To the extent that rhetoric and writing studies bases its theories and pedagogies on the self-present composing subject—the figure of the writer who exists apart from the writing context, from the “world,” from others—it is anti-communitarian. Communication can take place only among beings who are given over to the “outside,” exposed, open to the other’s effraction. This essay therefore calls for the elaboration of a “communitarian” literacy that understands reading and writing as functions of this originary sociality, as expositions not of who one is (identity) but of the fact that “we” are (community).

Analyzing postmodern theory, course discussion, and student texts, this article argues that womanist theology and the texts it gathers can serve as efficacious course content for other-literate students. Womanist theology offers students a scholarly discipline that expresses inter- and intracultural rhetorical awareness, bridging the gap between home and school literacy functions.

The Word. In the beginning was the word, in principio erat verbum , in the words of the Vulgate version of the gospel according to John. In medieval manuscripts of this gospel, verbum and the words surrounding it are usually prominent in some way (large, ornately decorated); the text enacts itself and the words became an icon for their own meaning. The prophet John continued by equating his God with the Word and attributing the making of all things to this God/Word.

Traces of a offers a unique scholarly perspective that merges interests in rhetorical and literacy studies, United States social and political theory, and African American women writers. Focusing on elite nineteenth-century African American women who formed a new class of women well positioned to use language with consequence, Royster uses interdisciplinary perspectives (literature, history, feminist studies, African American studies, psychology, art, sociology, economics) to present a well-textured rhetorical analysis of the literate practices of these women. With a shift in educational opportunity after the Civil War, African American women gained access to higher education and received formal training in rhetoric and writing. By the end of the nineteenth-century, significant numbers of African American women operated actively in many public arenas.In her study, Royster acknowledges the persistence of disempowering forces in the lives of African American women and their equal perseverance against these forces. Amid these conditions, Royster views the acquisition of literacy as a dynamic moment for African American women, not only in terms of their use of written language to satisfy their general needs for agency and authority, but also to fulfill socio-political purposes as well.Traces of a Stream is a showcase for nineteenth-century African American women, and particularly elite women, as a group of writers who are currently underrepresented in rhetorical scholarship. Royster has formulated both an analytical theory and an ideological perspective that are useful in gaining a more generative understanding of literate practices as a whole and the practices of African American women in particular. Royster tells a tale of rhetorical prowess, calling for alternative ways of seeing, reading, and rendering scholarship as she seeks to establish a more suitable place for the contributions and achievements of African American women writers.

This article examines issues of literacy and identity relative to the development of a critical pedagogy and a critical democracy. An earlier version was delivered as the Chair’s Address at the Fifty-first Annual CCCC Convention on April 13, 2000.

The tradition of rhetoric established 2,500 years ago emphasizes the imperative of speech as a defining characteristic of reason. But in her new book Lend Me Your Ear, Brenda Jo Brueggemann exposes this tradition s effect of disallowing deaf people human identity because of their natural silence. Brueggemann s assault upon this long-standing rhetorical conceit is both erudite and personal; she writes both as a scholar and as a hard-of-hearing woman. In this broadly based study, she presents a profound analysis and understanding of this rhetorical tradition s descendent disciplines (e.g., audiology, speech/language pathology) that continue to limit deaf people. Next to this even-handed scholarship, she juxtaposes a volatile emotional counterpoint achieved through interviews with Deaf individuals who have faced rhetorically constructed restrictions, and interludes of her own poetry and memoirs. The energized structure of Lend Me Your Ear galvanizes new thought on the rhetoric surrounding Deaf people by posing basic questions from a rhetorical context: How is deafness constructed as a disability, pathology, or culture through the institutions of literacy education and science/technology, and how do these constructions fit with those of deaf people themselves? The rhetoric of deafness as pathology is associated with the conventional medical and scientific establishments, and literacy education fosters deafness as disability, both dependent upon the premise that speech drives communication. This kinetic study demands consideration of deafness in terms of the rhetoric of Deaf culture, American Sign Language (ASL), and the political activism of Deaf people. Brueggemann argues strenuously and successfully for a reevaluation of the speech model of rhetoric in light of the singular qualities of ASL poetry, a genre that adds the dimension of space and is not disembodied. Ironically, without a word being spoken or printed, ASL poetry returns to the fading, prized oral tradition of poets such as Homer. The speech imperative in traditional rhetoric also fails to present rhetorical forms for listening, or a rhetoric of silence. These and other break-out concepts introduced in Lend Me Your Ear that will stimulate scholars and students of rhetoric, language, and Deaf studies to return to this intriguing work again and again.

I make the following moves in this article: (1) I briefly trace how rhetorical listening emerged in my thinking; (2) I explore disciplinary and cultural biases that subordinate listening to reading and writing and speaking; (3) I speculate why listening is needed; (4) I offer an extended definition of rhetorical listening as a trope for interpretive invention; (5) I demonstrate how it may be employed as a code of cross-cultural conduct; and (6) I listen to a student’s listening.

In writing this paper, I have maintained that the actual act of writing is an important means for reflecting and revising the paradox of one’s privileges. It helps to put one’s self—especially one’s private and day to day thoughts, feelings, and bodily reactions—on the line for personal and public scrutiny.

A s a field of professional inquiry intertwined with the practice and teaching of its own subject, composition studies has enjoyed the steady pace of its own recent evolution.Few composition scholars twenty years ago would have imagined the rate at which the field is now developing, exploding beyond its boundaries, creating new alliances, and locating new sites for inquiry and knowledge production.These current transformations owe in part to the inevitable burgeoning of a theoretically interdisciplinary field with a strong orientation toward self-reflection.They also owe to unprecedented changes underway in higher education, changes pressured by shifts in the politics and economics of university administration, the advent of new technologies, population changes that affect student demographics, and the creation of alternative structures and contexts for teaching and learning.Composition, in seeking a disciplinary identity, is questioning the ways it creates and mediates knowledge and the ways in which that knowledge informs and is informed by various contexts for research and practice.This collection focuses on the ways in which composition reconsiders established dichotomies, examines new connections among areas of inquiry, and suggests avenues for inquiry that have transformative consequences for the sites of theory, research, and teaching.When we first proposed this volume of essays, we sought submissions that reconsidered the relationship among theory, research and practice, expecting that our focus would primarily be on the changing face of composition research.Our open call and invitation to individual scholars, however, resulted in very few reports of research studies, but rather in contributions that reflect the extent to which the theory/research/practice relationship now occupies our disciplinary thinking.Since the publication of Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (1987), the past decade has seen attention to research methodology largely displaced by conflict between theory and practice.This conflict, still rooted, one might argue, in the desire for a unified theory, often centers on the extent to which any theory employed by compositionists must grow, if not from research, then from practice, or at least edgment of "what is contradictory, and perhaps unknowable" (9).Many of the authors in this volume (Rose and Lauer; Chiang; Grimm, et al.; Okawa) build into their essays acknowledgement of their positions as scholars and researchers and examine their "findings" as cultural and ideological products.At that same time, some of them are quick to point out the limits and consequences of new theories and methodologies for composition as a disciplinary community (Seitz; MacDonald; Neff; Ray and Barton).Increasingly, compositionists have more confidence in the recognition that teaching makes knowledge, and that practice, overdetermined as it is, continually calls into question the traditional purpose of theory-to explain unaccounted-for phenomena and solve new problems.Lore, as North distinguishes it from traditional disciplinary knowledge production, can, Harkin argues, be thought of as postdisciplinary theory, because it allows for practitioners' often contradictory attempts to solve writing problems with more than one cause, rather than using theory in the traditional way to contain situations (134).Beth Daniell has argued that while composition theories may lack the authority to dictate pedagogy, as rhetoric, they are what persuade us to teach writing in the ways that we do (130).At the same time that theories may contain the discipline by "serving the interests of . . .groups within that discipline" (131), they are what enable us, she says, to "create a community in which we can figure out what we, individually and collectively, believe about our work" (135).In that rhetorical and political sense, theory is practice.But, as several of the authors in this volume (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) ask, whose "work" and whose interests define us and remain at the center of composition as a discipline?Can theory, research, and practice in ever new relationships intersect and hold an expanding community together or drive it apart into separate communities whose power and authority may be in jeopardy?Composition's calling into question its knowledge comes at a time when the authority of that expert knowledge may be at risk.In the wake of shrinking graduate programs and the responsibility-centered-management of academic departments in the new corporate universities, the literature components of some English departments are beginning to reclaim an expertise in the teaching of writing or, in some instances, to efface that expertise, deeming it no longer necessary, politically appropriate, or cost-effective.Much composition scholarship in fact contributes to this withering away of the more public conception of composition.Our growing understanding of complex context-specific literacy practices runs counter to institutional conditions that assume composition is an essential set of transparent skills to be conveyed one-time-only to first year students by exploited instructors.If retooled writing courses do result from the disciplinary boundary crossing of compositionists into deconstruction, feminist, multicultural, and cultural studies, what in the experiences of teachers and students justifies or interrogates these theories in practice?How does interdisciplinary inquiry expand avenues and change how and what we research and teach?What locates theorists, courses, teachers, and programs that might grow from this research within "composition"?Several of the authors in this volume locate their concerns about composition's "identity crisis" in a disjuncture between theory and pedagogy, whether questioning composition's attempts to achieve more disciplinary status (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) or its failure to focus more attention on knowledgebuilding inside the field (MacDonald; Neff).

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Contents: Part I:Theory, Language, Rhetoric. C. Schuster, Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical Theorist (1985). R.A. Harris, Bakhtin, Phaedrus, and the Geometry of Rhetoric (1988). J. Klancher, Bakhtin's Rhetoric (1989). T. Kent, Hermeneutics and Genre: Bakhtin and the Problem of Communicative Interaction (1991). K. Halasek, Feminism and Bakhtin: Dialogic Reading in the Academy (1992). M. Bernard-Donals, Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism (1994). M. Cooper, Dialogic Learning Across Disciplines (1994). K. Halasek, M. Bernard-Donals, D. Bialostosky, J.T. Zebroski, Bakhtin and Rhetorical Criticism: A Symposium (1992). Part II:Composition Studies, Pedagogy, Research. J.S. Ritchie, Beginning Writers: Diverse Voices and Individual Identity (1989). J.J. Comprone, Textual Perspectives on Collaborative Learning: Dialogic Literacy and Written Texts in Composition Classrooms (1989). G.A. Cross, A Bakhtinian Exploration of Factors Affecting the Collaborative Writing of an Executive Letter of an Annual Report (1990). D.H. Bialostosky, Liberal Education, Writing, and the Dialogic Self (1991). T. Recchio, A Bakhtinian Reading of Student Writing (1991). M. Middendorf, Bakhtin and the Dialogic Writing Class (1992). N. Welch, One Student's Many Voices: Reading, Writing, and Responding With Bakhtin (1993). H.R. Ewald, Waiting for Answerability: Bakhtin and Composition Studies (1993).

In this essay I set out a case for why the concept of sponsorship is so richly suggestive for exploring economies of literacy and their effects. Then, through use of extended case examples, I demonstrate the practical application of this approach for interpreting current conditions of literacy teaching and learning, including persistent stratification of opportunity and escalating standards for literacy achievement. A final section addresses implications for the teaching of writing. (Brandt 167).

My aim is to suggest ways of using [Joseph] Cornell’s art in order to create an appreciation of the ways that textual coherence can manifest itself, and to discern a shaping strategy that may help us support students’ prefigurative literate activities.

The University of Pittsburgh Press Series in Composition, Literacy and Culture has recently published three titles which should be of interest to historians of literacy and of teaching. Two of the works under review collect historical documents from the 19th century. (Crowley 109).

Changing Work, Changing Workers looks at U.S. factories and workplace education programs to see what is expected currently of workers. The studies reported in Hull's book draw their evidence from firsthand, sustained looks at workplaces and workplace education efforts. Many of the chapters represent long-term ethnographic or qualitative research. Others are fine-grained examinations of texts, curricula, or policy. Such perspectives result in portraits that honor the complex nature of work, people, and education.

[This book] is a must for those committed to voicing the personal conflicts writers experience and to turning those confusing and sometimes dismaying moments into productive sites for questioning textual relations. - Journal of Advanced CompositionIn Getting Restless, Nancy Welch calls for a reconception of what we mean by revision, urging compositionists to rethink long-held beliefs about teacher-student relations and writing practices. Drawing primarily on feminist and psychoanalytic theories, she considers how revision can be redefined not as a process of increasing orientations toward a particular thesis or discourse community, but instead as a process of disorientation: an act of getting restless with received meanings, familiar relationships, and disciplinary or generic boundaries--a practice of intervening in the meanings and identifications of one's text and one's life. Using ethnographic, case-study, and autobiographical research methods, Welch maintains two consistent aims throughout the study: to show how composition teachers can create for themselves and for their students environments that encourage and support revision as restlessness and as a process of intervening in a first draft's thoroughly social meanings and identifications to demonstrate how composition's process legacy is revitalized when we understand that our means to form and change communities- to form and change constructions of authority--are located in revision. In achieving these ends Welch examines three academic sites: a campus writing center, undergraduate writing classrooms, and a summer workshop for K-12 teachers. This book will appeal to a wide audience, including classroom and writing center teachers, historians and theorists in composition and rhetoric, feminist theorists, and those engaged in literacy studies, teacher education, and connections/tensions among teaching, writing, and psychoanalysis.

Contents: Preface. Part I: Writing in the Material World. The Technology Question. Technology Studies. Part II: The Role of Technology in the Cognition of Literacy. Reading On-Line. Materiality and Thinking: The Effects of Computer Technology on Writers' Planning. Text Sense and Writers' Materially Based Representations of Text. Part III: The Social and Cultural Construction of Literacy Tools. Social Dynamics, or Scientific Truth, or Sheer Human Cussedness: Design Decisions in the Evolution of a User Interface. Constructing Technology Through Discourse with Ann George. Part IV: Conclusions and Future Inquiry. Historicizing Technology. Theorizing Technology.

Situating the teaching and learning of arguments within historical contexts, M. Daly Goggin ushering in the tigers of wrath - playfulness and rationality in learning to argue, S. Clarke narrative and arguemnt, argument in marrative, Mike Baynham argument as a key concept in teacher education, G. Harvard and R. Dunne argument, dialogue and religious pluralism - reflections on the current state of religious education in Britain, Howard Gibson and Jo Backus argument and science education, Carol J. Boulter and John K. Gilbert raised and erased voices - what special cases offer to argument, J. McGonigal extending children's voices - argument and the teaching of philosophy, Patrick Costello conflict and conformity - the place of argument in learning a discourse, S. Mitchell signalling valuation through argumentative discourse, M.A. Mathison thinking through controversy - evaluating written arguments, C.A. Hill negotiating competing voices to construct claims and evidence - urban American teenagers rivalling anti-drug literature, E. Long et al a different way to teach the writing of argument, A. Berner and W. Boswell argumentative writing and the extension of literacy, P. O'Rourke and M. O'Rourke.

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A compelling collection by one of the pioneers of revisionist approaches to the history of literacy in North America and Europe, The Labyrinths of Literacy offers original and controversial views on the relation of literacy to society, leading the way for scholars and citizens who are willing to question the importance and function of literacy in the development of society today.

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The first full-length account integrating both the cognitive and sociological aspects of reading and writing in the academy, this unique volume covers educational research on reading and writing, rhetorical research on writing in the disciplines, cognitive research on expertise in ill-defined problems, and sociological and historical research on the professions. The author produced this volume as a result of a research program aimed at understanding the relationship between two concepts -- literacy and expertise -- which traditionally have been treated as quite separate phenomena. A burgeoning literature on reading and writing in the academy has begun to indicate fairly consistent patterns in students acquire literacy practices. This literature shows, furthermore, that what students do is quite distinct from what experts do. While many have used these results as a starting point for teaching students how to be expert, the author has chosen instead to ask about the interrelationship between expert and novice practice, seeing them both as two sides of the same project: a cultural-historical professionalization project aimed at establishing and preserving the professional privilege. The consequences of this professionalization project are examined using the discipline of academic philosophy as the site for the author's investigations. Methodologically unique, these investigations combine rhetorical analysis, protocol analysis, and the analysis of classroom discourse. The result is a complex portrait of the participants in this humanistic discipline use their academic literacy practices to construct and reconstruct a great divide between expert and lay knowledge. This monograph thus extends our current understanding of the rhetoric of the professions and examines its implications for education.

academic discourse community has become a commonplace in discussions of writing across the disciplines. The purpose of this article is to critically examine this commonplace. Specifically, I argue that while many students may be unfamiliar with the specialized conventions of different disciplines, an image of our students as uninitiated outsiders fails to recognize that students are already longstanding members of the culture of school and are highly literate about how classrooms work. This image fails to account for the powerful legacy of school experiences that students bring with them every time they step into the classroom and undertake a writing assignment. That is, as Stanley Fish reminds us, our students are already in possession of (or more often

Introduction. I. THE NEW RHETORICS: OVERVIEW AND THEORY. Ferdinand de Saussure, Nature of the Linguistic Sign. I. A. Richards, From How to Read a Page and Speculative Instruments. Kenneth Burke, Definition of Man. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences. Richard Weaver, The Cultural Role of Rhetoric. Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric and Philosophy. Stephen Toulmin, The Layout of Arguments. Richard McKeon, The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic Productive Arts. Chaam Perelman, The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning. Michel Foucault, What Is an Author? Michael Polyani, Scientific Controversy. JUrgen Habermas, Intermediate Reflections: Social Action, Purposive Activity, and Communication. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Wayne Booth, The Idea of a University-as Seen by a Rhetorician. Bibliography I: Overviews and Theories. II. THE NEW RHETORICS: COMMENTARY AND APPLICATION. Donald C. Bryant, Rhetoric: Its Functions and Its Scope. Richard Ohmann, In Lieu of a New Rhetoric. Robert L. Scott, On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic. Douglas Ehninger, On Systems of Rhetoric. S. Michael Halloran, On the End of Rhetoric, Classical and Modern. Terry Eagleton, Conclusion: Political Criticism. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy. Walter R. Fisher, Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument. Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa S. Ede, On Distinctions between Classical and Modern Rhetoric. Jim W. Corder, Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, The Illiteracy of Literacy in the United States. Patricia Bizzell, Arguing about Literacy. James A. Berlin, Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom: Postmodern Theory in Practice. Bibliography II: Commentary and Application. Index.

Gary A. Olson presents six in-depth interviews with internationally prominent scholars outside of the discipline and twelve response essays written by noted rhetoric and composition scholars on subjects related to language, rhetoric, writing, philosophy, feminism, and literary criticism. The interviews are with philosopher of language Donald Davidson, literary critic and critical legal studies scholar Stanley Fish, cultural studies and African American studies scholar bell hooks, internationally renowned deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller, feminist literary critic Jane Tompkins, and British logician and philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin. Susan Wells and Reed Way Dasenbrock provide distinctly divergent assessments of the application of Donald Davidson s language theory to rhetoric and composition, and especially to writing pedagogy. Patricia Bizzell and John Trimbur explore how Stanley Fish s neopragmatism might be useful both to composition theory and to literacy education. And Joyce Irene Middleton and Tom Fox discuss bell hooks s notions of how race and gender affect pedagogy. In two frank and sometimes angry responses, Patricia Harkin and Jasper Neel take J. Hillis Miller to task for seeming to support rhetoric and composition while continuing to maintain the political status quo. Similarly, Susan C. Jarratt and Elizabeth A. Flynn express skepticism about Jane Tompkins s vocal support of composition and of radical pedagogy particularly. And Arabella Lyon and C. Jan Swearingen analyze Stephen Toulmin s thoughts on argumentation and postmodernism. Internationally respected anthropologist Clifford Geertz provides a foreword; literacy expert Patricia Bizzell contributes an introduction to the text; and noted reader-response critic David Bleich supplies critical commentary. This book is a follow-up to the editor s (Inter)views: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy, already a major work of scholarship in the field.

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Based on five years of close observation of students, writing and collaborative planning--the practice in which student writers take the roles of planner and supporter to help each other develop a more rhetorically sophisticated writing plan--foremost cognitive composition researcher Linda Flower redefines writing in terms of an interactive social and cognitive process and proposes a convincing and compelling theory of the construction of negotiated meaning.Flower seeks to describe how writers construct meaning. Supported by the emerging body of social and cognitive research in rhetoric, education, and psychology, she portrays meaning making as a literate act and a constructive process. She challenges traditional definitions of literacy, adding to that concept the elements of social literate practices and personal literate acts. In Flower's view, this social cognitive process is a source of tension and conflict among the multiple forces that shape meaning: the social and cultural context, the demands of discourse, and the writer's own goals and knowledge. Flower outlines a generative theory of conflict. With this conflict central to her theory of the construction of negotiated meaning, she examines negotiation as an alternative to the metaphors of reproduction and conversation. It is through negotiation, Flower argues, that social expectations, discourse conventions, and the writer's personal goals and knowledge become inner voices. The tension among these forces often creates the hidden logic behind student writing. In response to these conflicting voices, writers sometimes rise to the active negotiation of meaning, creating meaning in the interplay of alternatives, opportunities, and constraints.

Assesment reform is an important topic in today's education. This document guides decisons about assessing the teaching and learning of reading and writing and reflects advances in understanding the best classroom practices.

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I often hear assertions, says Wendy Bishop, writing classes have no content, especially when compared to literature classes or other classes in other disciplines where famous texts by famous authors are commonly under discussion. In this unique compilation of essays, Bishop brings together the voices of teachers and students to affirm that the content of writing classrooms is the work that these individuals do together. It is this focus on reading and writing about writing that has made Subject Is Writing such a popular text. Like earlier editions, the third edition serves as both a classroom reader and a rhetoric for first-year college writing. End-of-chapter questions invite students to respond to the essayists with essays of their own. Turning to the appendix of Hint Sheets, teachers and students will find a selection of handouts filled with practical advice that will help them navigate through the daily life of their classrooms. The third edition has been enhanced with three new essays by teachers and the work of four new student authors. They discuss choosing topics, developing voice in writing, and understanding classroom writing assignments; they offer insights into drafting practices and encourage readers to investigate their writing lives in similar ways. The essays in Subject Is Writing are not esoteric, academic treatises, but relevant and earnest communications that speak to all writers as peers, colleagues, and interested adult makers of meaning.

The United States is at a crucial moment in the history of literacy, a time when how well Americans read is the subject of newspaper headlines. In this insightful book, Carl F. Kaestle and his colleagues shed new light on this issue, providing a social history of literacy in America that broadens the definition of literacy and considers who was reading what, under what circumstances, and for what purposes. The book explores diverse sources-from tests of reading ability, government surveys, and polls to nineteenth-century autobiographies and family budget studies-in order to assess trends in Americans' reading abilities and reading habits. It investigates such topics as the relation of literacy to gender, race, ethnicity, and income; the magnitude, causes, and policy implications of the decline in test scores in the early 1970s; the reasons women's magazines have been more successful than magazines for men; and whether print technology has fostered cultural diversity or consolidation. It concludes that there has been an immense expansion of literacy in America over the past century, against which the modest skill declines of the 1970s pale by comparison. There has also been tremendous growth in the availability, purchase, and use of printed materials. In recent decades, however, literacy has leveled and even declined in some areas of reading, as shown in the downward trends in purchases of newspapers and magazines. Since Americans are now being lured away from the print media by electronic media, say the authors, current worries about Americans' literacy levels may well be justified.

Introduction - explanations of current international crises, A.R. Welch and P. Freebody literacy strategies - a view from International Literacy Year Secretatiat of UNESCO, L.J. Limage pen and sword - literacy, education and revolution of Kurdistan, A. Hassampour aboriginal education in Northern Australia - a case study of literacy policies and practices, C. Walton rights and expectations in an Age of Debt Crisis - literacy and integral human development in Papua New Guinea, N. Ahai and N. Faraclas literacy and primary education in India, K. Kumar adult literacy in Nicaragua 1979-90, C. Lankshear literacy and dynamics of language planning - dynamics of Singapore, A. Kwan-Terry and J. Kwan-Terry the troubled text - history and language in American university writing programmes, J. Collins workplace literacy in Australia - competing agendas, P. O'Connor individualisation and domestication in current literacy debates in Australia, P. Freebody and A.R. Welch.

Perhaps the most intellectually stimulating result of the literacy crisis has been our recognition of literacy as a continuum of expertise, practices, and beliefs. We know that literacies range from oral and orthographic practices involving print and electronic texts to isolated and social behaviors encompassing the informational sphere of home, society, or school. Academic literates have come to recognize the wide range of literacies in play today and to realize that many literacies are outside our own literate experience-or rather, we have come to realize that we are outside observers to those literacies that we have not experienced. Although we are indelibly inscribed with our own literate practices and deeply entrenched in our academic culture, we can still recognize the continuum of literacies. However, we have difficulty fully understanding and valuing those literacies that function outside the academy. No matter how wide-ranging our twentieth-century views of literacy might be, whether we refer to Shirley Brice Heath's studies in the American Piedmonts, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole's Vai project, E. D. Hirsch's cultural literacy, or Walter Ong's and Eric Havelock's theories of orality and literacy, we continue to privilege the written word. Even our respectful explorations and discussions of Vai and Piedmont literacies are implicitly situated in comparison with schooled literacy. Our concepts of literacy are inevitably colored by our own dependence on the physical artifact (on handwriting, on hard copy) and on our deep-seated insistence that reading and writing are inseparable language arts. Thus, the text-dependency-reading books, writing books, and reading and writing about those books-in our own documentary culture and noetic world makes very difficult an accurate conception of alternative literacy practices, be they current or distant in time. But medieval popular literacy can provide a crucial link for understanding those alternatives; medieval practices prefigure and explain some of our own literacy practices, especially those outside the academy.