The Value and Role of Community-Writing Practices

Abstract

ing with a thesis: “All they are doing is relocating the problem.” As well, the discourse has been edited to follow, even if not slavishly, the syntax and usage of standard written English. (127) How, more exactly, is this a hybrid document? How is its hybridity essential to its purpose? And how would I know another hybrid document when I saw one? Deans offers similarly quick evaluations of the Carnegie Mellon students’ inquiry projects, which were papers that integrated secondary research as well as reflection on the CLC experience and popular perspectives on their topics. Deans calls these projects “a complex interweaving of sources and discourses” (135), but he provides few details and data to demonstrate how they earned this tag. I admit to being partial to close textual analysis, so perhaps my reservations are unfair. Further, this book is an adaptation of Deans’s dissertation, so those of my bent may be able to pick up the diss to satisfy our curiosity. Again, in this book Deans does not purport to have used ethnographic or discourse analysis methods; instead, he has distilled his observations in an attempt to offer a “vocabulary . . . for readily discerning the relationship of particular service learning approaches to particular literacies, discourses, pedagogical arrangements, and learning goals” (144–45). In the spirit of responding to and extending Writing Partnerships, I would like to close by offering the definitions I presented to the faculty and local literacy providers with whom I met at the miniconference mentioned Ashley Lexis for Literacies and Service 125 above. While I employed Deans’s operational vocabulary, I found myself in need of some further definition of terms, particularly the five types of literacies he lists (and the discourses they are a part of ): workplace, academic, critical, community, and hybrid. In his book Deans gives examples of these, but he does not explicitly define them. For instance, in one place he offers, broadly, “African American urban discourse” as an example of a community discourse, and he identifies hybrid discourses as “creative combinations” of academic discourse and community discourses (133). I found that I could not reproduce his charting of for/about/with models without attempting some clarifications for the group to work with. They are reproduced below, following Deans’s assignments of value but with my definitions added: 1. Writing for the community. The most valued literacy is workplace: writing and reading that helps workplaces and other organizations function. Other privileged literacies include academic. 2. Writing about the community. The most valued literacy is academic: writing and reading that helps students succeed in school and that helps schools produce successful students. Other privileged literacies include critical: writing and reading that helps individuals concerned with inequity critique how workplaces, schools, and other organizations function. 3. Writing with the community. The most valued literacy is hybrid: writing and reading that helps groups and individuals meet “home” needs through mixing and integrating workplace, academic, critical, and community literacies. Other privileged literacies include community: writing and reading that helps groups and individuals meet “home” (private, family, neighborhood, and identity group)