Community Engagement Project and Gravyland

            In his book Gravyland, Stephen Parks makes some compelling arguments concerning the urgency of community based writing projects, encouraging us to reconsider the value and role of local communities in our classrooms.  In Parks discussion of the Glassville Memoires, a project in which students worked with community members to develop a “community history” of a racially integrated neighborhood, he suggests that ideally a community project focuses on “intercultural rhetoric and dialogue” with a primary focus on local communities.  Parks admits that however desirable and politically efficacious such collaborations might be, intercultural engagements always run a risk of devaluing non-academic modes of writing or expression and even putting the “community” in a disempowered relation to its own histories.  This exigency strikes me as an important one: how are we to conceive of the “community” in these engagement projects?  How do we teach our students to understand “community” itself as a multi-valenced confluence of different voices with different discursive practices?

Parks encourages us to reimagine the work of a writing classroom as “coming into contact with voices from the edge that are trying to reshape public debate through writing.”  I think this is perhaps a better place to start.  The question becomes, who is on this “edge,” what public debate is being reshaped, and, most significantly, what kinds of “writing” are effecting this change? 

In a 2005 article from JAC (Vol. 25 N. 1) entitled “The Heidelberg Art Project as a Site of Literacy Activities and Urban Renewal Efforts: Implications for Composition Studies,” Valerie Kinloch examines the ways in which this Detroit based community project used materials such as trash, broken toys, and condemned buildings to create “urban art.”  Kinloch situates this project in relation to the political rhetoric of “decay” and “dilapidation,” arguing that the community actively participates in commenting on and transforming this political language.  The materials that would seem to legitimate the marginalizing language of politicians become the very modes through which this discourse is challenged and made to reconceptualize the meaning of “urban renewal.” While Kinloch focuses primarily on the value of Heidelberg as a model for challenging politically dominate discourse on urban spaces, I think her article also speaks to the problem of defining “communities” and, more particularly, the “edge” that Parks situates as the site that “reshapes public debate.”

Kinloch demonstrates the ways in which discursive practices, whether on the edge or in the academy, frequently produce and challenge “public debate” by imagining writing practices differently.  In an article entitled “Metaphysical Graffiti: Getting Up as Affective Writing Model” from the same issue of JAC, Jennifer Edbauer takes as her point of departure a consideration of “existing literacies,” namely the form and function of graffiti as public writing.  While Edbauer goes on to contextualize graffiti within a consideration of writing as an affective relation, her sudden realization that “graffiti is writing” and a form that communicates and produces effects and affects, speaks to the issue of “existing literacy” and modes of writerly production that have political effects in reshaping not only public debate, but also public spaces. 

Both of these articles take urban spaces as their model for “community,” complicating the manner in which we might try to think “literacy” as a simple literary or critical mode.  Indeed, both articles point toward the ways in which, in order to generate meaningful, politically engaged “contact zones” for our students, we should begin by thinking through the multiple means through which people produce writing and what precisely the affective and political stakes might be for this writing.

For the purposes of my 101 class, “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” there is not necessarily an easy way of “remixing” an oral history project such as the Glassville Memoires.  Rather, given the relative sensitivities to and personal investments in a topic like drugs, I would make a “community engagement project” a project about thinking through the multifarious ways in which different communities conceptualize “the drug.”  At least part of the course’s goal is to engage critically the cultural figure of “the drug” and, it seems to me, this necessarily begins by locating the different rhetorical modes in which it is produced.  Which communities are saying what?  How are they saying it?  What kinds of writing are being used? 

I would ask my students to locate three different “rhetorical communities” that take drugs up as an issue.  The goals of this assignment would be 1) to recognize the different cultural meanings and affective values of the “drug” in three different communities; 2) to identify the kind of writing that each of these communities employs (medical? Political? Personal? Art? Graffiti? Music?); and 3) discuss the manner in which the kind of writing used by a given community either challenges or recapitulates the terms of “public debate” or cultural scripts. 

Ideally, students would make contact with these rhetorical communities through three different modes, such as the digital, the textual, and the local, grassroots organization.  Identifying the different rhetorical and literacy practices of “communities” is an important first step toward understanding the value of writing and public debate.