Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement

 

Linda Flower

Paper, 0-8093-2852-6
978-0-8093-2852-9, $35.00s
304 pages, 6 x 9, 8 Illus.
Rhetoric / Composition

 

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Presenting a comprehensive pedagogy for literate action

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement explores the critical practice of intercultural inquiry and rhetorical problem-solving that encourages urban writers and college mentors alike to take literate action. Author Linda Flower documents an innovative experiment in community literacy, the Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh, and posits a powerful and distinctively rhetorical model of community engagement and pedagogy for both marginalized and privileged writers and speakers. In addition, she articulates a theory of local publics and explores the transformative potential of alternative discourses and counter-public performances.  
In presenting a comprehensive pedagogy for literate action, the volume offers strategies for talking and collaborating across difference, forconducting an intercultural inquiry that draws out situated knowledge and rival interpretations of shared problems, and for writing and speaking to advocate for personal and public transformation.

 

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“This book gathers into one place the thinking and theorizing that has gone into the CLC, a pioneering literacy project; it meanwhile engages with several current subtopics in composition studies—critical pedagogy, rhetoric, service-learning, empowerment, agency, invention, multiculturalism—and contributes to them in fresh, confident ways.”
— Thomas Deans, author of Writing and Community Action: A Service-Learning Rhetoric and Reader

 “Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement ranks at the very top of contributions in the fields of composition studies, literacy research, and sociocultural perspectives on learning.”
—Glynda Hull, University of California, Berkeley

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Linda Flower is a professor of rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University and the author, editor, or coeditor of eight books, including The Construction of Negotiated Meaning: A Social Cognitive Theory of Writing (SIU Press). The cofounder of the Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh, Flower also has served as codirector of the Department of Education’s National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon.