Ramblings...

I will be honest, I read the readings this week only one time and I feel that I didn't read them very closely--however I am going got go with my initial impression on this one and hope that it isn't too far off. I feel like these readings were very theoretical.. I feel like it (community based work)shouldn’t be complicated this much. The intro talks about taking rhetorical work "public" and "doing rhetoric" but really what they are doing is complicating things and imposing their views and believes onto everyone else. "communities can benefit" blah. As if we (rhetoricians) have all the answers.

I realize that theoretical interpretations are important---even when the topic is seemingly simple and straight forward---I guess I just didn't like the way this book chose to go about it.

~~Stray thought~~~ Perhaps it is important to pose a theoretical interpretation of community based work at a time like this when the field is so new and people are just starting to pin down exactly what community literacy is and how to do that work or what is considered to be community literacy work? I don't know.

I guess I prefer to see the who, what, why, when, where, and how of the community literacy work (or any work for that matter)rather than the theoretical background and influence of such work. However this has proved to be a weakness of mine---so this is a not always a good thing.

There were a few things I liked about the readings---the Space to Work in Public Life was interesting. Except for the part where they said "Cleary, these communities can benefit from the increased attention of rhetoricians in pursuit of democratic ideals" and then continued to qualify that with "but rhetoric can also benefit from community partnerships premised on negotiated search for the common good." Yes. Because it is that simple.

I apologize for my ramblings... its 5:30 in the morning :)