Dimmick, Michael Seminar Paper

m. dimmick Multimodality and Liberation Pedagogy: SNCC Adult Literacy Programs in the South From Whence We Begin In the Chair's address to the CCC Convention in 1993, "Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition," Anne Ruggles Gere laments the insularity of existing composition histories, noting that "this historiography has focused inside classroom walls"(251). Bolstered by recent work in the field on alternative pedagogical sites by Shirley Brice Heath, Glynda Hull, Patricia Bizzell, and Ruth Hubbard, Gere argues "the need to uncouple composition and schooling, to consider the situatedness of composition practices, to focus on the experiences of writers not always visible to us in the institution"(253). Her concern seems born out as recent scholarly work in the field has centered on recuperating diffuse pedagogical histories in an effort to further inform our own pedagogical practices by focusing on "little histories" in the academy; however, as Stephen Schneider has pointed out, "these studies point to a rich tradition of critical rhetorical education... in the United States...But one group of sites continues to be absent from the conversation: those educational sites developed out of the civil rights movement"(47). Schneider points out the glaring absence of studies on Citizenship schools and the Freedom Schools, both of which focused on literacy practices in African American communities and had substantial impact on the civil rights movements of the 50s and 60s. In his focus on the Freedom Schools, Schneider illustrates how Stokeley Carmichael's classroom pedagogies created "an organic relationship to the community and bore witness to the link between education and organizing"(49). Schneider is right in suggesting that the educational sites developed during the civil rights movement are a rich field needing further study, in particular for the cultivation and use of critical pedagogies to effect social change. In this paper I take up Gere's call "to uncouple composition and schooling" by looking at the adult education practices evident in the literacy artifacts of Mary Varela, a SNCC member in charge of developing literacy materials for adult education in Alabama and Mississippi during the 1960s; for all

intensive purposes we can think of these sites as a "contact zone," and the literacy artifacts reflect the struggle and grappling between dominant and minority groups in those spaces(Pratt). As a member of the Selma Literacy Project (SLP) in 1964, Mary Varela was responsible for developing "literacy materials out of the experience, needs and aspirations of adult" African Americans in Selma, Alabama (Goals 1). Later, in 1966 she worked in a primarily African American community in Mississippi during the early 1960's. These programs ran concurrent with Carmichael's efforts and, not surprisingly, reflect an effort to develop an "organic relationship" between reforming literacy practices and creating new opportunities for social and civic change. Where the average age of the students in the Freedom Schools was 15, Varela was engaged in working with adults in already existent social movements outside of the hierarchies of any particular institution. By looking at local resistance to Jim Crow practices in the South we can theorize new goals and responsibilities in the classroom. The express goal of the SLP was to not only develop literacy and citizenship, but to offer a means for cultivating agency by fostering critical self reflection, engendering confidence, responding to histories of racism, and promoting sustainable modes of learning within the community itself. When "official" literacy education failed to produce results SNCC adapted a policy of working with the specific desires of the local community. By using filmstrips and combining them with text, the farmers in this community effectively organized new literacy practices using multimodal discourse to achieve the goals of their community. Selma (critical pedagogy, literacy artifact 1)1 In language that echoes Franz Fanon's argument that "decolonization is the veritable creation of new men,"(2) Varela's pedagogical goals in The Selma Literacy Project aspire to enable adults to live "a fully human life"(1) based on a socially situated rhetoric that is grounded in the immediate community needs of the learner community. Varela locates literacy practices of the time in a 1 Author's note: I have set specific limits here to fit closer to the assignment requirements; In doing this I have chosen to rely on the richness of Varela's own document because it is so didactic and polarizing. What might be lost in further analytical development is, I hope, made up for in Varela's own voice. Admittedly this section can be a bit choppy and mechanical

pedagogical tradition closely linked to dominant, institutional values. Arguing that these practices simply recreate the hegemonic values that denied African Americans agentive subjectivity and identity formation, Varela instates a critical pedagogy that disdains authority and disseminates power laterally, to relocate/reconceptualize the relationship of subject positions to power in the production of knowledge. In this manner, as Giroux has discussed, literacy practices can be directed by adult learners in response to their particular "social formation" to answer the "broader collective hopes" of their community. In this sense, then, Varela's pedagogical goals echo in many ways Paulo Freire's idea of praxis: "reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it" (51). In fact, much of Varela's pedagogical discussion emphasizes building critical consciousness in order to initiate significant change. The literacy materials needed for the SLP, Varela writes, "hope to reflect the needs of the adult's life, to bring about an understanding of the forces in society which may have contributed to those needs and to present the possibility of changing those forces to help answer those needs"(1). Living "a fully human life" can be achieved then by creating a system of literacy education that works to join the learners' experience and modes of discourse to a broader understanding of the cultural and civic discourses that have been/are instrumental in shaping their lived realities. Literacy practices, Varela suggests, are instrumental in developing critical agency and taking action to re-shape discourses to more equitable ends. Not unlike Freire, the emphasis on meeting the needs of the community is grounded in a belief that no liberation from oppression occurs unless the oppressed are central to effecting that change. Varela writes, "That any attempts to assist a people in changing their circumstances must take the people where they are and on their own terms and in their own manner assist them to understand their needs and the possibilities of acting on these needs"(1). Varela believes that this particpatory engagement on the part of the adults can be achieved by shaping education practices to the learning styles and experience of the community, and by disrupting the traditional role of authority held by teachers. The educational system is portrayed as not just being

complicit in the oppression of African American's, but the basic educational institution (literacy materials, teachers, teaching practices) is critiqued for actively perpetuating the values of a dominant discursive position and in turn replicating the social parameters and forces that have marginalized African American. Existing literacy materials "are inadequate and insult the dignity and style of life of the black-belt Negro community"(2) and should be discarded. Instead, Varela stipulates that the materials must reflect the "strengths of the style of life in the Negro Community and also to reflect and build on whatever sense of identity exists"; "take experiences, hopes, fears, happinesses, sorrows, and needs and build materials out of the adult's verbal expression of them"; and should "be largely a response to the adult and his present state of mind and style of life"(4). Teachers, Varela observes, rely on a practice of "directed learning" guided by clear authority figures and fall back on "traditional student-teacher patterns2" of education(3). Instead, Varela states, teachers should employ"creativity and sensitivity" to respond productively to the "needs, abilities, weaknesses and the strengths of others"(3) in such a way as to disseminate authority across the learning experience and build learners' confidence. Being largely middle class subjects, the teachers have negative attitudes to the lower classes. The teachers tend to portray the lower class as "ignorant, uncomprehending," and "retarded." As outsiders, there is a barrier between the groups, which the outsiders tend to build "higher and out of proportion"(2). For the teachers to be effective, Varela says, outsiders must "grow to a sensitivity to the Inside people," and come to terms with their "motivations for coming to the community"(2). Ultimately, "...the existing materials and theories about teaching adults attempt to impose a formal and alien style of learning which takes little or no cognizance of the adult's own style of learning," nor do they allow the teacher to productively engage "Low socio-economic groups [that] have their own style of learning(3). Not surprisingly then , the goals and materials Varela advocates for are designed to draw on and support local language practices, and respond to the needs of the community's learning styles. 2 This is not unlike Freire's Banking theories of teaching.

In drawing on modes of discourse and language use within the group's own traditions for creating literacy materials, teachers can help students recognize and validate the epistemological richness of their own discursive practices in order to cast in relief the deterministic capacity official discourses have played in shaping the historical and material conditions of life for minority subjects. Building a pedagogy around local language use illuminates the ways in which systems of power are discursively constructed. As I will discuss in the following section, local discourse practices can create a counter hegemonic discourse to provide new social and ideological spaces, create new identities, and transform civic practice. Varela's critical pedagogy then works to liberate subjectivity by cultivating critical awareness through literacy skills with which African Americans can critically engage and transform the discourses that perpetuate oppressive systems of power. Mississippi (literacy artifact 2, Af- Am rhetoric, multimodality, counter hegemonic discourse) In her report to a funder in 1966, Varela makes a call for a new form of literacy materials filmstrips that incorporate image, audio, and text - that reflects the growing needs and practices of the Mississippi community and illustrates a further refinement of her earlier pedagogical goals by providing an insight to the literacy practices with which SNCC and the community were working. Her report presents a substantial change in SNCC's efforts to cultivate a critical public pedagogy by servicing adult education needs in the African American communities. Finding current pedagogical practices untenable, Varela initiated a program that works to deal with the particular language needs of the community in the effort to cultivate agency in local spaces against the institutional practices of exclusion leveraged against African Americans in the Jim Crow South. The decision to use multimodal literacy practices, rather than training new teachers, served a specific need for the making and disseminating of civic agency/action that not only stemmed from the locals' own immediate needs, but which operated rhetorically outside of conventional classroom structures that oftentimes continued histories of exclusion from civic life and participation in market culture. Her report makes the case that we can find resistance embedded within minority engagement of official discourse, and illustrates how

African Americans drew on a rich tradition of African American modes of discourse to produce an agentive response to dominant hegemonic discourses. In comp theory there has been much discussion of the need to allow a space for student voices in the academy to engage and reclaim agency from the dominant hegemony. What this discussion both argues and admits is to a certain extent paradoxical, but it reflects the contradictions inherent in institutional discourses. On the one hand, student identity and voice is threatened by a hegemonizing academic insistence on certain alien discourses, largely representative of dominant ideological positions. On the other hand, this research points to and relies on the fact that students carry diverse and highly productive originary voices regularly engaging in discourses and speech acts outside of the dominant hegemonic field characteristic of institutional culture. Interestingly, while the implicit and explicit threat to identity and subjectivity is that students are stripped of their voices at the gates of the academy or other dominant public spaces, research also shows a history of embedded resistance in minority use of these dominant codes. Oftentimes resistance in these discourses is coded and enmeshed within the framework of dominant discourse. Canagarajah shows how minority students play with the form of academic discourse to appropriate and undermine authority, using authoritative representatives of dominant discourses to "speak for" minority positionality ("Safe Houses"). Although this appropriation and coding of dominant discourse in the academy often seems to be misread, it reflects larger traditions in African American rhetoric, a consideration of which will help to explain how these traditions are drawn on in constructing new, hybrid modes of discourse and acts of resistance. Geneva Smitherman traces a lineage of discourse within the African American community that shows a practice of embedding oppositional discourse within appropriated modes of dominant discourse. In the African American community, "High talk," spirituals, and "cool talk" all illustrate methods of adapting and transforming modes of discourse to oppositional, counter hegemonic ends. Smitherman points out that "any previously all-white activity or field that blacks enter is colored by a black conceptual approach and terminology, as if to say this can only be ours if we put our special

linguistic imprint upon it"(58). Smitherman identifies four primary African American modes of discourse: call and response; signification; tonal semantics; and narrative sequencing(103). In each instance these modes of discourse appropriate the assumption that language operates in a discrete and contained semiotic system; instead, these rhetorics produce new voices that "play" with western cultural assumptions about the logics of language by using exaggerated language; mimicry; proverbial statement and aphoristic phrasing; punning and plays on words; spontaneity and improvisation; imagemaking and metaphor; braggadocio; indirection; and tonal semantics(95). Of significance here is that in many of these modes of discourse and the accompanying "rhetorical qualities" the "message" draws on multiple semiotic modes to produce a counter hegemonic discourse. For example, Smitherman points out how "the traditional black church retained the African belief in spirit possession"(57). In this instance, the rhetoric is fully embodied, so that the call and response preacher tradition draws the audience into the sermon using a participatory, dialogic oratory style. In addition to the call and response orations, the members of the congregation actively participate in the social space of the church by "gittin the spirit," "shouting," dancing, singing, and clapping. As Smitherman points out, the slaves appropriated the imposition of Christianity on slave culture and introduced Africanisms that reflected their own world view. By infusing the traditionally staid worship practice with multiple, more overt modes of meaning, the slaves managed to resist "the white man's Christianizing efforts to subdue their will to be free"(56) and illustrate the multimodal counter hegemonic character of African American rhetorical practices. So even a cursory look at African American rhetorical tradition illustrates a long history of employing multiple semiotic systems to produce meaning from several modes in a manner that "plays" on and with normative discursive practices. "Black Semantics," Smitherman argues, "represents Black American's long-standing historical tendency to appropriate English for themselves"(58). As Smitherman makes clear, the history of oppression and colonization of African Americans has yielded a broad variety of counter hegemonic modes of discourse. Varela's critical pedagogy works

with these language practices to emphasize the production of new textual forms. The New London Group has argued extensively that western theories of communication and literacy have privileged certain modes of discourse over others. In particular, they argue, literacy has focused on writing and listening to such an extent that all the different modes embedded in texts and in speech acts are actively disregarded. Drawing on the history of how African American rhetorics specifically work against this privilege of single modes of discourse, Varela illustrates the way in which multimodal discourses are being used in the community to enable agency, subvert authority, re-narrate dominant hegemonic discourse, and introduce civic practices to the community. The literacy goals of the movement, then, are explicitly political and oppositional. "It must be stated here clearly and firmly," Varela writes, "that this movement is indeed going about the job of confronting institutions and structures - local, state, and federal - which persists in segregating out from decision making those considered 'unqualified' by color, educational, or economic status"(Report 2). Principal in these efforts though are means of disseminating knowledge and cultivating literacy practices. Speaking of the community's commitment to change, Varela observes that "this new mood...is expressing itself in the setting up of economic self- help programs. People have decided they no longer want to depend on anyone - plantation owners, county or state governments, or federal government for their basic needs...People want to work for themselves; people want to provide for their own food and housing needs instead of having to rely on dole"(3). Importantly, these efforts to wrestle sovereignty over their lives from the hands of a white, moneyed institutional structure and authority build on the community's own situated knowledge base. Varela observes that agency is created through dialogue about the experiences other people have in using information. The community asks concrete questions about procedures and policies that would move them to a self sufficiency: "How Long does the okra have to be to market it?"; "How much does it cost to get a charter?"; "How did you get your loan for farm equipment?"(3). For Varela, these questions represent a need to shift literacy practices from teaching "for the sake of teaching people to read 'because they ought to know' or for any of the

other reasons put forth by educational programmers (whose reasoning I suspect, finds roots in their fear of 'illiterate' people)3"(2). Instead she argues that for adult education programs to have any long term usefulness in continuing the education process and making literacy relevant to the community's lives, "the adult education materials needed to serve the movement were those which communicated the specifics on how to do something"(3). Embedded in her comments we can see the perspectives of traditional educational policies that represent the colonizing intentions and discourse of the dominant culture: the aim is to produce a particular subject under particular conditions. This is one facet of Varela's report that, like her pedagogical concerns, shows an acute sensitivity to dominant discourse as a colonizing force. Before addressing that issue though, it would be useful to discuss the filmstrips mentioned by Varela, as they further illustrate the idea of a dominant, colonizing discourse alluded to in her recommendations, and provide a measure of how multimodality is employed as a counter linguistic response to the colonizing force of dominant discourse. As evidence of the usefulness of structuring literacy programs around community learning traditions and need to know how to "do something," Varela includes several filmstrips with descriptions and analyses of their usefulness. She includes "Panola County Mississippi, 1965," "If You Farm You Can Vote," and describes future filmstrips, "Something Of Our Own"(filmstrip and "reading book"), and "How To Make A Slave (a negro history filmstrip to accompany the SNCC Freedom Primer)"(1). These filmstrips draw from African American modes of discourse and mark the beginning of integrating practical local knowledge and narrative traditions with literacy education in the production of new discursive forms in order to produce more active citizenship. Two of these filmstrips are particularly useful to discuss as they provide an insight to the pertinent civic issues and strategies for addressing these issues by illustrating how civic discourse and official language are at the center of the discursive creation of identities: "Panola County Mississippi, 1965" and "If You Farm You Can Vote." The filmstrips use a narrative mode of discourse to "tell a kind of folk story revelatory of the 3 These comments echo comments mentioned in discussing her pedagogy, but I felt that showing the repetition of these concerns help illustrate the importance of disseminating authority and disassembling traditional educational practices.

culture and experience of Black America"(Smitherman 155); in drawing on the "culture and experience of Black America," narrative is used to re-narrate the historic exclusion of African Americans from dominant discourse. "Panola County" generally shows how the citizens in Panola "organized themselves to register to vote" and discusses the community relevance of this action by touching on "such issues as jobs, better eduction, etc."(5). An early production, this filmstrip was a first effort at integrating literacy practices and needs based knowledge. The filmstrip shows the process of the Panola citizens registering to vote through image and a spoken narrative; while the filmstrip does not pair image with written text, it shows a first step at integrating new technologies with multiple modes of discourse to utilize and disseminate a particular knowledge base instrumental in fostering further agentive action - registering to vote. The filmstrip makes it clear that there are discrete identities at risk from civic processes (as well as physical violence). Civic procedures are represented as discourses somewhat alien to the citizen's common experience, while simultaneously in the process of constructing them as "other" and effectively excluding many citizens from the active democratic practice/identity of "citizenship." The filmstrip responds to this exclusion and helps citizens to navigate that discursive system by orchestrating a new discursive response. "If You Farm You Can Vote" takes "the complicated technical material" that illustrates how to elect farmers to "the ASCS Committee which decides cotton allotments" and "break[s] it down into a useable form"(5). Traditionally, the ASCS has been run by white farmers, and so the extra cotton allotments would be given to the "big farms and plantations" run by the white farmers, leaving the "black small farmer" with barely "more than a half to two acres over his allotted acres to plant cotton. Cotton money multiplies for those who already have it"(5). This concentration of wealth in the hands of white farmers and poverty in the African American communities is perpetuated by the "complicated technical material" or official discourse involved in the election process. "The complicated procedure in nomination and balloting"(5) has rendered the government/civic discourse relatively opaque and has traditionally excluded African Americans from the process, not unlike the way in which the procedure

for registering to vote for general elections had been shrouded in mystery for the community in Panola. Consequently, a relatively strict dispersion of subjectivity is discursively produced and maintained along class and race lines. "If You Farm You Can Vote" is the most explicit example of using multimodality to produce counter hegemonic identities and agentive subject positions as it combines image, audio, and text to create "new social futures" for the community. In doing so the filmstrip not only integrates literacy practices but inaugurates a new discourse that provides a means of drawing on the multiple subject/identity positions occupied by any person. Both the exclusion from civic discourse discussed in the filmstrips and the traditional perspective on literacy ("because they ought to know") raise a critical issue of dominant discourse as a site of power, colonized by and perpetuating a history of racist and classist subject formations. From this perspective we can best theorize the work that is being done in using multimodal filmstrips to educate and sponsor literacy. In her earlier statement of the Selma Literacy Project's Goals, Varela writes that "man should participate in the basic decision of his society in order to achieve a fully human life"(1, italics mine). In part then the goal of literacy education in both Selma and Mississippi is to liberate oppressed subjectivities from a colonized/colonizing official discourse4 that perpetuates the articulation of historically marginalized subjects as, oftentimes, less than human. In order to become fully human, literacy pedagogy has to produce a new form that operates outside of official discourse/power structures. Because the civic discourse discussed in the films is officially embedded in the authority of the state, a revisionary project of/against state agendas requires a new emphasis on differing discursive forms to produce a new articulation of subject formation. The New London Group's theory of Design provides a useful means of explaining the use of filmstrips here and for understanding how multimodal discourse transformatively produces and renegotiates identity by introducing dynamic play in the tension between different semiotic systems 4With little effort we can take as a given that legal discourse which has controlled conceptions of the body, of species (how much of a person Af. Am. "were"), intellect, sexuality and relationships, determined and disseminated and limited rights, barred from engagement and service, and limited access to materials exemplifies colonized/colonizing discourse.

and, in turn, transforms the subject in the process of designing. Design consists of three basic components – available design, design, and the redesigned. Available designs are the resources available for redesign, and include orders of discourse and "the grammars" of semiotic systems(20). Designing, or "the process of shaping emergent meaning involves re-presentation and recontextualisation" of available designs and will "more or less normatively reproduce, or more or less radically transform, given knowledges, social relations, and identities," "but it will never simply reproduce Available Designs"(22). In the process of designing, "configurations of subjects, social relations, and knowledges are worked upon and transformed"(22). "The outcome of Designing," that is, the Redesigned, " is a new meaning, something through which meaning makers remake themselves. They reconstruct and renegotiate their identities"(23). For our discussion here, theories of design are critically important as they dissolve the privileges of power accorded hierarchies of discursive positions, or orders of discourse, by setting in tension the systems of meaning. To define discourse as a system of tension and transformation allows the subject a greater agency because s/he is not only "brought into being" or contained under the scripted subject position of a dominant discourse, which runs the risk, as was historically the case in the south, of marginalizing subjects; but, the subjects' own socially situated discursive practices are also able to engage and draw from the dominant discourse, producing a hybrid, agentive subjectivity that can unsettle or transform the dominant orders of discourse and instate a new, more socially equitable hegemony5. As mentioned above, the privilege accorded certain modes of discourse over others (written over visual, spoken over paralinguistic, etc ) has effectively removed from consideration the efficacy and purposefulness of other semiotic systems in how we shape discourse. Multimodality, then, is a "hybrid," "intertextual" process that draws from all available design elements to produce a new form that transforms existing, and creates new, discursive forms, and, consequently, ways of ordering knowledge and being in the world. 5 Of course this is is not an absolute outcome, but it is a new possibility for being. Design simply opens the possibility for transforming relations of discourse. The existing hegemonic order can still triumph; design though illustrates how a new equitable hegemony can be constructed. See Laclau and Mouffe for discussions of different, marginalized groups effecting a new change in hegemonic relations.

As I mentioned earlier, the filmstrips draw from and engage several "available designs": the dominant discourse, traditions of narrative in African American discourse, individual knowledge/experience, histories of oppression/marginalization, as well as the grammars of written texts, recorded audio, and visual elements. In designing the new multimodal discourse and disseminating these knowledges, the citizens are actively engaged in renegotiating their identities within the broader culture in an effort to facilitate more inclusive democratic practices, as well as to redistribute economic controls over their lives. In these efforts, the citizens have redesigned their social position and identity in relation to the broader culture. Varela's use of multimodality then is a liberatory practice stemming from a radical pedagogical position that works to renegotiate identities and subject formation. Drawing on the available designs of individual knowledges, traditions of discourse, and the history and practice of subject formation in official discourse, the filmstrips produce a new, counter hegemonic discourse. Chandra Mohanty writes that "Resistance lies in self-conscious engagement with dominant, normative discourses and representations and in the active creation of oppositional analytic and cultural spaces...Uncovering and reclaiming subjugated knowledges is one way to lay claim to alternative histories"(185). By re-narrating civic discourse, the community literacy practices engage the dominant discourse and create new oppositional spaces in which the historically marginalized relation to civic practices can be reinscribed in more equitable terms of access and productivity. Multimodal discourses then work to transform subject relations for the participants. A Conclusion of Sorts (for now) The New London Group claim that "each discourse involves producing and reproducing and transforming different kinds of people"(Cope 21). If subjects are formed in these linguistic acts, then a truly radical pedagogy requires/provides the opportunity for a proliferation of new discourses in order to produce a new subject set in new relations to the state/official discourse. Reappropriating historical modes of oppression offers one critical step in the struggle over knowledge and identity formation. Multimodal theories of discourse offer the opportunity to draw from the available orders of discourse to

recreate a new discursive state, a new state of agentive being. This "little narrative" culled from Varela's literacy artifacts calls attention to the need for alternate pedagogies, more productive conceptions of writing that account for new technology, and an attention to local discursive practices. Situated in a specific racial and economic strata, the multimodal literacy practices Varela discusses (locally based, need determined, image and text) illustrate the ways in which instating new literacy practices particular to the needs and language practices of a specific community have the potential to disarticulate social organizations of power and initiate new modes of response by "challenging and changing those institutions making decisions about their lives." Given the effectiveness of these literacy practices in subjects creating clearer identities as citizens, there is a clear precedent for directing discussions of new technologies, respecting student voices, code meshing, and generating new rhetorics to a more productive engagement with issues of identity that works to strengthen students' authority over their own literacy practices. Works Cited Canagarajah, A. Suresh. “Safe Houses in the Contact Zone: Coping Strategies of African American Students in the Academy.” College Composition and Communication 48.2 (1997): 173–96. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of The Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2004. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York:Continuum, 2000. Gere, Anne Ruggles. "Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition." Views from the Center: The CCCC Chair's Addresses 1977-2005. Ed. Duane Roen. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006. Mohanty, Chandra. " On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s ." Cultural Critique 14 (Winter 1989/90): 179-208. New London Group. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Ed.Bill cope and Mary Kalantzis. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Schneider, Stephen. "Freedom Schooling: Stokeley Carmichael and Critical Rhetorical Education." College Composition and Communication. 58.1 (2006): 46-69. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Varela, Mary. Goals of The Selma Literacy Project. May 1964. -------. Report to Mrs. Deborah Cole. 20 Feb. 1966. APPENDIX A (in process, would love to have some feedback on the train of thought, development, etc) Space (these things gotta get made somewhere...) While preparing African American's for civic discourse, these new, oppositional discursive modes were often produced in spaces outside of the purview of the public sphere. In both Varela's pedagogic statement and her report on adult literacy materials, social and physical space is critically important to the efficacy of praxis, the lateral dissemination of multimodal texts, and the re/negotiation of socially situated subjectivities. Varela's acute awareness of class differences and prejudices in Selma (and Mississippi) highlights a need for educators to resolve "outsider"/"insider" dichotomies to participate in the social life of the Selma African American community. She also speaks of sites in Mississippi where the African American farming community congregates to discuss civic practices (voting, farm allotments, market concerns), a filmstrip workshop, and the aims for establishing a community based radio station. Each of these instances illustrates a social space fraught by ideological concerns, regardless of whether it was the threat of an outsider educator's unexamined racist assumptions or whether it was the possibility of a greater allotment of farmland. Nunley argues that "if the spatial is ideological, then both space and, of course, ideology possess a rhetorical component...the material configuration or spatial location of a site mediates rhetorical performances which enable certain kinds of discourses and rhetorics while constraining others"(228). By facilitating new epistemologies and rhetorical acts, these sites determined the extent to which African American's engaged in productive counter-hegemonic discursive practices and formed counter social formations outside of the dominant, hegemonic public sphere. While Nunley draws on the tradition in African American history of "hush harbors" to productively theorize those spaces where

"Black folks affirm, share, and negotiate African American epistemologies and resist and subvert hegemonic Whiteness,"(222) Nancy Frasen offers a more appropriate/extensive/complex theory/terminology that aligns these counter hegemonic linguistic practices with an agonistic social practice. Frasen theorizes "subaltern counter publics" as "parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs"(67). These new literacy practices provide a social space in which disenfranchised African Americans are able to navigate dominant discourses, re-narrate dominant discourses, and produce counter linguistic practices that effectively authorize African American voices in democratic practices that had historically privileged white citizens. [return to Nunley, need to account for seeming dismissal of her term above]Nunley writes that these discursive/physical spaces "reconfigure and flatten asymmetrical power relations to provide a measure of safety and solace through authorizing or legitimating voices that typically lack jurisdiction in non-hush harbor spaces" or dominant public spheres" (235). Although "subaltern counter publics" and "hush harbors" bear similarities to Pratt's conception of "safe houses," I hesitate to call these sites "safe houses" because that theory betokens a different kind of literacy site and practice. Safe houses are "social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporary protection from legacies of oppression" (6). While these safe houses are important in reshaping how rhetorical acts, epistemologies, and identities are conceptualized and developed, Pratt's theories evolve out of the particular social configuration of an academic institution, where while a high degree of historical risk, punitive consequences, socially situated differences in knowledge bases, and types of counter hegemonic voices exist, the academic institution itself can provide the social space for a "temporary protection from legacies of oppression6." In this sense 6 By no means do I wish to diminish the importance of safe houses in the academy. I argue here only that the character of these social spaces is different; in that the sponsors of literacy practices differ greatly, the acts of resistance I discuss illustrate a particular historicized, purposeful practice of subversion that has defined African American relations and rhetorics in the US since the earliest days of slavery. In many ways these practices have been invested in alternative

counter publics are adamantly different, strategic sites of learning and response set against and in relation to "legacies of oppression." African American counter publics evolve directly out of historically contextualized acts/spaces of resistance and subversion that draw on, construct, and facilitate alternate ways of being (being fully human) in the world. Counter publics, then, are social spaces to strategically perform rhetorical acts of ideological subversion and social reconfiguration in order to disrupt dominant group influence and to reform social relations. Fraser notes how the strategic use of space produces counter ideological rhetorical responses: "On the one hand, [subaltern counterpublics] function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics"(68). While providing an intergroup sanctuary in which multiple voices circulate, the social space of counter publics produce new, differently articulated "agitational" and arguably liberatory responses to the hegemonic stratification of social relations, as can be seen in the rise of multimodal literacy practices in response to the specific social needs of African Americans in the South. Indeed, "It is precisely in the dialectic between these two functions that their emancipatory potential resides. This dialectic enables subaltern counterpublics partially to offset, although not wholly to eradicate, the unjust participatory privileges enjoyed by members of dominant social groups in stratified societies"(68). Nunley, Vorris L."From the Harbor to Da Academic Hoood: Hush Harbors and an African American Rhetorical Tradition." African American Rhetorics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed Ronald Jackson and Elaine Richardson. SIUP, 2004. in this section I seek to employ, broaden and illuminate the range of counter publics Fraser sets out. Royster focuses on the vibrant counter publics found in teh activities of the elite AAW of the 19th century. I want to argue that these oppositional rhetorics are also produced outside of the relative privilege afforded the AAW women she discussed in a more common, contentiously oppressive material reality, and that these issue forth not as an outcome of highly literate practices but as a critical awareness of the need for literacy in civic life.???

sites outside of the well traveled social spaces of dominant culture