Why Civic Fluency?
Improving on a rights-based approach
Backstory of a future focus
When I was Executive Director of the Chicago Literacy Alliance, we worked on developing a logic model or Theory of Change for our organization’s programs. This model would help folks (especially funders) understand how our efforts to build capacity, align services, and advocate for the literacy sector would address core concerns about not just educational access and literacy but a healthy civic culture and democratic community.
The initial structure the team proposed was to use realizing “literacy is a human right” as our goal. On the plus side, the phrase lined up with a slogan we used on our workspace wall and on our sweatshirts and other swag.
My response to this right-based proposal, though, was that while it was true, it was not true enough. It didn’t fully encompass what we did and why. It also threatened some downstream consequences we were better off avoiding. I’ll get to those consequences in a moment, but the basic weakness in the slogan was that it was good for a bumper sticker or a sweatshirt, but wasn’t very helpful beyond that. It serves as a moral trump card, but doesn’t help much to get to what follows. What follows matters.
Instead, we used Civic Fluency as the organizing concept in the model. As I mentioned in the previous post, the concept of Civic Fluency aims to embrace the full set of skills needed to live a full, human, adult life in community with others. Its orientation is prospective, inclusive, deliberative, and evolving, rather than retrospective and static. It foregrounds authentic discussion of both the what and the why, without supposing those matters to be settled in advance.
In today’s post, I’ll line out what I see as a few of the liabilities of a rights-based approach, specifically when it comes to literacy, and point you to some further discussions. In a subsequent post, I’ll discuss a few articles and books that elaborate some of the difficulties of the appeal to rights alone in the characterization of what more just systems of educational opportunity might look like.
Liabilities of the “literacy is a right” approach
I’m learning to adjust my discussion of these issues to the Substack medium, and I’m trying mightily to avoid the temptation to write everything I have thought or currently think about this topic in this one post. If something below is incomplete or would benefit from further elaboration, I will look to get back to it and develop it. Please consider this a sketch of my position, and if you see opportunities to improve it, let me know. But please know that I know holes exist.
To focus first on the specific liabilities of using “literacy is a human right” in the literacy contexts:
It implies that literacy is one thing;
It implies that “we” (whoever “we” are) already know what it is;
It implies that literacy is a binary—something you either have or you don’t; that it’s a switch to be flipped or a bucket to be filled (compare with Paulo Freire’s indictment of the “banking model” of education);
1-3 lead to a kind of “deficit discourse,” which thereby invokes a “savior mentality, in turn talking to benefactors in a way we would never talk to constituents about their learning.
Taking these in order, the first thing to explore is that literacies are multiple—they are systems of knowledge and power mediated by cultural tools and symbols. They are ways to know things, say things, and do things using these tools and symbols. For example, the tools of civic literacy can include voting, petitions, and writing one’s Representative or Senator. The symbols can include “a more perfect union,” “one person-one vote,” and “E pluribus unum.”
I’ll point you here to a White Paper I wrote with colleagues a few years ago on multiple literacies. It provides further detail as to how many kinds of literacy make up the kind of future we need to support for all learners. Reading and writing literacies are important “gateway literacies,” in that they afford access to other literacies in an asymmetric way. One can read a book to learn how to play a piano, but playing a piano will not teach you how to read a book. That said, even written language’s tools of persuasion find their basis within more fundamental sources of oral literacy and storytelling.
Second, asserting that “literacy is a human right,” implies that one knows what it is, which raises the legitimate question as to who was part of determining that definition and who wasn’t. Part of the point of Civic Fluency is to foreground the discussion of what literacies shall mean to the people we aspire to be together with diverse others. Furthermore, it reduces the danger of merely trying to make universal something that may only have been a part of one sub-culture’s particular experience. The hope is that it provides an antidote to tendencies to cultural supremacy, supposing that the possession of this or that form of literacy thereby makes one culture more “advanced.”
Third, literacies are continuums and not binaries, so there’s no switch that flips to take you from being a person without literacy to a person with literacy. Our starting point should be a recognition that everyone, structured by the constraints on the tools available to them, develops the literacies they need to navigate their environments. We are all on continuums of literacies upon which we can grow. At some point, I’ll try to introduce you to some folks who are working on some very exciting immersive technologies to provide virtual environments to cultivate indigenous forms of natural and cultural literacies.
Finally, the binary dimension especially creates the potential to foster “deficit discourse” within the dominant narratives about literacy and educational opportunity. It defines the challenge by what (certain) people are thought to lack rather than by the potential that our current structures fail to activate. This, when coupled with the shoestring-budget urgency most literacy non-profits operate with, creates funding narratives that can effectively re-stigmatize learners already facing barriers to access. Organizations optimize for communicating about their work in ways that can serve to flatter their donors and volunteers, but simultaneously subvert an ethos of partnership with the learners they support.
By contrast, Civic Fluency aims to build urgency more toward the good we seek to create together than toward the harm we wish to avoid. To adapt one of the civic literacy metaphors above, it invites us to consider, on an ongoing basis, what the “more perfect union of literacy” looks like.
The contrast between the rights-based approach and my alternative proposal has more dimensions than I can fully account for here, but my hope is that the Substack will provide me with enough room to iterate on this issue and address them over time. I’ll leave it here with the operating understanding I try to start from, which is that genius is evenly distributed, but inequitably activated by our systems and institutions. The fault here is not in our selves but in our stars, and I’m trying to help us get to better guiding stars.
Other resources and more to come
As I mentioned, I’ll dig into some recent scholarly and public-interest work addressing the weaknesses of a rights-based approach to goal setting. In the meantime, here are some other venues in which I’ve tackled the comparative advantages of the civic fluency model over the rights model, and the difference these advantages can make in advancing a solidarity-based approach.
Your library should be able to afford you access to my article in The Library Quarterly applying the Civic Fluency model to the potential civic role of libraries: “Re-imagining Literacy Equity as Civic Fluency Building: Some Hard-Won Lessons Libraries Can Carry Forward”.
Perhaps easier to access in a couple ways is my 2024 podcast conversation with Alida Miranda-Wolff on her CareWork Podcast: “Building Toward the Future of Literacy Equity”.
Thanks for reading. Until next time.