Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love

By Stephen Parks

In Gravyland, Parks chronicles the history of an urban university writing program and its attempt to develop politically progressive literacy partnerships with the surrounding community while having to work within and against a traditional educational and cultural landscape. He details the experience of Temple University’s New City Writing program from its beginning as a small institute with one program at a local public school to a multifaceted organization, supported by large multiyear grants and establishing partnerships across the diverse neighborhoods of Philadelphia. The author describes classrooms where the community takes a seat and becomes part of the conversation—a conversation that readers of Gravyland share through the inclusion of a selection of passages produced by community writers published by New City Community Press.

While Parks celebrates classroom success in generating knowledge through dialogue with the larger community, he also highlights many of the obstacles the organizers of the New City Writing program faced. The author shows that writing alliances between universities and communities are possible, but they must take into account the institutional, economic, and political pressures that accompany such partnerships. Blending the theoretical and practical lessons learned, Parks elucidates New City Writing’s effort to offer a new model of education, one in which the voice of the professor must share space with the voices of the community, and one in which students come to understand that the right to sit in a classroom is the result not just of nationalist war but of peaceful civil disobedience, of community struggles to gain self-recognition, and of collective efforts to seek social justice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Mar 26, 2010
• ISBN: 9780815651567

Book preview

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Writing Beyond the Curriculum

The Hybrid Nature of University/Public-School Partnerships

Indeed, I would go so far to say that it is the critic’s job to provide resistances to theory, to open it up toward historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests, to point up those concrete instances drawn from everyday reality that lie outside or just beyond the interpretative area necessarily designated in advance and thereafter circumscribed by every theory.

—EDWARD SAID, The World, the Text, and the Critic

VOICE IS A CENTRAL CONCEPT within composition/rhetoric studies. Centrality, however, does not necessarily imply consensus. For more than thirty years, there has been an on-going debate in the field regarding whether an individual’s voice is an intrinsic personal attribute or the result of larger social and political narratives—a difference underlying the Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae dialogue over the nature of personal and academic writing (Bartholomae 1995; Bartholomae and Elbow 1995; Elbow 1995). Nor is there consensus over whether one position is necessarily more conservative or progressive than the other: Is Elbow, whose expressivist pedagogy enables students to bring their community experiences into the classroom, somehow less progressive than Bartholomae, who designed a constructivist pedagogy to benefit working-class students in Pittsburgh? Given a situation with oppositional paradigms and contradictory politics, Joseph Harris (1996) goes so far as to argue that these differences over voice cannot be resolved within our field.

This state of affairs does not mean that voice cannot be a useful concept, however. Rather, I want to argue that the seemingly oppositional logic of voice can be productively deployed within the context of university/public-school literacy partnerships. Instead of trying to imagine that the resolution of the voice debate can occur within any piece of student writing or classroom practice, I propose that when voice is understood as necessarily hybrid, as placing itself in two different domains simultaneously, the seeming contradiction might be understood as operationally enacting a complete form of literacy politics, a politics that can transform the relationship among composition classrooms, university students, and local public schools.

For although the Bartholomae and Elbow dialogue frames the issue of voice within the university curriculum, the dialogue surrounding voice within composition/rhetoric now takes place within the context of our field’s public turn, a term Paula Mathieu (2005) uses to mark the emerging network of university, community, and public-school partnerships that now exist within universities and university writing programs. In this way, the work of composition/rhetoric has come to include not just the professor/student dynamic discussed by Bartholomae and Elbow, but public-school students, K–12 teachers, and neighborhood activists. In this chapter, then, I want to explore how the concept of voice enables a full engagement with the work of the public turn.

To this end, I will continue to focus on the development of the Institute for the Study of Literature, Literacy, and Culture by discussing one of its initial projects, Urban Rhythms, a project that would place itself within the seemingly oppositional logic of voice as one means to create systemic change within a public school’s curriculum. For although debates on voice have been contentious in the field, there also seems to be a pretty unified front that the effects of standards-based education on public-school students has diminished both the personal and curricular diversity of student voices. The difficulty is in understanding how to use those student voices to alter the emergent social and politically conservative definitions of literacy being dispersed in a standards-based environment. This chapter tries to speak to that difficulty.

Urban Rhythms I

During the first years of the institute’s existence, I taught an Advanced Composition course that served as one of the initial entry points into the complicated relationship between voice politics and public-school partnerships. It did not start out this way. Instead, the course was initially focused on popular music, with an emphasis on how it could be read as a communal and political response by the working class to mainstream cultural values. Students were asked to read studies of folk music and the blues as well as to study protest music from the 1960s. The end point of the class was to be an examination of politically motivated rap music—for example, the music by Public Enemy—as a current incarnation of class politics.

My thought was that such a course would connect the music most immediate to my students, rap, with a longer tradition of social and political musical expression. The goal was to broaden the historical horizon through which students could understand the political sensibilities and aesthetic actions of working-class culture—here defined as an intercultural and interracial phenomenon—because this diverse sense of their culture most reflected the urban world in which they existed. Ultimately, I wanted them to begin to recognize the role of language in creating a different set of values from the commodity-driven lifestyle being produced by mainstream