The People Write Back: Community Literacy Practices and the Visibility of the Ordinary Writer

This chapter presents a portrait of literacy across three institutional settings: schooling, business, and law court. This portrait of literacy is not a typical case although the issues raised through this portrait may extend widely. The portrait is perhaps best viewed as a “telling case” (Mitchell, 1984), a case whose particularity and difference make visible hidden social, cultural, and political processes in the nature, structuration, and multiplicity of literacy practices (Street, 1995).