Stepping Outside the Resource Frame: Reconsidering Rural Literacy and Sustainability

• In Event: Rural Literacies: Text and Context Beyond the Metropolis

Abstract

This paper questions the resource frame typically applied to understanding the role of literacy in rural sustainability. As described by Deborah Brandt, in the United States, “literacy skill is treated primarily as a resource—economic, political, intellectual, spiritual—which […] has potential payoff in gaining power or pleasure, in accruing information, civil rights, education, spirituality, status, money” (2001, 5). For the past decade, public and educational policies focused on the survival of rural towns have emphasized the economic benefits of literacy, particularly the ways that mastering new technologies of literacy can ‘bring rural communities into the 21st century’ and allow them to ‘compete on a global stage.’

Whether reading and writing actually contribute in these areas (see Graff 1991), this view of literacy-as-mastering-a-technology bypasses the efforts of New Literacy Studies scholars to understand literacy as a social practice—as an event primarily about people and relationships, not technologies (Street 2003). Literacy-as-technology returns us to what Brandt calls a “strong text” view of literacy (1990, 13), a view that is reinforced at the K-12 level in the U.S. by the New Criticism methods of literary interpretation advocated by the creator of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.

The neoliberal philosophy that underlies the CCSS and the No Child Left Behind/Race to the Top models of education reform emphasizes not only literacy-as-technology, but literacy-as-competition. In this view, literacy, although highly standardized, is also completely atomized—an activity practiced similarly and simultaneously by individuals whose primary relationship is not with other literate practitioners—who may be in the same room with them—but with the text at hand. This heightens the strong-text nature of the literacy model imposed on K-12 schools and reduces the possibilities for literacy to be experienced as a communal, collaborative act.

Pressures are strong on rural U.S. teachers to teach to this strong-text view and ignore other possible uses of literacy. However, rural communities cannot survive through economic competition alone. People and their relationships with one another, both inside and outside their communities, are also a vital part of rural sustainability.

This paper examines the work of the North Dakota Curriculum Initiative, an attempt to provide curriculum maps and lesson plans connected to the Common Core State Standards. It offers a critique of those efforts’ suitability for rural communities, and considers what alternative instruction might look like if we consider literacy for rural communities outside the economic resource frame.

Author

• Kim Donehower, University of North Dakota