Rural literacies explores literacy’s role in creating a dichotomy between rural and urban Americans and argues that literacy educators must examine rural literacies in context and work against urban biases in order to create social sustainability within rural communities and solidarity between rural, urban, and suburban communities. This sustainability is multidimensional and informed by interdependent ecological, economic, political, and social factors. The first and last chapters of the book were written collaboratively, but the authors wrote the second, third, and fourth chapters individually to show readers how literacy sponsors and notions of sustainability apply to their unique experiences with rural literacies.
In chapter 1, Donehower, Hogg & Schell explain the multifaceted images of “rural” and “literacy,” and define “rural literacies” as literate skills used to sustain rural life. Their goals are to examine the spaces where people teach and learn about rural literacies and rural issues, and to promote citizen participation models which will sustain rural communities and create solidarity among rural, urban, and suburban communities.
In chapter 2, Donehower uses Derek Owens’s definition of sustainability and Deborah Brandt’s concept of literacy sponsors as she analyzes how traditional preservation, abandonment, and modernization metaphors affect rural Appalachians’ literate lives. She believes that finding literacy sponsors who want to teach and learn from rural people is essential to resisting stereotypes and achieving sustainability. In chapter 3, Schell further explains these metaphors as she discusses the farm crisis narratives of tragedy and smart diversification. Schell argues that these narratives maintain society’s “agricultural illiteracy” because they fail to create “mutual identification” that educates people about environmental and food issues that relate to everyone. In chapter 4, Hogg moves beyond Donehower’s and Schell’s analyses of how these metaphors influence rural people and focuses on how rural women’s existing literacies provide opportunities for understanding and complicating rural literacies. Rural women record local history, organize clubs, and plan events that strengthen a community’s ties and cultivate its members’ literacies. These ties are essential to sustaining today’s rural communities because, as fewer rural residents farm, rural life has become more about creating close ties to people and the community than to the land. In the final chapter, the authors ask readers to become rural literacy activists and share units on media representation, food politics, and place that readers can use to teach students about rural literacies and create mutual identification between rural and urban areas.
Rural literacies proves that rural areas are not frozen in time but are vital places working against stereotypes to develop social sustainability. This book is essential for all educators who want their students to understand that many social and political patterns that rural, urban, and suburban communities encounter are interconnected, and that creating solidarity between rural, urban, and suburban communities helps everyone.
