Abstract

Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism Through Literacy Education, which makes a hopeful yet nuanced case for how networked efforts within institutions might create change. The book combines deep illustrations from the civil rights era with contemporary efforts in community literacy, layering perspectives as it moves forward and backward in time, to explore how different practices of literacy education shape notions of citizenship and how activists in literacy education go about pursuing social change. Laying out a parable to ground a key idea in his book, Feigenbaum retells the traditional story of the starfish savior: a man walking along a beach notices thousands of starfish washed up on the shore, and he sees another man throwing the starfish back into the sea, one by one. He tells the man throwing the starfish that this is a waste of time, as there are thousands of starfish-he cannot make a difference. The man throws another starfish into the sea and replies, "I made a difference to that one. " This story is meant to be inspirational, but Feigenbaum, drawing on Buzz Alexander's Freirean interpretation of the parable, points out that this story is an individualistic myth that limits the potential for activism: rather than running into to town to gather others to help, or researching the cause for why the starfish are being washed up along the shore, the man exemplifies the idea that good citizens act alone. As Feigenbaum writes, "The starfish savior's willingness to sacrifice time and energy toward a good cause makes him appear to be morally righteous, but in failing to enlist aid in resolving the macroproblem, he ensures that the vast majority of starfish will perish" (9). Acting out of a starfish savior mentality-or, as my students termed it, starfishing-means blending romantic naivet and individualism in ways that are ultimately ineffective in forwarding activism.