Community vs. Local Literacies

“Community literacy could be (but is not) another name for what Barton and Hamilton (1998) call ‘local literacies’ – the diverse, daily forms of reading and writing used by working-class people, often overlooked or dismissed in our preoccupation with the elite literacies of school or business” (Flower 18).

What???

I guess I was thinking of community literacy as local literacy - according to Flower's definition. I always thought that community literacy was being literate in the forms of communication of the community you are a member of, and with service learning, you bring a different type of literacy to a community. For example: Our lunchtime programs at local elementary schools. We go out into the East Lansing community - into elementary schools - and bring a new type of literacy, German, to the elementary school kids.

“Community literacy…is an intercultural dialogue with others on issues that they identify as sites of struggle. Community literacy happens at a busy intersection of multiple literacies and diverse discourses. It begins its work when community fold, urban teens, community supporters, college-student mentors, and university faculty start naming and solving problems together” (Flower 19).

However, this problem-solving approach makes a lot of sense, really, but I'm not sure how it relates to the service-learning I've done. My first experience with service learning was in the College of Ed. We went to local urban schools and helped a classroom teacher once a week. Sometimes I worked with individual students or groups of students. Other times I helped the teacher run experiments in the classroom. I'm not sure the College of Ed. really went out of the way to find a problem and a way to solve it. I don't think they really payed attention to the needs of the "customer" (as Flower said). So why did they call it service learning? I thought of it more as field work. Maybe they called it service learning because we were in an urban school helping the downtrodden minority.

Maybe I can make my work with German Outreach fit this definition. So it is increasingly important for students to learn a language other than English these days. There isn't a lot of money to fund these programs (problem identified by university faculty and community partners). So we go into the schools to expose the students to another language at an early age, and even if they don't end up choosing German, they have a positive experience learning a language and choose to study one in the future. Hmm... Not sure that fits either.

Flower does cite Dewey and his active approach to democracy and education, and I think that service learning fits right in with Dewey's approach of being an active participant.

So my question is why can't community literacy be local literacy, too? And don't we, when we go out into the community, pick up the literacy of that community?