I love the terrain where theory and action meet. That's why I enjoy working in the area of community literacy. Sure, theories provide different lenses for interpreting the decision points, questions—even hunches—that guide the rhetorical work we do in arenas that matter most to us. Yet scholarship in human activity is just beginning to understand how complex this kind of intellectual work really is. It is not simply applying what you know, but rather actively negotiating a course of action in the face of competing—often conflicting—theories, goals, institutional expectations, traditions, values, and habits of mind. Yet this is the space where knowledge matters, where each of us has the chance to make where we work and live a bit more inclusive, responsive, experimental, and lively.
My approach to community literacy is inherently interdisciplinary—bringing together the most abstract theories of political philosophy and the most grounded studies of situated literacies. My scholarship draws on a wide array of rhetorical methods to test the limits and potential of day-to-day democracy. The individual articles I’ve written, for instance, contribute to broader conversations in service learning, out-of-school literacies, and sustainability. This 2008-09 academic year, I’m teaching a new course on knowledge activism that features the wide range of rhetorical tools that activist rhetoricians use to contribute to public life.
After completing a postdoctoral fellowship through Pittsburgh's Community Literacy Center and Carnegie Mellon University, I continued for several years to direct community-literacy initiatives with Wayne Peck and Joyce Baskins. With Linda Flower and Lorraine Higgins, I published Learning to Rival: A Literate Practice for Intercultural Inquiry. We recently published the leading article—a fifteen-year retrospective—for the inaugural issue of Community Literacy Journal. My new book, Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics offers a comparative analysis of community-literacy studies that traces common values in diverse accounts of “ordinary people going public.”
