Foreword: What's really weird is...
It is important to recognize that the case studies here are not remarkable, not outliers. Roozen did not do hundreds of interviews to locate those few rare individuals who had rich, complicated literate lives. Instead what he did in each case was pick up on interesting threads and push on those threads, and in each case he found textures that ran back, across, and through people’s lives. What is important to recognize is that all of our threads have these kinds of entanglements, these kinds of lines of flight across settings, times, people, places, and practices. When we expand our literate landscapes, when we don’t just look at a person in one place and fix them in our gaze in one role, what we find are the threads of literate lives across imagined borders (cf. Berry, Hawisher, & Selfe, 2012). That is the central, core, most important conclusion that these case studies support.
As Terri fills out medical charts and feels the dehumanizing pressure of genres that convert people with complicated and interesting lives, with families and friends, into a fragmented series of biological indicators, medical diagnoses and prescriptions, she resists with writing. She writes a dystopian science fiction novel; she pens poems about the patients, partially to remind herself of their humanity; she writes a religious devotional; she produces a multimedia video of breast cancer survivors in her family. With each of these moves, Terri is crossing imagined boundaries—religion, medicine, family, art, work; however, it is critical to see how deeply entangled these practices are. Her writing helps her survive and thrive in her work, helps her humanize her everyday nursing care of people. Her work gives purpose, sense and texture to her life and her writing.
With Lindsey we see a practice from a graphic design class of cutting and rearranging as a way of disrupting and re-seeing being carried over into writing processes, including literary criticism and creative writing. And interestingly, when Lindsey uses the affordances of cutting and rearranging, she joins another thread among creative writers. Famously, for example, Vladimir Nabakov employed a similar composing process, writing his novels on index cards that he could physically rearrange (Nabakov, 1967). In fact, as Roozen and Erickson note, his posthumously published final novel (Nabakov, 2009), released by his son, is presented with perforations, marking the breaks of his index cards and inviting readers to cut out and reorder the text.
What is really strange are not these cases, but that we ever imagined that people would live their lives inside discourse communities, inside domains, that their identities and selves, feelings and thoughts could flash on and off as they moved across social maps, here the nurse, there the sister, here the poet, there the devout Christian. What is really strange is the ideological delusion that we can slice and dice people and their practices into “worlds apart.”
Roozen and Erickson highlight the theoretical and empirical stakes by contrasting their cases with the traditional discourse community account of academic writing and disciplinary enculturation:
Haas (1994) wrote that, “At the college level, to become literate is in many ways to learn the patterns of knowing about, and behaving toward, texts within a disciplinary field” (p. 43). However, the portraits of these five co-researchers' repurposing, remediating, and coordinating a rich network of texts and textual practices, of authoring themselves continually across vernacular, disciplinary, and even professional worlds and of navigating the tensions and synergies that texture their efforts suggest much longer, more complex, and more heterogeneous pathways of learning. Those portraits also begin to document the ongoing ways — ways we must learn to see — that students are (re)making disciplinary genres, practices, identities, and fields through their engagements.
These case studies of long chains of persons and practices becoming can help us to break out of dominant tropes and address the questions that then appear:
How do people and artifacts tie together the moments of our lives?
How do social practices develop, expand, change, morph and move through lives, across time, across place, across social context, across inhabited identity?
These are indeed critical questions for our field.
Beyond the rich theoretical and empirical implications of Expanding Literate Landscapes, Roozen and Erickson also consider pedagogical implications. The strategies they lay out in the conclusion are well worth careful attention, but I ended up most struck by their understated hope:
In an environment with ever greater emphasis on ever narrower regimes of literate accountability, we hope this picture of co-developing literate activities reminds us how important it is in human terms to look at the whole person, to support the co-curricular activities as well as the curricular.
I truly do believe that expanding our literate landscapes by seeing the long trajectories persons and practices trace across what we imagine as borders has the power to make us more accountable to whole persons (not tests) and more alert to our profound potentials to forge new connections and make new worlds.
