Institutions, Systems, Mythos, Standardization, and Vernacular Discourse

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Rambling, Part I


 I'm rereading Long's Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics and thinking about how the institution of the community college fails in its approach to literacy because of its allegiance to the state system and not to the community which it claims to serve. They make two claims, both which meet the cultural expectation that "education leads to success":

  1. Community colleges are inexpensive institutions that provide accredited courses which transfer to four year institutions; the assumption there that it's the four-year degree -- not the two-year degree or certification -- that fulfills the promise that a college education leads to success
  2. "Careers, not jobs." Here, the claim is that, instead of starting entry-level in retail or the service industry, with few skills to meet the demands of globalist corporate practices that hire and fire at will, the community college student will gain skills that prepare for long-term careers, even those that survive globalist pressures, and return the employee to the nostalgic times when we could work at the same company for decades and ensured retirement benefits, instead of the post-Fordist economy in which we currently live where nothing is guaranteed.
Michel de Certeau
To appreciate these claims we first ask how these claims, and the state institutions which support these claims, affect us as taxpayers, community members, faculty, staff, and ultimately students in an institution that designs itself as a top-down hierarchical one not responding to community needs, but maintaining its own administrative-heavy, bureaucratic existence through the replication of disenfranchising programs, programs that replicate the dominant culture and not the alternative discourses of the local community. I'll leave it to LF to help me with the original histories and goals of community colleges, but we've wandered far away from those original goals.

In chapter 3, Long summarizes features of situated public literacies -- those literacies that we see in our communities and which our students bring to the campus -- their campus. 
  1. Performance
  2. Collaboration
  3. Problem-solving stance (Freire, Dewey, Alinsky)
  4. Sponsorship
  5. Alternative discourses
The academy, and the community college especially, claim to offer a space that is designed on a habermasian public sphere, with vision statements, policies hidden in handbooks, etc. But in fact the discursive space at community colleges are contrary actual democratic ideals (Fraser) because this discourse doesn't represent actual community discourse as shown in Long's five-point features of situated public literaies.

If the community college represented actual community discourse, the college would seek out disengage voices and seek to engage and meet their needs and wants. Instead, the actual community's voices are ignored. What we have, of course, is the habermasian facade of community discourse -- an elite few, already empowered because of their participation in the dominant culture's systems -- but overall most community members don't even know about the college, much less engage with college policy or curriculum designed and certainly are never asked to participate in curriculum design at any level. For example, during current discussions of degree plans and core requirements, community members at my institution are not involved in any whit. It's the institution that fully controls this discourse, under the auspices of the state's requirements and of course with the consistent goal of meeting accreditation standards. Yet neither of these voices actually represent local, situated, public discourse.
Instead, the community college a) follows the system reflection of the state itself as a dominant culture institution with that culture's values, ethos, language, etc.; and b) reinforces standardization, through the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, SACSCOC [sic], and so forth for the game of accreditation. The system of accredidation in the form of transfer-is-our-goal-at-any-cost erases the community discourse, since most community members will never attend college or are interested in four-year degrees, and the best function of a community college would be to actually provide literacy, emancipatory skills such as alternative economic or communication models to counteract the dominant system which -- evidently -- is designed and increasing is effective in oppressing/depressing local communities all the while community college enrollments increase.

Contrast alternative discourse which seek alternative economies, social structures, art, literature, and other discursive systems which the community college all invalidates. The community college must invalidate all alternative discourses because of the THECB and SACSCOC discourse, which invalidates those community literacies.

Finally, the community college as an institution of the state system "gate keeps" [verbing something a gatekeeper does] students so that all alternative discourses -- contrary to the ideals of Fraser, Dewey, Anzaldúa, Welch, Shor, hooks, Alinsky, Habermas, Warner, Flower, Mathieu, Long, Hauser, McKee, Weisser, and others -- are bracketed, red-marked, failed, and probationed (financially and academically) until they are expelled from the dominant system again, with little recourse except to go into labor (worse, retail), or learn their lesson after a few years and take on the shackles of the dominant discourse with its hierarchical deafness to the community.


So what do we do? 


I'm still working on that.

BONUS

I'm reposting a small critical discourse ananlysis of a public meeting held a few months ago. I was told to remove the post, and I did. But considering the comments in this post, I felt that the material regarding that public meeting would demonstrate how the dominant culture in fact disenfranchises the community culture, as explained above:

 Critical Discourse Analysis of a "College Forum"


Be strong, and courageous.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
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