Grabill

Grabill, Jeffrey T. Community Literacy Programs and the Politics of Change. Albany: State U of New York P, 2001.

Grabill's book is primarily a theorizing of the concept of literacy (grounded in his work with a community lit agency in Georgia), so it's less useful to my project. But Grabill offers an interesting discussion of institutions and argues for a version of institutional change and institutional action that gives preferential option for the poor (borrowing Catholic social teaching heavily).

Literacy, Grabill says, only has meaning in the context of specific, local institutions. Moreso than an abstraction like 'literacy,' institutions "are written, and if they are written, they can be rewritten" (8). Hence, concrete social change happens at the level of the (concrete) institution. Civic engagement efforts need "a critical rhetoric." Grabill writes, "This rhetoric is a situated procedure committed to participatory decision making within communitities and institutions that gives preferential option to the least powerful" (64).

Such efforts should involve interventions in the ways communities and institutions intersect (88). Specifically, practitioners of civic engagement work (ASL, etc.) need to revise their notions of "community" away from a homogenizing project. The danger of the word 'community' is that it is singular and potentially monolithic. Instead, make a committment to "difference" and "to naming those differences that mark one as less powerful" (91). He goes on: "I want to suggest that the committment to others is a committment to collective action and difference. I see no other way" (91).

On preferential option: "The reasons for preferential treatment are rather simple in principle yet terribly complex in practice. Recall that the ethical and political justification of democratic processes depends on there being free and equal participation. Once we acknowledge that decision-making processes aren't free and equal--and they never are--then it is necessary to think carefully about how they can approach that ideal" (123). Preferential option, in other words, gives the culture a closer approximation to the "ideal" of justice. You admit inequality and take affirmative steps to achieve equality. So with ASL work, the agency gets preferential option--over university, faculty member, career, student, and student need. (150-151).