Literacy in Composition Studies Oct 2013 RSS Open Access

Literacies In/For Action: Prefigurative Pedagogies and Collective Knowledge Projects

Gerald Campano California University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

y copy of the first issue of Literacy in Composition Studies is thoroughly marked up.It engages issues, questions, and even anxieties I have carried with me over my roughly twenty years as a teacher and literacy researcher.In an effort to continue the conversation I am going to take up two themes that thread through many of the initial articles and their responses.The first theme regards the conceptual tropes we use to describe our work.The second relates to transformative potential and, equally as important, limitations of scholarship that is directed to providing access and opportunity to historically disenfranchised students and communities.This interest in equity is something I believe many share across the areas of Literacy Education and Composition and Rhetoric.In his opening essay, Bruce Horner argues for a shift from spatial to temporal metaphors in the conceptualization of literacies.Spatial metaphors risk essentializing literacy practices-exoticizing or romanticizing them-and even reproducing the very autonomous ideologies the field has worked so hard to deconstruct.A methodological focus on temporality may help researchers work through some of these contradictions (Horner 4-5).In a similar vein, many of the subsequent authors invoke the terms "purpose, " "labor, " "intentionality, " "process, " "circulation, " "work, " and "movement, " a historicizing direction that I for the most part endorse, and which seems to be in line with the empirical realities of global migrations and transnationalism.My qualification is because phrases like "emergent dynamism" shade into the discourse of neoliberal incursions into education, which valorize innovation, as there will always be new literacies, and literate identities, to market.A renewed emphasis on temporality may also exist in tension with another acknowledgement made by several of the contributors: that there is often, following Pierre Bourdieu, significant social inertia and reproduction in the field of education, even as we work within and against the system to try to expand what constitutes academic knowledge and practice.This tension can induce some self-reflection and soul searching for scholars who try to balance an analytical disposition, the pressures to generate new terms and ideas for the academic market, and the desire to make a difference in students' lives.My own contribution engages these themes from the vantage point of having taught and conducted research with elementary school students and their families in predominantly under-

Journal
Literacy in Composition Studies
Published
2013-10-31
DOI
10.21623/1.1.2.7
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Topics
rhetorical criticism discourse analysis teacher development literacy studies race and writing community literacy editorial matter
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (1)

  1. Buchanan (2017)
    Teaching as a Political Practice
    Literacy in Composition Studies

References (23) · 5 in this index

  1. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Print.
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  2. Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. Studies…
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  3. Anderson, Benedict. Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination. London: Verso, 2005. Print.
  4. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Print.
  5. Barton, David, and Mary Hamilton. Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. London: Routledge, …
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  1. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc JD Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Print.
  2. Broyles-González, Yolanda. El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement. Austin: U of Texas P, 1994. Print.
  3. Campano, Gerald. Immigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering. New York: Teachers Colle…
  4. Campano, Gerald, and María Paula Ghiso. “Immigrant Students as Cosmopolitan Intellectuals.” Handbook on Resea…
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  5. Campano, Gerald, María Paula Ghiso, Mary Yee, and Alicia Pantoja. “Toward Community Research and Coalitional …
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  6. Cochran-Smith, Marilyn, and Susan L. Lytle. Inquiry as Stance: Practitioner Research in the Next Generation. …
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