violence and such, but it built my character.
Here Solana distinguishes two images of Cabrini-Green—the image that only outsiders see and the image of what some insiders have experienced, offering a more nuanced image of Cabrini-Green that previous media images, those of a “notorious” public-housing area, did not capture.
Additional posts indicate that these residents continue to seek out ties with their former community, further establishing the role of an enclave community as a site for both inner-community and wider circulating public engagement. For example, in another post, “Donnell Howard, Handyman Extraordinaire!,” one former resident provides another former resident with a professional recommendation:
I’d like to make a special endorsement for my good friend Donnell Howard for any of your Home Remodeling or Handyman needs….He has helped me with installing ceiling fans and painting my condo…He will give you a free estimate for your project…. ([email protected])
In providing Howard access to wider (public) media tools for his business, this post reveals a side of Cabrini-Green where residents formed a community built on associations, an act institutions often only associate with those in the dominant public sphere. Here, residents construct Cabrini-Green as an enclave, but one that does circulate to the wider public through recognizable dominant idioms, questioning whether enclaves are not in some respect full-fledged public entities.
64 Recognizing One Another in Public | Veronica Oliver
One view of marginalized groups going public through self- representation highlights the use of “hidden transcripts.” In Cushman’s study exploring the institutional-literate tools used by African-American residents of Quayville when “interacting with gatekeepers” (69), she explains that these social service recipients might be understood to be supporting their “ideological domination” when using the privileged discourse with gatekeepers, but these “public transcripts” are imbued with “hidden transcripts” that enact “counterhegemonic ideologies…and push at predominant values present in the public transcript” (Cushman 69). This example of an enclave’s use of “hidden transcripts” differs from Squires’ point concerning how enclave publics rely on the use of “hidden transcripts” only in safe spaces (458). For Squires, enclaves move into counterpublics and reveal “hidden transcripts” only when oppression has lessened and resources are available (460). Similar to Fleming, this places the ability for enclaves to go public on external resources as opposed to internal ingenuity, confining the rhetorical strength of enclaves to internal debate or reifying their position by performing a “public transcript” (Squires 458). On some level, the goal for marginalized publics is to “preserve culture [and] foster resistance” (Squires 460 [counterpublic]; 464 [satellite]; 458 [enclave]). For Squires, in the case of enclaved publics, preservation equates hiding self-representation (460). Yet, residents of Cabrini-Green did go public as an enclave to preserve their community and counter their “notorious” image, but in ways not addressed by Squires’ taxonomy of marginalized publics.
CONCLUSION The problem of self-representation for enclave publics has meant the risk of reifying their position by “performing a ‘public transcript’” (Squires 458); it is only when groups have gained access to resources or assistance (Fleming, “Subjects” 235; Higgins and Brush 696-697; Squires 460), or are in a less oppressive position, that they are able to address the wider public in any meaningful way (Squires 460). Yet, as an enclave, Cabrini-Green residents offered their position as a point of publicity, making it a public feature of their drive to represent themselves. And, through self-representation across different publics, residents of Cabrini-Green challenged notions of enclave publics necessarily needing to rely on the expert discourse of those
65 | with more rhetorical capital, for these residents created their own institutionally recognized rhetorical space of agency.
Institutions have the power to reinforce specific meanings and values of literacy (Grabill 119), but as this study shows, enclaves do not need to stay positioned in subordinated roles to these definitions. Instead, enclaves can work the institutional practice of coalition formation as a gateway for public access. Further, enclaves themselves are not necessarily non-public actors, for Cabrini-Green residents were both situated as an enclave and used that position as a feature of public engagement. Acknowledging this agency does not minimize the conditions under which they labored to go public, but it does increase our scholarly understanding of such work that takes place against all odds. Residents of Cabrini-Green prove exemplary in their capacity to exploit their own position, one vexed by institutional racism, to expose not only local but also wide-reaching systematic inequalities. Scholars in public sphere theory and community literacy might take the work of Cabrini-Green residents as a model for understanding how disenfranchised groups can work with institutions without losing self-representative agency.1
Veronica Oliver is a PhD candidate at Arizona State University. Her dissertation studies the construction and public circulation of argumentative appeals in relation to an activist organization’s decision- making that attempts to leverage its’ identity and membership both to serve its constituents and to continue to direct wider public attention to a public controversy. To document the complexity of this decision making, the study grounds its analysis in the rhetorical work of Puente Arizona (Puente) concerning Senate Bill 1070, recent legislation aimed at deterring illegal immigration and deporting current undocumented residents of Arizona.
This dissertation turns on the distinction Catherine Squires draws among enclaves, counterpublics, and satellites. As an organization whose members 1 Residents did not win against the CHA in court, yet such results should not lessen the effects of their rhetorical work, for Cabrini-Green residents’ ingenuity transformed this group from the position of “obsolete” to one capable of self-representation in the wider public.
66 Recognizing One Another in Public | Veronica Oliver include undocumented people, Puente’s public status is subordinated. According to Squires, Puente would likely cultivate its status as an enclave, sheltering member’s citizenship status. To make this characterization, Squires’ taxonomy turns on matters of risks and resources, arguing that subordinated people form enclaves when the risks for protesting an injustice are high and resources low. Yet, Puente does go public. The dissertation argues that by attending only to matters of risk and resources, current scholarship doesn’t sufficiently account for the work of Puente beyond its form and function as an enclave.
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WORKS CITED
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Print. Barton, David and Mary Hamilton. Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print. Belenky, Mary Field, Lynne A. Bond, and Jacqueline S. Weinstock. A Tradition That Has No Name: Nurturing the Development of People, Families and Communities. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Print. Bennett, Joan. “my childhood in cabrini.” Comments. Cabrini-Green. com: The Transformation of a Neighborhood. n.d. Web. 03 March 2011. Branch, Kirk. “Eyes on the Ought to Be”: What We Teach About When We Teach About Literacy. New York: Hampton P, 2007. Print. Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print. Calhoun, Craig. “Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere.” Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992. 1-48. Print. Charney, Davida H. and Christine M. Neuwirth. (with David S. Kaufer and Cheryl A. Geisler). Having Your Say: Reading and Writing Public Arguments. New York: Pearson / Longman, 2005. Print. Cushman, Ellen. The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community. Albany: SUNY P, 1998. Print. Fagan, Jeffrey, Garth Davies, and Adam Carlis. “Race and Selective Enforcement in Public Housing.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 9.4 (2012): 697-728. Print. Fleming, David. City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America. Albany: SUNY P, 2008. Print. ---. “Subjects of the Inner City.” Towards a Rhetoric of Everyday Life. Eds. Martin Nystrand and John Duffy. Madison: University of Wisconsin P, 2003. 207-244. Print. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992. 109- 142. Print.
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Grabill, Jeffery T. Community Literacy Programs and the Politics of Change. Albany: SUNY P, 2001. Print. [email protected]. “Donnell Howard, Handyman Extraordinaire!” Comments. Cabrini-Green.com: The Transformation of a Neighborhood. n.d. Web. 03 March 2011. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. Print. Higgins, Lorraine D. and Lisa Brush. “Personal Experience Narrative and Public Debate: Writing the Wrongs of Welfare.” College Composition and Communication 57.4 (2006): 694-729. Print. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End P, 1990. Print. “Human Rights Committee: Monitoring Civil and Political Rights.” Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, n.d. Web. 27 Dec. 2012. Jones, Leslie Ann. “CHA Defendants’ Memorandum in Support of Their Motion for Summary Judgment on all Counts.” Cabrini- Green Local Advisory Council vs. Chicago Housing Authority. United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division. 02, Feb. 1998. Shriver Center: Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law. 23, Oct. 1999. Web. 03 March 2011. Long, Elenore. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. West Lafayette: Parlor, 2008. Print. Long, Elenore, John Jarvis, and Diane Deerheart Raymond. “The Nipmuck People Do Exist: Imagining the What Next—An Experimental Alternative to Evidentiary Legal Discourse.” Texts of Consequence: Composing Rhetorics of Social Activism for the Writing Classroom. Eds. Christopher Wilkey and Nick Mauriello. Cresskill: Hampton P. 317-48. Print. Lucio, J. and W. Wolfersteig. “Political and Social Incorporation of Public Housing Residents: Challenges in Hope VI Community Development.” Community Development: Journal of the Community Development Society 43.4 (2012): 476-491. Print. Negt, Oskar and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1993. Print.
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Salama, Jerry J. “The Redevelopment of Distressed Public Housing: Early Results from Hope VI Projects in Atlanta, Chicago, and San Antonio.” Housing Policy Debate. Volume 10, issue 1. Open Source Institute and New York University. Fannie Mae Foundation, 1999. Web. 14 Sept. 2012. Solana, Lena. “always rememba.” Comments. Cabrini-Green.com: The Transformation of a Neighborhood. n.d. Web. 21 March 2012. Squires, Catherine R. “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres.” Communication Theory 12.4 (2002): 446-468. Print. Steele, Carol. “Written Submission of the Coalition to Protect Public Housing in Chicago, Illinois USA to the Human Rights Committee at its 85th Session (2006).” Coalition to Protect Public Housing. 27, Jan. 2006. n.d. Web. 03 March 2011. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2005. Print. Young, Iris Marion. Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.
70 Helping To Build Better Networks: Service-Learning Partnerships as Distributed Knowledge Work
Guiseppe Getto, East Carolina University Many community stakeholders are experiencing increased pressure to enter the digital arena in order to be heard by Kendall Leon, new audiences, but many such stakeholders lack the technical Portland State University expertise to do so. To meet this demand, some service-learning & Jessica Getto-Rivait, teachers are turning to digital media production as a new Northcare Health method of service. This approach to a service-learning Services pedagogy brings with it inherent complications, however. We believe these complications call for a re-orientation of service- learning projects around a model of distributed knowledge work. This model asks students to view themselves as budding professionals entering into community networks that pre- exist them. It also requires students to deeply share their knowledge-making practices with community stakeholders.
or community stakeholders like Eric, an elementary school art teacher Ffrom Michigan who creates digital documentaries with his art students, it is no longer enough to build a basic public presence represented by a static website. Eric’s audience of parents, funding organizations, and other art teachers respond to stories—particularly stories that document some of the innovative work that is going on in his classroom. This is why Eric first partnered with Guiseppe,
71 Reflections | Volume 13.2, Spring 2014 a service-learning instructor at a local university, to help better document some of the stories taking place in his classroom. These stories centered on the frenetic “chaos” of Eric’s classroom and the creative media that his students were using for projects, which ranged from cardboard, plastic, and other recycled materials to green screen technology used to animate student projects into short videos.
Stakeholders like Eric are creating both a crisis and an opportunity for service-learning instructors across the country. Such stakeholders often lack the expertise and resources to produce and circulate digital media, in order to effectively tell their stories in a larger arena. This is often because the primary concern of many non-profits and community groups is direct service, not media literacy. At the same time, the “prosumerization” of media technologies means that production technologies like digital cameras, web hosting platforms, and design software that were once exorbitantly expensive are now closer to being within reach of many communities and classrooms (Rennie).
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In this vein, we wish to respond to the call of Elenore Long and others to explore the intersections between digital technology and community literacy by introducing a new model for service-learning pedagogies (13). Founded in technical communication and critical technology studies, we advocate rethinking service-learning as distributed knowledge work or highly coordinated and collaborative work in which stakeholders pool expertise to create impressive digital projects that meet both learning goals and organizational prerogatives. As a case-in-point, we draw on our experiences teaching a community media-themed First Year Composition (FYC) service- learning course that invited students to design digital projects to meet the needs of organizational partners from the local community.
Specifically, what we propose in this article is a methodology for doing service-learning that involves tapping into the distributed knowledge work already happening in local communities. Mapping such a methodology involves articulating how a service-learning pedagogy is developed as a kind of knowledge work and more specifically, as knowledge work that happens at three levels of social and technological infrastructure:
1. The local community: as we will explain, developing a pedagogy founded on distributed knowledge work involves getting invested in one’s local community, enough so that useful professional and civic networks become apparent.
2. The university: at the institutional level, our method has the potential to be both disruptive and productive. We discuss how to deal with resistance to the development of service- learning pedagogies as knowledge work, as well as how to use them to build resources within academic institutions.
3. The classroom: within a classroom founded in distributed knowledge work, a careful balance must be struck between the structure and flexibility of learning goals. As we will explain, the classroom is a kind of fulcrum for our method: it can be a space to try out ideas before they reach a larger audience, such as community leaders or university administrators. At the same time, however, student learning
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goals should never be short-changed when creating useful pedagogical experiments, some of which will inevitably fail.
After exploring our experiences developing a pedagogy of distributed knowledge work within each of these layers of infrastructure, we close with implications for future scholarship and pedagogical development at the intersections of community work, emerging technologies, and service-learning.
NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES, SERVICE-LEARNING, AND COMMUNITY MEDIA Our call for the use of emerging technologies in service-learning and community-based projects is not new. A growing number of scholars in both composition and technical communication are working productively at the intersections of service-learning and digital technologies, such as Michelle Comstock, Ellen Cushman (“Sustainable” and “Praxis”), Jeffrey Grabill (“Community” and Writing Community), Melinda Turnley, and Michelle Simmons, for instance.1 These thinkers challenge us to reconsider concepts like literacy, engagement, authenticity, and the public sphere via the incorporation of digital technologies into community-based writing projects and service-learning pedagogies. Cushman, in particular, offers an especially useful pedagogical and theoretical analytic—a “praxis of new media”—for creating sustainable, community-based new media projects. Weaving a rhetorical awareness into the New London’s Group concept of design, Cushman’s “praxis of new media” adds a much-needed ethical dimension to the consideration of meaning-making as a complex exchange between audiences and producers because it gives equal weight to people, technologies, and media (Cushman 125).
Similarly, Melinda Turnley aligns the commitments of service- learning and client-based pedagogies with critical approaches to 1 Simmons posits an “extended model” for community writing projects outside of a singular classroom and semester; this extended model aligns well with our theory of distributed knowledge work as the nexus of service learning and new media technology. By employing distributed knowledge work as our framework, we cannot take the semester or classroom to be the unit of analysis when arriving at sustainability, or when attending to infrastructural concerns.
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technology. The “[c]ritical consideration of technology” is an ability, Turnley argues, that allows students to be better, more informed writers as they must consider “their client’s potentials and constraints to propose and produce feasible project deliverables” (“Integrating” 109). Rather than just consider rhetorical effectiveness as efficiency, a critical approach to technology in service-learning compels students to ethically consider how “technological decisions” shape “interpersonal relationships” (110). To this end, in “Towards a Mediological Method: A Framework for Critically Engaging Dimensions of a Medium,” Turnley develops a heuristic called “mediology” to help stakeholders make “rhetorical decisions about multimodal possibilities.” Based on the work of Regis Debaray, mediology is “a means for framing problems and conducting research about relationships among culture, media and the transmission of ideas” that accounts for both macro-level considerations and local praxis (Turnley 127).
We see these trends as ripe for a useful convergence of ideas in which approaches to producing knowledge using digital technologies meet existing models of service-learning and community engagement, transforming both. As a contribution to this scholarship, we wish to introduce our concept of service-learning as distributed knowledge work, a model in which knowledge-making is responsive to the expertise of the stakeholders involved and is thus attentive to issues of sustainability and available technological infrastructure. Understanding distributed knowledge work as a potential model for developing service-learning pedagogies enables us to align a critical view of technologies, media, and service-learning with the goals of a FYC or introductory technical communication course.
From an extra-curricular viewpoint, the study and practice of community media is another arena of community-based technology work that we have found useful. This area of study and praxis has most consistently been located within the field of communication, and explores the ways that experienced communicators, such as college faculty, work together with community stakeholders to produce publicly broadcasted media. Community media is thus differentiated from other—often more established—forms of media
75 Reflections | Volume 13.2, Spring 2014 by stakeholders’ interest in production with and for local audiences. Nicholas Jankowski and Ole Prehn echo these assertions when they define community media as the study of “communication structures and communication processes within a distinct social setting—a geographical community or community of interest” (20). At the other end of the spectrum, Kevin Howley defines community media as a form of praxis, or as “grassroots or locally oriented media access initiatives predicated on a profound sense of dissatisfaction with mainstream media form and content, dedicated to the principles of free expression and participatory democracy, and committed to enhancing community relations and promoting community solidarity” (2).
We locate our own work somewhere in the middle of the spectrum from research methodology to pedagogy to community praxis. Most importantly, we agree wholeheartedly with calls from scholars like Anne Wysocki and Stuart Selber to open emerging forms of media to writing, or to open the production, circulation, and consumption of new media to the thinking of people who are writing experts (Wysocki 7; see Selber as well). In addition, we think community media can be similarly opened: as scholars seek new ways to engage with communities through pedagogies involving emerging technologies, we see it as important to think of the projects they work on as sustainable products and processes that begin within already-existing community structures, processes, and value systems, and that thus must be respectful of, and responsive to, these “local publics” (Long 16).
One way to situate service-learning work as a critical form of community media is to think of community work involving emerging technologies as always already existing within a distributed network of knowledge. Generally, “distributed knowledge work” is used to describe work that is collaborative and takes place over computer- based networks. Business researcher Eli Hustad, extending Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s communities of practice, has labeled geographically-dispersed, electronic, collaborative partnerships “distributed networks of practice” (69). Within such a network, the focus is on managing different kinds of knowledge rather than technologies. This means that groups are defined by projects of
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interest; maintaining flexible configurations; relying on recursive, yet somewhat hierarchal structures; and engaging in decision-making through distributed cooperation (or shared authority) (Ho et al. 449). As critics have demonstrated, however, distributed knowledge models often represent the ideal situation rather than the actual complexities of knowledge work. As those who engage in community-based writing work know, knowledge is always already situated, and “problems of transferring, negotiating or co-constructing knowledge vary with [different] distribution types” (Haythornthwaite 3, 7).
When Eric first encountered Guiseppe as a new service-learning instructor looking for community partners, for instance, he was already heavily invested in creating digital videos with his art students. He even had his own YouTube channel and had entered a few documentary contests for K-12 educators. This work was far from sustainable, however. Eric struggled to maintain a slew of new projects that he was constantly integrating into his teaching, much less to document all these projects, to edit the footage, and to upload new videos to online networks for sharing. He was also not satisfied with the quality of his previous attempts at documentary and overall wanted to improve the efficiency and efficacy of his digital video production workflow, while building stock footage of his classroom that he could use as background footage.
Enter Courtney, Ivory, and Val, three students enrolled in Guiseppe’s community media-themed FYC service-learning course who expressed interest in working with Eric. All three were moderately proficient in digital video production but wanted to learn more. Most importantly, they were all deeply concerned with helping local communities reach larger audiences through the use of digital technologies.2 This was a good match for a service-learning partnership, in other words. In our collective experience, doing distributed knowledge work effectively with people you don’t already know well—as often happens between students and community partners in a service-learning class— requires explicit attention to the networks of people that make up the community you are serving, as well as attention to the technologies, media, and types of knowledge available within that community.
2 These vignettes are based on a formal case study of Guiseppe’s class, the full version of which is cited below (Getto).
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In our own classes, and especially when working on digital projects with stakeholders who have little knowledge of digital technology, we encourage students to pay close attention to what knowledge community partners do have: such as what types of media they deem useful and how individual members of their community communicate with each other during their daily work lives. In other words, we ask students to consider what kind of infrastructure community-based knowledge work relies on.
Though commonly people like to think of an infrastructure as a “substrate,” or material base upon which a community runs, we prefer, along with Susan Star and Karen Ruhleder, to think of infrastructure as a “fundamentally relational concept” (112). Rather than being easily defined as a built structure that has “pre-given attributes frozen in time,” infrastructure “is something that emerges for people in practice, connected to activities and structures” (Star and Ruhleder 112). Infrastructure, like technology, has meaning only in usage. When Eric asked students to assist him with digital video production, then, he was asking them to enter a complex network of people, processes, and structures necessary to both build and maintain robust digital documentaries. Jeffrey Grabill sums up infrastructures and the networks they are part of nicely when he says:
Infrastructures are not just information, not just interfaces, not just the computers or the wires. Infrastructures enact standards, they are activity systems, and they are also people themselves (and all that people entail, such as cultural and communal practices, identities, and diverse purposes and needs). Community networks of any kind are social, political, and technical; they get work done and allow others to work; and they embody a set of often hidden and invisible design decisions and standards that change people and communities. It’s not information that is powerful. Infrastructures are powerful. (“Writing” 40)
Infrastructures can be thought of as the glue that keeps distributed knowledge networks together, then. They are the people, processes, and structures necessary to keep such networks running smoothly and productively.
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Given this, and based on our experiences working within the networks of a variety of communities in Lansing, Michigan (and teaching service-learning students via these networks), we contend that thinking about community-based pedagogy (especially when it involves emerging technologies) as a kind of distributed knowledge work that attends to local infrastructures is useful because:
• it aptly describes how the production of media (and writing in general) happens in many community learning situations;
• it draws the attention of scholars, practitioners, and students to the complexity of the networks of people, processes, and structures necessary to run a community, and to do short- term work with that community that is anywhere close to useful;
• it provides a fresh perspective for thinking about the interactions of stakeholders in any group-based project that necessitates valuing all the individual forms of knowledge brought to the table;
• and because of all of this: it makes work done in a community learning situation much more likely to be sustainable for all those involved.
Just as Scott Blake has expressed concern with hyperpragmatism in technical communication courses geared toward meeting the needs of business and industry at the detriment of students’ critical abilities for public engagement, we are attempting to balance parallel considerations in the first year writing course (289).
As scholars and teachers invested in first year writing, we are concerned with a hyperpragmatism founded in teaching students to be successful within a university to the detriment of the development of both civic and technological abilities—particularly the abilities to make change in their day-to-day lives within communities they will inhabit beyond our courses. Though we recognize the need to make writing courses useful for the universities in which they are
79 Reflections | Volume 13.2, Spring 2014 conducted, as Cushman argues, such a “history of professionalization might be one reason academics have so easily turned away from the democratic project that education serves to ensure-civic participation by well-rounded individuals” (“Rhetorician” 11). Below we further explore our own project to ensure civic participation within the local community, the university, and the classroom.
I. DISTRIBUTED KNOWLEDGE WORK WITHIN THE LOCAL COMMUNITY To design courses that are mindful of local infrastructures and the distributed knowledge networks they sustain, service-learning instructors need to begin by working with local community members themselves, before they ever consider sending students into the community. All three of the authors of this article began their work in the community groups, non-profits, and small businesses of Lansing, MI by working as volunteers or support staff for community media projects that were important to local organizations and individuals. Over the course of our time pursuing Ph.D.s at Michigan State University, we were each involved with the Capital Area Community Media Center (CACMC) because of our interests in doing community-based work that involves emerging technologies. Through the CACMC, we planned and facilitated technology-focused workshops (on logo design, technology plans, web design, etc.) for non-profits; assisted in writing grants to help build infrastructure; and participated in actual media production for numerous projects (e.g. digital videos, websites, social media campaigns, etc). To teach students how to help community stakeholders tell stories via emerging technologies, we needed first to have the insider knowledge of how and why that happened in our local community. Not only did this build our individual repertoires for doing community media work, it taught us about the networks and infrastructures of the stakeholders with which we worked, such as what stakeholders were doing well, what they needed help with, what help they were likely to accept, and what help would likely fall on deaf ears.
This work was distributed in that it involved us sharing our expertise and inviting local area residents to share theirs, to produce projects of mutual benefit. We learned with local residents, in other words, rather than being the experts who foisted our knowledge upon them. This often happened out of necessity. Most of the projects we became
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involved in required knowledge we didn’t possess at the beginning of the project. When Eric approached Guiseppe to help him build his capacity for digital documentary work, for instance, Guiseppe had sufficient knowledge to do this work himself but had never taught anyone else how to do this work. Nor had he taught students how to collaborate with a community partner who wanted help with this work. The project thus began with Guiseppe visiting Eric’s classroom to investigate the knowledge network he would be asking students to enter. This investigation would also entail collaboration with Eric on whether or not the curriculum Guiseppe had in mind would serve his needs.
In a larger sense, because of our experiences working with community media projects in Lansing, we learned that this work is central and not ancillary to the life of local residents. We also learned through this experience that the CACMC’s capacity was limited. As a small, incipient non-profit, the center could not afford sufficient staff, technology, or other resources required to serve a community of nearly 400,000 people. The CACMC’s director was thus very amenable to service-learning partnerships via which he could help us place students with local stakeholders that needed digital work done. These important efforts would lay the groundwork for making infrastructural connections between local area stakeholders and our incipient service-learning FYC courses.
II. DISTRIBUTED KNOWLEDGE WORK WITHIN THE UNIVERSITY It is important to acknowledge at this point that we are not in any way trying to claim that the three levels of infrastructure we’re discussing (local community, university, classroom) are separate. Rather, they are entirely interconnected. We are simply discussing them separately for clarity. At the same time that we were investing in local publics that supported community media, for instance, we were also exploring MSU for resources that we could use to help community initiatives build their own infrastructure. Some of the resources we found included:3
3 For a more complete reading of MSU’s infrastructure, see DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill.
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• Technology: including a staffed documentary lab with digital cameras we could check out, computer labs that doubled as classrooms, software available for our use, and digital cameras available to students for checkout
• Technology support: including a Writing Center that offered training in various technologies and tech-savvy colleagues willing to advise us
• Like-minded knowledge workers: including ourselves and several other teachers invested in community engagement and service-learning; a community media center (the CACMC) willing to help match-make community partners with service-learning instructors; designated service- learning sections of FYC; and college freshmen willing to enroll in a designated service-learning class
And though in our implications section we will discuss possibilities for universities without such robust infrastructure, we must acknowledge that of course the infrastructure available to us at MSU helped make our particular service-learning partnerships possible. It made sense, in other words, given the resources available to us at our university and the needs articulated to us by local community leaders to design a service-learning class around community media.
At the same time, we do not feel that our model of service-learning as distributed knowledge work is dependent on a certain type of infrastructure. Our model is a way of tapping into existing networks centered around knowledge, networks which exist in every community and in every university. What we are advocating is sustained and long-term work within these local publics before ever setting foot in a service-learning classroom. However innovative our actual service- learning pedagogy is, it was highly impacted by, and thus impacted, the networks of people within which we developed it. Rather than create completely new infrastructure, and completely new networks, we advocate facilitating new intersections between people, processes, and structures already in place. Such a move requires a necessary act of humility on the part of service-learning teacher-scholars, as
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well as an acknowledgement that no good idea can be of social use without sufficient community support.
At the same time, and as anyone who is an educator knows, the activities associated with course design can be powerful moves to make, particularly within organizations like universities that are explicitly dedicated to both innovation and the public good. In the next section, we would like to discuss how we facilitated new connections between the networks and infrastructures that we encountered during our preliminary community media work. We found that processes for producing community media worked somewhat differently when students were introduced into the mix. The length of an academic semester necessitated students coming to a new understanding about media production for the public good within just a few months.
III. DISTRIBUTED KNOWLEDGE WORK WITHIN THE CLASSROOM One implication of our argument is that service-learning work that doesn’t tap existing knowledge networks—networks that teachers already know well—is unlikely to be successful. Students need room to fail, room to innovate, and at the same time need to be protected (as do community partners) from the worst penalties of their failures and innovations. A service-learning class itself, in other words, should function as a distributed knowledge network and infrastructure for this kind of work: knowledge work that will usually be less than professional, that will hopefully engender student investment, and that will produce at least some outcomes for all parties involved. To create such a classroom space, we developed assignment sequences that encouraged the types of knowledge work that we had experienced while developing the course: work that was distributed, attentive to existing infrastructure, done with an awareness of sustainability, and that taught students about knowledge-making processes important for community media work.
When applied to the classroom, this meant an emphasis on respecting the various forms of knowledge everyone involved with a given project brought to the table and being flexible about the distribution of the actual work of knowledge-making. To accomplish this, we interwove into our curricula various media that we felt would be most conducive to supporting distributed knowledge work. This
83 Reflections | Volume 13.2, Spring 2014 didn’t mean that every project assigned involved digital technology or collaboration, however. Essay writing assigned early on allowed students to write about concepts important to community media- based service-learning, such as sustainability, mutual respect of knowledge, and collaboration. Essay writing also enabled students to complete research papers that helped them solve problems involving the design of their media projects, and that helped them communicate these solutions to community partners. Finally, the essay served as a touchstone for students who were most familiar with a writing class being about writing essays.
The media that students used on their actual projects for their community partners were much more multifaceted. Courtney, Val, and Ivory would use a large assembly of technologies during their work with Eric. These technologies included iMovie; iTunes; Eric’s video camera; an MSU video camera; library computer labs with smart screens; various websites such as those that made royalty-free music available; individual student laptops; and wired and wireless Internet connections. This list was developed as the students moved through an assignment sequence that began with a personal essay that explored students’ experiences with literacy and technology in communities from their past. Next, students engaged in a research project into the literacies and technologies important to their community partner. Finally, students produced several iterations of research and media until they had designed a deliverable that met community partner needs.
This recursive style of knowledge work allowed students to meet the sometimes radically shifting demands of the ad hoc networks we encouraged them to form with their community partners. As their project proceeded, for instance, Courtney, Ivory, and Val became increasingly anxious that they didn’t have an adequate sense of audience for producing a video that would meet Eric’s needs. This fear was amplified by the fact that Eric wanted not only a video but also wanted the students to produce resources to use in his current and future projects. He had “big plans” for their footage, including reworking some of it into a longer project he was working on for local broadcast television. At the same time, the students felt that
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Eric wasn’t giving them specific-enough feedback to prepare a final project that would meet all these complex specifications.
In response to concerns such as these, we have constantly encouraged our students to engage in deeper forms of collaboration with their partners, rather than retreating to the safety of the classroom and asking us for answers. When the students approached Guiseppe with these concerns, he thus invited them to engage Eric in an in-depth conversation after their first visit to his classroom to capture footage. In response to this encouragement, the following scene would unfold between the students and Eric:4
Courtney: We were gonna do the music and everything—we just wanted to showcase it in kind of more an organized way or do you want it like less organized?
Eric: That’s a good one…[looks at camera] You waiting for an answer? [everyone laughs]
E: I have to think on it…I think that’s kind of cool. Then we can just make up like the little icons like on movies, we’ll have like first, second, third, fourth, and fifth. And they can just click on that movie and go to it. We’ll do that like in iDVD—
C: Like the different chapters—
E: Uh-huh.
C: So it will like play through anyways but you’ll have, if you want to scene select you can like kind of do that [to Val] Can we do that? I mean, I don’t know…
V: Yeah, depending on what, like, editing thing you can make it in like a DVD format. Did you want it on like Youtube? Did you want us to like upload it to Youtube?
4 Ivory had a scheduling conflict and wasn’t available to attend this meeting.
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E: Probably, yeah. Probably do that kind of thing… You both— you’re going to use a Mac for this?
C: Yeah. We’re going to.
V: Who did you want to see—like, who did you want to be able to see this video?
E: Anybody.
V: Anybody?
E: Yeah, we’ll make it for Youtube, then Channel 21. It’ll be Bob who does our broadcasting—
V: Like for Lansing Public Access?
C: It’s like the local broadcasting?
E: Yep! And then he’ll put it up on TV for like fillers between his shows and stuff.
Here we see first year composition students making very sophisticated moves in response to a complex partnership involving knowledge work. Their goal is clearly to understand all the audiences Eric wants to reach and how various technologies might be mobilized to meet these audiences. This scene represents distributed knowledge work in action, in other words: students sharing their knowledge-making processes with their community partner in a deep and inclusive way.
Rather than approach Eric as a recipient of this knowledge-making process, the students show evidence of figuring themselves as outsiders to Eric’s ongoing work. Rather than suggesting audiences, they asked him, “who did you want to be able to see this video?” Rather than presenting the plan for organizing the video, which they
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had brainstormed with Guiseppe in class as part of their assignment, they present this plan in a very invitational manner: “We were gonna do the music and everything—we just wanted to showcase it in kind of more an organized way or do you want it like less organized?” The students show evidence of a sensitivity to the distributed work necessary to produce a video for multiple audiences, a video that would enable an art teacher to become a better maker of digital documentaries.
In every project we facilitated, there were always unseen exigencies that arose, as happens with any kind of knowledge work. In fact, because students had to continually adapt their knowledge-making practices during their projects, we’d like to argue, they developed a kind of kairotic sensitivity to the conditions in which they were producing their projects. We think that this kind of sensitivity is unique to a classroom where students are encouraged to think of themselves as networked writers engaged in a kind of service that revolves around knowledge.
While we hope we have demonstrated that our approach to service- learning as distributed knowledge work is beneficial for writing teachers and their students, we also want to foreground the usefulness of this approach to community partners. As Cushman notes community stakeholders must often contend with a “hit it and quit it” approach to service-learning (“Sustainable” 40). The operative question is: what kind of long-term community impact do we yield from a distributed knowledge approach that differs from other approaches?
First of all, our approach acknowledges that service-learning partnerships are a part of the natural and ongoing recruitment process that community stakeholders already undergo. Because of the decline in grant funds and rapid growth of new organizations in the non- profit sector, community stakeholders have a high need for volunteers, professional or otherwise. These organizations also typically have a high degree of volunteer turnover. Within the organization, staff members must recruit enough volunteers to ensure regular services, events, and special projects are completed in a timely manner. When thinking of a community organization as a knowledge network that
87 Reflections | Volume 13.2, Spring 2014 we are temporarily enlisting our students to support, we must know a given organization well enough to make sure the learning goals of our class are compatible with organizational needs (or infrastructure) at that time. If they are not, service-learning instructors should try to find organizations and other resources to aid them in achieving their goals. By striving toward mutuality from the start, we make certain that our service-learning partnerships are somewhat natural continuations of organizational workflows rather than unnecessary interruptions of them.
Eric didn’t need new technology, for instance. He already had technology that enabled him to make digital documentaries, technology he had won through a competitive local grant. He needed a better workflow for using this technology, and he needed a resource for helping him enact this workflow. This is why, after much discussion and collaboration, Courtney, Ivory, and Val would turn over to Eric not only a polished version of a video showcasing the activity of his art classroom (https://www.msu.edu/~gettogui/ Eric1Project.mov) but also a full iMovie project with all the footage, images, and royalty-free music files they had collected, plus a written guide to effectively using all these new resources. Starting out with a simple video in mind, the students ended up providing Eric with assets for the kind of knowledge work he most valued.
Indeed, the issue of sustainability is never a simple one. Service- learning partnerships cost stakeholders valuable time, and workflow is also understood, articulated, and measured differently by different stakeholders. For some organizations, workflow is best achieved in service-learning partnerships when students do routine writing tasks for the organization. A local healthcare center asked our students to serve by making monthly newsletters; training time was minimal, and the release of that task allowed staff to focus more on client relationships. Other organizations preferred students work on special projects that were not a part of their regular routine but that served long-term goals. A local youth initiative asked students to make a WordPress-based website that was appealing to young people who were entering a local detention center. Shifting organizational identity is a challenge to all stakeholders involved in this process, but it also constitutes an exciting opportunity.
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We recommend beginning partnerships by asking community stakeholders for as many extant documents as they can provide, particularly documents that they feel represent their organization’s identity (such as websites, videos, mission statements, newsletters, brochures, flyers, etc.). These documents create a necessary touchstone for students to form an ad hoc network with community stakeholders—a network based in ongoing work. Such documents, in addition to collaborative meetings with stakeholders, enable students to connect the work they will do with stakeholders to work that has already been accomplished by these stakeholders.
This is only the beginning of the process, however. Even when our students have asked questions, written detailed notes, and have elicited from their partners clear parameters for projects, discussion of in-progress drafts with partners inevitably yields some version of “no, this isn’t who we are” or “oh... this is how you see me.” As a result, students learn more about the organization, and organizations learn more about how their organizational identity can be represented through the production of various kinds of media. Such encounters also engender conversations about the sustainability of service-learning deliverables. Though the issue of sustainability should be foregrounded throughout the project, in our experience, this issue tends to truly hit home for both partner and student near the termination of a project. To account for this, as part of our curriculum, students documented their entire process of completing a project and assembled this documentation into guides geared at helping their partners sustain projects after the semester ends.
Our model of distributed knowledge work was developed, after all, because we wanted our partners to come away with knowledge that enabled them to be increasingly independent in their capacities to produce media for various audiences. To foster such critical abilities, we must appreciate all of the different kinds of knowledge that stakeholders bring to the table when engaging in service-learning as distributed knowledge work. As service-learning teachers, we often have knowledge of composing various media; trends in volunteerism; intellectual property; project management; communication strategies; and group work theories and practices. We convert that knowledge into materials and processes to initiate community
89 Reflections | Volume 13.2, Spring 2014 partner relationships that can become curricula that aid students in figuring out how to work with community stakeholders. Community stakeholders often marshal their knowledge of non-profit culture; organizational identity and practices; local community trends; specific technologies; and expertise in understanding and fostering volunteer and student development. Students in turn draw on their knowledge of volunteering; the writing process; understanding and using technology; working within group settings; and learning how to adapt their expectations and practices to successfully navigate the service-learning classroom in all its complexity.
As service-learning instructors, we can remind both community partners and students at regular intervals what each stakeholder has to bring to the table. We can do this through in-class discussions, meetings, e-mail updates, and short writing assignments. Regardless, our goal should be to foster mutual respect and learning amongst everyone involved—a necessary goal if both short-term and long- term outcomes are to be reached.
As stakeholders work together, they also learn to exchange knowledge in a more effective manner. Community organizations learn more about intellectual property and methods to make and sustain media projects. Students learn how organizational missions and goals shape media and how media are produced and maintained within different forms of infrastructure. Instructors learn better techniques for project management, communication, and problem- solving as we monitor the relationships students are building with their community partners throughout the semester. When we work together, we increase our knowledge across stakeholder groups. As we strive for interdependence, we increase our individual capacities in myriad ways.
IMPLICATIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS As we hope we have demonstrated, there are a variety of challenges to our model worth considering. And though a full exploration of all of them is beyond the scope of this article, we hope to touch on a few as we cover implications for conceptualizing service- learning partnerships as distributed knowledge work. The first such implication is the ways in which this model is impacted by
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and has the potential to impact various kinds of infrastructure— community-based, university-based, and classroom-based. Though, as we mentioned before, the exact work we have been reflecting on throughout this article wouldn’t have been possible were it not for the networks and infrastructures we were working within, the opposite is also true: any infrastructure provides motivated teachers and scholars with both limitations and opportunities.
Prior to our work at MSU, for instance, no instructors had conceived of FYC-based service-learning as a way to produce community media. That possibility now exists at MSU, and has been taken up by at least one part-time instructor who has used our curriculum to create her own partnerships within the local community. Infrastructure, then, is most apparent when it breaks, either through negligence or the intentional rupture of existing policies (DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill 19). Enthusiastic teachers and scholars may find that the development of similar courses—courses that help connect various types of infrastructure together through distributing work across traditional boundaries—is a productive way to make a case for new resources, new activities, perhaps even new tenure-lines or other positions. Certainly none of the infrastructure we relied on for teaching at MSU was built in a day; it represents the coordinated effort of a variety of stakeholders applying concerted effort for sometimes years at a time.
Another important implication and challenge to our model is its place within the discourse of FYC and other introductory courses, such as introductions to technical communication or media studies. We see this challenge as divisible into two main aspects of FYC infrastructure that are more or less consistent from institution to institution:
1. Variability in student population, goals and outcomes: In a first year writing course, students are typically first year students, with varying experiences in and with college-level writing. At the same time, however, in some ways this is another argument for our model, because the very variability of student learning in FYC mitigates against a one-size-fits all model and towards more a distributed model in which various kinds of knowledge
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(programmatic, individual, communal, etc.) are folded into a FYC program that takes commitments to its local community seriously.
2. Differences in the role that the course plays in the university: though more of a challenge to service-learning than to our model of it, per se, many service-learning instructors can relate to the story of the colleague who wants to do service-learning but is concerned with adding learning outcomes to an already- rigorous and taxing curriculum. Our experience, however, has been that our model allows for a lot of scalability when it comes to the scope of projects because the relationship that is consistent is between instructor and community partner. Knowledge-based projects like the ones assigned in writing classrooms can easily be repurposed for external audiences if one is aware of the intricacies of the needs of those audiences.
If we are certain of one thing, it is that service-learning requires an intense commitment to the sharing of knowledge from all stakeholders. For such work—or perhaps any public initiative— to be successful, in other words, all the people involved must see themselves as a part of a collective, as part of a responsive network of individuals who pool their resources for a common good. Our model utilizes distributed knowledge work not just to produce useful public deliverables but also to build the kind of relationships that make community partnerships worth pursuing.
Guiseppe Getto is an Assistant Professor of Technical and Professional Communication at East Carolina University. His research focuses on user experience (UX) design and the development of participatory cultures, both within organizations and online. The findings of his research have been published or are forthcoming in Computers and Composition, Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization, Communication Design Quarterly, Interdisciplinary Humanities, and Reflections, as well as conference proceedings for the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (ACM SIGDOC),
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in addition to various edited collections. Visit him online at: http:// guiseppegetto.com/.
Kendall Leon is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in Portland State University’s Department of English. Her research broadly focuses on everyday acts of rhetoric and writing, which brings her to investigate cultural and community rhetorics, digital writing, writing program administration, and research methodologies. Her current research projects focus on examining the relationship between invention, identity, and the rhetorical practices of community-based organizations, as well as assessing the impact of service-learning pedagogies on the rhetorical learning of students and instructors in the first year composition classroom. Her articles have appeared in Community Literacy Journal, Writing Program Administration, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Computers and Composition, Reflections, and Proceedings of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference, in addition to various edited collections.
Jessica Getto-Rivait, Ph.D., C.N.A., is a nursing and community communications professional. Her volunteer portfolio notably includes starting a Rotary Interact chapter at Berkley High School (Berkley, MI); co-founding and directing the Alternative Spring Break Detroit program at Wayne State University (Detroit, MI); and organizing the Curt Teichert archives at the Paleontological Research Institute (Ithaca, NY).
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WORKS CITED
Comstock, Michelle R. “Writing Programs as Distributed Networks: A Materialist Approach to University-Community Digital Media Literacy.” Community Literacy Journal. 1.1 (2006): 45-66. Cushman, Ellen. “Sustainable Service Learning Programs.” College Composition and Communication. 54.1 (2002): 40-65. Print. ---. “The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change.” College Composition and Communication. 47.1 (1996): 7-28. Print. ---. “Toward A Praxis of New Media: The Allotment Period In Cherokee History.” Reflections. 4.3 (2006): 124-43. Print. DeVoss, Danielle, Cushman, Ellen, and Grabill, Jeffrey. “Infrastructure and Composing: The When of New Media Writing.” College Composition and Communication. 57.1 (2005): 14-44. Print. Getto, Guiseppe. “Networked Knowledges: Student Collaborative Digital Composing as Communicative Action.” Communication Design Quarterly. 2.1 (2013): 33-58. Print. Grabill, Jeffrey. “Community Computing and Citizen Productivity.” Computers and Composition. 20.2 (2003): 131–150. Print. ---. Writing Community Change: Designing Technologies for Citizen Action. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007. Print. Long, Elenore. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2008. Print. Haythornthwaite, Caroline. “Communicating Knowledge: Articulating Divides in Distributed Knowledge Practice.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association, New Orleans, LA. May 2004. Print. Ho, Cheng-Ter, Yuh-Min Chen, Yuh-Jen Chen, and Chin Bin Wang. “Developing a Distributed Knowledge Model for Knowledge Management in a Collaborative Development and Implementation of an Enterprise System.” Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing. 20 (2004): 439-456. Print. Howley, Kevin. Community Media: People, Places, and Communication Technologies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.
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Hustad, Eli. “Exploring Knowledge Network Practices and Evolution in Distributed Networks of Practice.” Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management. 8.1 (2010): 69-78. Print. Jankowski, Nicholas W. and Ole Prehn, eds. Community Media in the Information Age: Perspectives and Prospects. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. Print. Rennie, Ellie. “Community Media in the Prosumer Era.” 3C Media: Journal of Community, Citizen’s and Third Sector Media and Communciation. 3 (2007): 25-32. Print. Scott, J. Blake. “Rearticulating Civic Engagement through Service Learning and Cultural Studies.” Technical Communication Quarterly. 13.3 (2004): 289-306. Print. Selber, Stuart A. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Print. Simmons, Michele. “Encouraging Civic Engagement through Extended Community Writing Projects: Re-writing the Curriculum.” The Writing Instructor. Posted: May 2010. Accessed: July 12, 2010.
95 Review: Democracies to Come: Rhetorical Action, Neoliberalism, and Communities of Resistance, by Rachel Riedner and Kevin Mahoney. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008. 142 pp.
Moira Ozias, University of Oklahoma ommunity literacy workers and publicly engaged teachers of writing have long Cbeen concerned with questions not only of learning and writing, but also of social change, equity, and justice. Whether we trace roots through Myles Horton’s Highlander School to critical pedagogy and activism (Branch) or through more institutionally focused efforts of land-grant colleges and organizations such as Campus Compact, our collective efforts have taken us out of campus spaces into surrounding local communities to write and learn with others. In Democracies to Come, Rachel Riedner and Kevin Mahoney give educators and activists a critical pedagogy and set of rhetorical tools that move “into broader contexts of democratic struggle, extending well beyond and across the classroom walls of academe” (4). They critique the structures and sutures of global neoliberalism, uncovering how it ruptures in local contexts. These ruptures, as they describe, provide opportunity for rhetorical action, intervention, and the possibility for more robust democratic struggle.
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Riedner and Mahoney situate Democracies to Come at the nexus of cultural studies, rhetoric, and composition studies, bringing cultural critique, rhetorical action, and pedagogy to bear on the work of learning across a variety of cultural spaces. They describe Democracies to Come as an essay in the tradition of Adorno (xv). In this way they weave theory with descriptions of experiences in classroom and activist spaces, uncovering connections locally and globally that demonstrate their call to … “pedagogy as a public, democratic practice that exceeds the bounds of the classroom and the university space and establishes affective relations that sustain and create new networks of affinity that are the life-blood of social movements” (4). Their exploration of the affective dimensions of neoliberalism and global capitalism – especially the production, consumption, and value of benevolence, despair and critical hope – offer to deepen our understandings of the learning and teaching of writing for social change. As the first in the Lexington Press series Cultural Studies/ Pedagogy/Activism, which aims to “pose and imagine exigencies within the current neoliberal hegemony” (xiii), Democracies to Come moves beyond a static critique of global neoliberalism, pointing to pedagogical possibilities across contexts.
In Chapters 1 and 2, Riedner and Mahoney describe their expanded approach to pedagogy and trace how pedagogical sites in and beyond university classrooms offer potential for rhetorical action. By approaching pedagogy as “a space of learning—not simply ‘teaching’—whose purpose is to develop an understanding of social structures and networks” (xiv), they understand critical pedagogy across contexts as a force for democracy insomuch as it seizes opportunities for rhetorical action that intervene in neoliberal structures, logics, and learning. The April 16, 2000 IMF protests in Washington, DC, as well as writing classes in more formal educational settings, offer opportunities for seeing not only how neoliberalism teaches hegemony, but also how language can be a mode of agency “to build new educative relationships and recreate … material conditions” (34).
Riedner and Mahoney deepen their exploration of the logics and structures of neoliberalism in Chapters 3 through 5, describing how affect circulates in service of global capitalism and how it might
97 Reflections | Volume 13.2, Spring 2014 provide pedagogical opportunities for intervention. Through a re- reading of protests of the Progressive Student Union at George Washington University, the contexts surrounding it, and the responses of university administration, they describe how consent is produced and policed within a particular site. This critique leads to explorations in Chapters 4 and 5 of how benevolence circulates to reproduce capitalist and colonialist orders, and how rhetorics of despair and hope offer opportunities for “affective intervention” (69). Although Riedner and Mahoney do not directly point to pedagogies of service-learning and public writing as sites where the circulation of benevolence can be especially apparent, the critique is rife for the making. Others have made similar moves, questioning what students learn when they do not critically engage across difference (Mitchell), or when they work with non-profits and other organizations that may participate in systems of global capital and the rhetorics that sustain them (Rabin; Vogelsang & Rhoads). Riedner and Mahoney help educators and activists deepen this critique and move toward affective interventions and rhetorical action across contexts.
Chapter 6 closes this book-length essay through an exploration of rhetorical action and the possibilities for affective openings as seized through writing by Zapatistas and cultural studies scholars. Riedner and Mahoney help us return to an understanding of rhetorical action as disruption to and ruptures of the familiar, as “new literacies that create openness for new pedagogies, and … emergent structures of feeling that make possible new affective relations and politics” (88). While they articulate the possibilities for critique and intervention across classroom and activist spaces, Riedner and Mahoney leave room for other scholar-activist-teachers to explore additional local out-of- classroom moments and contexts for pedagogy and praxis. While service-learning courses, community literacy work, and writing center work can be understood within contexts of neoliberalism, the frameworks for critique, pedagogy, and praxis offered in Democracies to Come provide alternative ways of understanding and engaging in literacy work (i.e., rhetorical action) with others against “fast capitalism” (Grimm) and neoliberal ways of knowing, writing, relating, and feeling.
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Democracies to Come may prove particularly useful for community engaged educators, activists, and composition scholars as it leaves us with lists of questions that lead to reflective praxis. As an educator, scholar, administrator and activist, I will use these questions - and the frameworks for critique that occasion them - in classroom and community contexts to foster my own and others’ critical reflection and “epistemological curiosity” (5). Service-learning and literacy educators like myself might also use the frameworks and pedagogical examples to develop new or deeper ways of engaging with our own and students’ affective responses and emotional (dis)connections with power structures. Whether we work with non-profits or individual community members, in correctional facilities or with activist organizations, Democracies to Come provides ways to understand our everyday work with language as action that has the potential to rupture geo-political and shift geopolitical systems. It provides a path toward critically engaging across the individual and systemic, as well as the local and global, a challenging move because of the neoliberal frameworks which conscribe our work and relationships, but a necessary move if we wish to work toward “the ought to be” (Horton as quoted in Branch 18).
Moira Ozias (MA, MSW) is Associate Director of the OU Writing Center and a doctoral student in the Educational Leadership & Policy Studies Program in the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education at the University of Oklahoma. Her research interests center on issues of identity and educational equity, particularly related to literacies, peer learning, and community-university collaborations. She has recently co-authored articles on writing center consultant education and the use of community-engaged pedagogies in graduate education, especially exploring issues of racial justice and space.
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WORKS CITED
Branch, Kirk. Eyes on the ‘Ought to Be’: What We Teach When We Teach about Literacy. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2007. Print. Grimm, Nancy. New Conceptual Frameworks for Writing Center Work. Writing Center Journal 29.2 (2009): 11-27. Print. Mitchell, Tania D. Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning: Engaging the Literature to Differentiate Two Models. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 14.2 (2008): 50–65. Print. Rabin, Lisa M. (2009). Language Ideologies and the Settlement House Movement: A New History for Service-Learning. Michigan Journal of Community Service-learning 15.2 (2009): 48- 55. Vogelsang, Lori & Robert Rhoads. (2003). Advancing a Broad Notion of Public Engagement: The Limitations of Contemporary Service-Learning. Journal of College and Character, 4(2), n.p. Retrieved from http://journals.naspa.org/ jcc/vol4/iss2/1/.
100 Review: Elaine Richardson. PHD to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life. (Parlor Press, 2013)
Mariana Grohowski, Bowling Green State hamefully, I was not familiar with Dr. University Richardson’s important work in African SAmerican and Hiphop literacies until I read her memoir PHD to Ph.D. In fourteen powerful chapters, Richardson unfolds her resolute history. The memoir is not like Richardson’s other academic work, though it reveals an early engagement with language politics; it was her Mama’s mission that she use “Propah Henglish” (4), and she was forced to “code-switch” in her speech and writing so teachers did not consider her “illiterate . . . for sounding Black” (202–7). In other words, Richardson’s expertise on code-switching and language use is implicitly present as she illustrates how her past enveloped her, “in a struggle between what the rest of the world told me about myself, and the girl my family tried to raise” (163). It is also a strikingly raw piece of prose that vividly exposes her experiences and struggles moving from PHD (“po ho on dope: ex-prostitute, ex-drug addict, hood-dweller, baby mama of two ‘illegitimate’ children” (213)) to eventual English Ph.D. and tenured professor at The Ohio State University.
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Richardson shares the various community literacies sponsored by parents, friends, and neighbors on 68th Street in Cleveland, Ohio and the lessons learned living a “double life” as both “Elaine, the school girl and Big Stuff, a ‘down ass chick’ in the making” (44). An observant and quick learner, Richardson recalls the methodologies she employed negotiating the discourses of her neighbors at the grocery store, on their porches, and of course, from more experienced street-workers as she learned “the ropes” as a novice prostitute.
Readers will come away perceiving Richardson not as an agentless victim but as one who learns best from lived experience. This is perhaps best illustrated through Richardson accounting of her drug addiction, funded from her earnings as a prostitute. As Richardson shares, “How do you explain to the police that you’re a prostitute that just wants her freedom to work the streets and support her habit? No matter what I said, I would be a no good woman getting what I deserved” (177). In fact, Richardson’s account as a prostitute advances what Jill McCraken might refer to as a “more realistic community representation” of “street [and] sex work” (13). Of course, unlike the discourse McCraken examines in newspaper articles about street workers, Richardson’s narrative offers a multidimensional, lived experience and avoids rhetorics of victimization, powerlessness, and systemic blaming of the world of prostitution. In essence, Richardson’s memoir proves that sometimes the only way to find one’s self is to lose one’s self, thereby exemplifying through her lived experiences that one is solely responsible for one’s destiny. As Richardson puts it: “It’s like qualities that we need to live are the same ones that can kill” (190). Thus, Richardson’s message suggests the immense power of individual responsibility against larger social systems (like race) for personal and social change, thereby advancing the rhetorical prowess of citizen rhetors for enacting local and global revolutions.
As a graduate student myself, I took particular interest in the ways in which Richardson conveyed the challenges and norms of academia in the last two chapters of her book. Though Richardson writes with a broader, less academic audience in mind, I found her advice about mentorship and navigating through academia as a student and junior faculty member refreshing, compared to Gregory Colón
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Semenza’s Graduate Study for the 21st Century. I found Richardson’s no-nonsense approach helpful; for example, Richardson attests, “In the world of what they call Research One University, your value is based on your ability to . . . [produce]. . .nobody cares about your personal struggles” (244). Yet, Richardson’s book is not meant as a how-to guide on professional development for graduate students; instead, Richardson’s work is about embracing not hiding who we are and where we come from. Whereas Semenza argues that to develop professionally, academics must deny their personal lives, Richardson’s memoir as a whole demonstrates that realistically, professional development demands the acknowledgement and incorporation of the various community literacies that surround us—within and beyond the academy. Though Richardson echoes Semenza’s testimony that academia is not for the faint of heart, Richardson exemplifies that surviving and thriving in academia is not nearly as hard as trying to make a life for one’s self (and one’s daughters) on the street.
There are at least two important insights that Richardson offers writing studies teacher-scholars in her memoir:
1. Like the 1974 National Council of Teachers of English’s (NCTE) “Resolution on the Student’s Right to Their Own Language,” Richardson attests that she was taught by her writing teachers and tutors to be ashamed of her language, often grappling with their labeling her “illiterate” for not easily adapting to “academese.” Thus, Richardson posits that writing instructors should encourage our students “to feel good about [their] language or value it,” in order for our students to, “feel good about [them]selves. Your language is your heart, your brain, your family, your history” (210-1). In short, I see Richardson advocating for a renewed commitment to the NCTE’s “Resolution on the Student’s Right to Their Own Language,” stressing that perhaps instructors of writing would better assist students if they focused on higher-order concerns such as, “how to write with power, to develop [one’s] voice, to analyze arguments, to become a critical thinker,” rather than focusing on lower-order concerns such as “‘cleaning up’ [student’s] grammar” (210). Such efforts are particularly possible for those interested in curricula that engage students’ or community partner’s discourses. In fact, a poignant example of a service learning assignment that enacts
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Richardson’s advice is Shirley Faulkner-Springfield’s Reflections article “Letters to Young High School Students. Furthermore, Richardson’s advancement in encouraging language rights might be of interest for community learners and writers as well that negotiate “propah English” and “code switching” in their literate lives.
2. Additionally, Richardson advances the argument that as teacher- scholars of writing, we could do better to acknowledge the needs, abilities, and experiences our students bring with them into our writing classrooms. In fact, Richardson’s life work exemplifies how one’s experiences and abilities can be embraced and utilized in educational and professional endeavors. As Richardson puts it: “Language, culture and history. We separate these to teach writing and language but they are not really that easy to untangle” (223). Thus, as readers of this journal know from first-hand experience, through curricula and assignments that engage reflective, contemplative writing for civic engagement and service learning projects, students are better able to acknowledge links between language, culture, and history in ways the five-paragraph essay ignores.
PHD to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life offers scholars, teachers, and students of public writing, civic engagement, and service learning hope and inspiration for overcoming adversity by the sure will to live and the hunger for knowledge and the need to embrace all aspects of one’s identity by uniting personal and professional literacies.
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WORKS CITED
Faulkner-Springfield, Shirley E. “Letters to Young High School Students: Writing and Uniting an Academic Community.” Reflections 10.2 (2011): 63–107. Print. McCracken, Jill. “Street and Sex Work: Re/Constructing Discourse from Margin to Center.” Community Literacy Journal 4.2 (2010): 1–17. Print. Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Committee on CCCC Language Statements. College Composition and Communication 25.3 (1974). Print. Semenza, Gregory M. Colón. Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010. Print.
105 Review: Stephen Parks. Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love. (Syracuse University Press, 2010) Kelly Langan, West Chester University n Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, through the of Pennsylvania efforts of the working class community by Iwhich he was raised, Stephen Parks was given the opportunity to attend college. In his book Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love, Parks narrates his own successes and failures with community partnerships during his time as the director of the Institute for the Study of Literature, Literacy, and Culture at Temple University in Philadelphia. Throughout the book, Parks gives a voice to community writers who were previously silenced, giving back to the working class communities by which he was raised, and, eventually, giving a voice to other marginalized groups as well. The community members tell stories of heartbreak, hardship, and happiness, but the underlying issue is ever present: their voices have been silenced. One community writer, Margarita Rojas, explains what it meant to be a woman in her community by saying, “I was going to continue studying, but tradition dictated otherwise. It was more like, ‘Women shouldn’t study because eventually
106 Reviews they get married and never practice their profession’” (163). For many community members, like Rojas, the projects outlined in Gravyland mean having their voices heard for the first time.
Parks’ goal in writing Gravyland is threefold: he wants to (1) open dialogue about communities becoming part of the college classroom, (2) create classrooms that value the mass of knowledge which develops through community dialogue, and (3) share stories in which students recognize their education as the result of entire communities’ efforts (xiv). In Chapters 1-4, Parks provides examples of community-based learning while providing readers with theoretical analyses of each experience. Through the successes and failures of Urban Rhythms and New City Writing, Parks creates a timeline of events that anyone interested in developing community-university partnerships might benefit from studying. His testimony is indispensable to those in academia who are working to establish and sustain community-based programs in outcomes-based institutions.
As Parks guides readers through his experiences, he anchors his stories with the established theories of Paula Mathieu, Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, Paulo Freire, and others. For example, in Chapter 1, “Writing Beyond the Curriculum,” Parks tells about an Advanced Composition course which analyzed popular music as a means to examine the “political response by the working class to mainstream cultural values” (3). Throughout the course, students began to tell their own stories: they felt that school never respected their working- class values; they shared stories in which they turned to music so they could reside in a culture in which their voices were valued, even if that meant turning away from education. With their collective stories in mind, the students began—above and beyond any assignment—a journal for Philadelphia public-school students to write about their working-class culture. Urban Rhythms would show value in the community voices. Although the students developed this initiative without prompting from their professor, Parks explains that their actions were rooted deeply in “existing theoretical and disciplinary paradigms” (5). With references to scholars such as Shirley Brice Heath, and activists such as Thomas Dewey, Parks gives readers the theoretical structure of his students’ actions; he shows the theories that might suggest his students would be successful.
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The goal of Urban Rhythms was to open a dialogue between community members about literacy; unfortunately, the outcome seemed to further separate community members into different factions—each working toward disparate goals. Parks’ inclusion of theorist, scholarly, and activist goals in “Writing Beyond the Curriculim” only validates the students’ attempt to give voice to a community. Regardless of the project’s ultimate dismantling, Parks characterizes the students with dignity and intelligence, never once suggesting that the project’s failure was their fault. This message of dignity-despite-outcome emerges as a main theme of the book; with community-based learning, there will always be small failures. No two community partnerships are the same, and there will always be room for improvement, but the message of persistence permeates Gravyland. Parks’ ambition and optimism could easily inspire all members of the community— students and faculty alongside politicians, administrators, and middle-class workers—to actively pursue change in society. His book acts as a community-based learning manifesto of successes through surface failures.
The most important message of Gravyland is exemplified in Chapter 5, “The Insights of Everyday Scholars,” in which Parks generously gives the community sixty pages in his book for their own writing— in both English, and in their native languages. He explains that giving voice to a community “represent[s] a sustained argument about who is an intellectual” (130). In “The Insights of Everyday Scholars,” Parks gives those voices an even wider audience. Throughout the book, Parks argues that real knowledge is created through the mixing of multiple voices from different parts of the community—university faculty, politicians, students, and the working-class. In this chapter, Parks shows his profound trust in and respect for all members of a community. His devotion to the message becomes more than just words in Chapter 5; more important than any other message in Gravyland, Parks leads by example and allows his voice to mingle with the voices of the community to “provide a partial representation of the collective voices that have been a vital part of our success” (131). One community writer, Mayra Castillo Rangel tells readers, “Since living in the US, I like the liberty, my freedom. I’m no longer a submissive Mexican woman, meant to be only a wife and mother” (173). In just one line, Rangel proves herself to be an empowered immigrant. Parks explains that “increased corporatization of the
108 Reviews university further facilitates community disempowerment” (196). The independence and strength of community writers like Rangel is vital to the success of Parks’ goals; the community voices included in Gravyland echo empowerment as the writers share their stories and insights.
The final chapter, “Success,” paints a picture of Parks’ experiences in shades of optimism and progress. Despite the struggles and momentary failures of New City Writing, Parks explains the successes embedded in the program and argues “for the importance of composition and rhetoric programs that develop strategic spaces (as opposed to tactical interventions) to support community- based partnerships and progressive literacy programs” (192). His argument—based mainly on the successes and experiences of New City Writing—proves useful to the faculty he addresses in the beginning of the book: faculty who are working to prove the efficacy of community-based learning in outcomes-based institutions. Parks’ work is especially important in an academic climate where the majority of faculty think “that working with public schools and community groups or implementing expansive service-learning pedagogies should not count as scholarship” (xxxvi).
In the end, readers might be left looking for expanded explanations of the underlying theories Parks uses to pepper his narrative. Someone without an extensive background in community-based learning might miss some of Parks’ references and allusions to scholars and activists who came before him. Even still, Gravyland brings readers through multiple community partnerships, their successes and surface failures, and how those experiences might have changed if the partners acted differently. The community writers represented in Gravyland offer a great deal to the work of service learning and community publishing—their voices remind readers that, all too often, academics forget to listen to their own community members. Even more, the insight and intellect present in every voice confirms Parks’ notion that anyone and everyone is a scholar in their own right. Parks’ detailed account of his experience proves to be irreplaceable for those in any part of the community who wish to open dialogue about literacy and education.
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Subscription Form Reflections | Public Rhetoric, Civil Writing and Service Learning
Reflections publishes a lively collection of scholarship, essays, interviews and reviews in a forum that brings together emerging scholars and leaders in the fields of community-based writing and public rhetorics. Featuring the work of • Melody Bowdon • Ellen Cushman • David Cooper • Tom Deans • Linda Flower • Diana George • Eli Goldblatt • Joe Harris • Bruce Herzberg • Brooke Hessler • David Jolliffe • Paula Mathieu • Phyllis Mentzell Ryder • Ira Shor • Amy Taggart • Nancy Welch
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