The literate tend to take their literacy and all it affords them for
granted; they are equally likely to assume that nonliterate people do
not know, think, or understand in the ways they do, that the silence of
nonliteracy is both intrinsic and deserved.
But as Lauren Rosenberg illustrates, marginalized adult learners are
quite capable of theorizing about their position in society, questioning
dominant ideas, disrupting them, and challenging traditional literacy
narratives in American culture. In The Desire for Literacy: Writing in
the Lives of Adult Learners, Rosenberg takes up the imperative
established by community literacy researchers to engage with people in
communities outside of formal schooling in an effort to understand adult
learners' motivations and desires to become more literate when they
choose reading and writing for their own purposes.
Focusing on the experiences, knowledge, and perspectives of four adult
learners, she examines instances in which participants resist narratives
of oppression, particularly when they become authors. Rosenberg's
qualitative study demonstrates that these adult learners are already
knowledgeable individuals who can teach academics about how literacy
operates, not only through service-learning lenses of reflection and
action, but also more radically in terms of how students, instructors,
and scholars of composition think about the meanings and purposes of
literacy.
