public institutions.5
Table 1. Prominent relationships between local publics and formal institutions.
| Literacy Scholar/s | Metaphor for the Local Public | Relation to Formal Institutions |
| Shirley Brice Heath | an impromptu street theater | the local public turns its back on public institutions |
| Deborah Brandt; Caroline Heller | organic imagery: a cultural womb and a garden | the local public relies on one or more institution to sponsor it |
| David Barton and Mary Hamilton;Ellen Cushman | a link anda gate along a fenceline | the local public intersects with a public institution |
| Eli Goldblatt;Linda Flower | a community-organizing effort and the community think tank | the local public is forged in partnership with a formal institution |
| Ralph Cintron | a shadow system | the local public defies formal public institutions |
Together, the studies reviewed in these chapters portray places where ordinary people develop public voices. But to draw implications from the distinctive features of these discursive spaces, the discourses they circulate, and the literate practices that sustain them, we need some sort of heuristic. The local public framework was designed for the job. It is introduced in chapter 2.
Following the format for the Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition, chapter 2 provides key definitions and distinctions. It begins by distinguishing ordinary people from those typically depicted going public, namely political leaders and celebrities. Then it provides a rhetorical definition of community for the study of community literacy—a definition rooted in the local publics reviewed in this volume. The chapter then defines key elements of the local public framework: the metaphor that frames the account of people going public and its distinctive features; the context (including location) that frames the site; the tenor of the discourse; the literacies that people in the account use to go public; and the process of rhetorical invention they use to figure out what to say, to do, and to write. The chapter concludes by previewing images of community literacy. The chapter suggests that learning to read local publics is an engaging intellectual enterprise and a prerequisite to forging mutually respectful community-university partnerships.
Chapter 3 asks the question: to what disciplinary priorities can this interest in how ordinary people go public be traced? The chapter argues that the history of community literacy is tied up in efforts to define the local public as an object of inquiry and a site for rhetorical intervention. The chapter suggests that what has attracted community-literacy scholars to local publics is the promise they hold of enacting what Flower has called “a rhetoric of engagement” grounded in relationships and focused on rhetorical action (Community Literacy 1). Scholars’ interests in local publics have coalesced around the connection between vernacular literacies and public life—a connection that contends with the inherent ambiguity of language rights discourse and all the complexity of public-spheres studies. The chapter looks at how the ideals of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) movement pervade research in community literacy and how community-literacy projects test these ideals by situating them in public domains where vernacular literacies have a place at the table.
The book’s next section, current views, uses the local public framework as a lens for interpreting a range of positions, arguments, and lines of research related to community literacy and for examining possible opportunities for new research, programs, and applications. To do so, current views features, in turn, a series of images of local public life prominent in the literature.
Chapter 4 features the impromptu street theater in Shirley Brice Heath’s ethnography of Trackton, the rural African-American community she studied in the 1970s in the Piedmont Carolinas and described in Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Theatrical imagery is especially attuned to the performative quality of local public discourse. Thus, chapter 4 draws a parallel between the poetic world-making power of style in written text (e.g., the metaphors researchers use to describe local publics) and the “poetic worldmaking” power of performance (Warner 114), such as those Heath observed on Trackton’s public stage. The chapter also compares Trackton’s public performances to the Native American New Ghost Dance which insinuates local issues into more formal public forums (Lyons).
Chapter 5 features two organic images for local public life: the cultural womb— characterizing the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church (Metro AME) parish to eight of the African Americans whom Brandt interviewed for Literacy in American Lives—and the garden, depicting the Tenderloin Women’s Writing Workshop (TWWW) in Caroline Heller’s Until We are Strong Together. Both images characterize local publics in relation to their sponsoring institutions; thus, the comparison highlights issues of institutional sponsorship and sustainability. The cultural womb and the garden also enact a rhetoric of transformation in which a local public serves as an “inspired context” for literacy learning (Willinsky 153). The chapter shows that in locations of stress and scarcity, such local publics transform lives through spiritual renewal and transform literacies by revamping familiar practices for new purposes. Somewhat ironically, then, this condition of stress and scarcity—what Brandt calls an “economy of efficiency”—contributes both to a local public’s vibrancy and its vulnerability. The chapter highlights the need for mestiza publics (Anzaldua), capable of supporting the demanding and necessary cultural work of intercultural communication (Fraser 125), intercultural inquiry (Peck, Flower, and Higgins 209), and border crossing (Higgins and Brush 695).
If the cultural womb and the garden featured in chapter 5 use literacy to enact democratic values and practices, the images featured in chapter 6 show just how tenuous the connection between literacy and democracy can be. The chapter features images of local public life at the intersection between private lives and public institutions. Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community is an ethnography of Springside, a working-class neighborhood in England, in the 1990s. Here David Barton and Mary Hamilton depict the private-public intersection as a link. They show that while a community group might use its literate repertoire to enact democratic values one moment, the group’s practices may violate tenets of democracy the next. In Ellen Cushman’s The Struggle and the Tools: Oral and Literate Strategies in an Inner City Community, the local public is a gate—the discursive and physical space between the gatekeeper, on the one hand, and the community resident, on the other. Of all the gatekeeping encounters Cushman documents in the industrial city she calls Quayville, only one affords anything resembling democratic access. Indirectly, Cushman’s ethnography asks, what would it take to teach gatekeepers in training to enact professional identities as knowledgeable advocates and fair judges? (Long “Rhetorical Education”).
Chapter 7 features local publics as partnerships between the community and the university: the community-organizing effort in Goldblatt’s “Alinsky’s Reveille: A Community-Organizing Model for Neighborhood-Based Literacy Projects” and the community think tank in Flower’s “Intercultural Knowledge Building: The Literate Action of a Community Think Tank.” These images pose two distinct rhetorics for local public life. On the one hand, a rhetoric of consensus guides Goldblatt’s recent effort to help a group of community leaders in North Philadelphia formulate a shared strategy for a literacy initiative called Open Doors. Based on the community-organizing discourse of Saul Alinsky, consensus transforms a problem into an issue for collective action. In contrast, the community think tank is, in part, a response to the frustrations Pittsburgh residents have voiced with community-organizing practices (Flower, “Intercultural Knowledge” 250; Flower and Deems 97). For this think tank, the goal for deliberation is not consensus among group members but the transformed understanding of individual participants made possible through the structured process of collaborative inquiry. The comparison highlights the prevalence of conflict in local public life, as well as tools for maximizing its potential in rhetorical invention. Most of all, the chapter asks: toward what ends do we, as ordinary people, deliberate in local public spheres? And, if the ultimate rhetorical art is intervention: what practices are available (or invent-able) to help us ordinary people get there?
Chapter 8 features a local public that defies formal public institutions: the shadow system in Ralph Cintron’s Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life and Rhetorics of the Everyday. The shadow system mimics the commonplaces so important to mainstream institutions—throwing them back onto the mainstream in forms the mainstream