Community

I've just read an interesting chapter on the History of Writing in the Community (Howard, U. 2008. In. C. Bazerman (ed.) Handbook of Research on Writing, pp. 237-254). This chapter spoke to me for a variety of reasons, but one of the main reasons was the discussion of community writing among the working class.

Community

I used to work with adults in the community. We weren't dealing with writing, but in the teaching of basic computer skills there is much scope for incorporating basic literacy instruction (if you're a skilled enough teacher), and this chapter reminded me of the importance of community as a cultural group that impacts so much of our lives, including our language development, reading and writing acquisition. I think this is something that Brice-Heath also speaks to in Ways with Words. I've been immersed in a world of higher education for so long now, that it's easy to forget that people are out there in the community learning in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes - fomalised education isn't the only way people learn. I was fascinated to read how historically people would often spend hours learning how to write at Sunday school and other community venues with mentors and experienced writers teaching those who were less experienced, rather than at formal state schools. This is clearly the basis for the UK adult community education programmes running today.

I was also fascinated to read that one reason that people historically fought to write was so that they could write autobiographies and histories of their communities – if these people hadn't persevered with writing, we would never have learned so much about the history of local communities. It makes me wonder about the transient nature of so much of our writing today – emails and blogs that could all disappear in the blink of an eye if we lost a server or electricity, for example. With blogs today, I have always sensed that a portion of society thinks they're rather indulgent; people writing about their lives for all to see because of some need to make their mark on the world, but this chapter shows that people have always strived to do that through writing - an attempt to get some part of ourselves, our community, and our society down "on paper" for posterity - while our medium has changed, our intentions, it seems, have not.

The theme that stood out for me the most as I read this chapter, was reading as a tool for empowerment. In the UK we have a long history of class struggle and worker protests, and it seems that learning to write was one way that people empowered themselves, both in order to protest (with flyers and petitions etc.) and to try and rise up in the ranks from one class to another. Knowledge is power, but it's obviously no good if you can't quickly and easily communicate that knowledge. The chapter also talks of women writing more secretly than men in the 19th Century, and those women who worked as maids etc. would use writing as a way to vent negative thoughts and emotions and "precipitate change in their circumstances" (p. 247). I think those of us who learned to write with ease and who write for a variety of reasons on a daily basis take it for granted as both a skill we can tap into easily and a freedom we have to make ourselves heard through writing. I was reminded what a gift it can be to write, when I read how many people learned to write just so they could write their own name on their marriage certificates. This may seem a small thing to us today, but as the author puts it, it can give a "sense of empowerment, identity, and agency...naming yourself rather then being named by others" (p. 240).