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Vi Dutcher at violet.dutcher@emu.edu
I was recently asked the origins of my interested in community literacy. Answering this question brought me back to Maggie Anderson and the Wick space at KSU: I came to the academy not so interested in my Mennonite background. What I mean is that early on in my schooling, I learned to separate my background from school. I attended a small Mennonite school in first grade, and we were forbidden to speak the language of home on school property. Then, when I transferred to public school, the Amish, in particular, and Mennonites, in general, were often stigmatized by peers. To bring one’s Mennonite background and school together is a foolhardy enterprise. However, all of this began to change for me when, as a senior undergraduate student, I took a poetry writing class taught by Maggie Anderson. One assignment asked us choose a poet from our anthology with whom we experienced some sort of affinity, do some background research on this poet, and write a paper about this affinity. As I worked my way through the anthology, attempting to find that spark, that link, I read a poem entitled “Uncle.” I knew exactly what was going on in that poem, unlike some of the other students in that class. This poem was, of course, written by Julia Kasdorf, a poet who grew up in a Mennonite community. That’s the first I knew that Mennonites wrote, that there was a Mennonite voice, that I had a voice—it came from deep inside me and made it’s way up to the surface. I could feel it happening. From then on, I kept seeing the connections everywhere. I saw that there is a story, and I saw that I am an active character in that story.
After reading the above, then, you can see where the importance of community literacy overarches everything I do. Composition scholars, long interested in students’ writing for college assignments, began, in the 1990s, to see that their work on student writing in the schools could actually be privileging the writing of the academy. They began working within the communities themselves and bringing us a wealth of research findings from within those communities and making the links between that community writing and the students’ writing in the classroom. This re-direction in research brought authenticity to our claim that in our classrooms, we value the students’ backgrounds and begin our coursework with where they are—assuming, of course, that it is important to us what they bring with them to the classroom.
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