The Desire for Literacy

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.

Lauren Rosenberg is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies and Director of First-Year Writing. Her training is in Composition and Rhetoric with specializations in community literacy, feminist rhetorics and methodologies, and writing program administration. She teaches courses in composition theory and pedagogy, critical and community literacy studies, feminist theories and methodologies, qualitative research methods, lifespan longitudinal studies, and writing program administration. She is also mentor new and seasoned teachers of writing.
Stories, and the ways that people represent their experiences, in their own words, have always mattered to her. In her book, The Desire for Literacy, she concentrated on the ways that adult learners restoried their lived experiences when they became writers, and how they turned their writing toward making social changes in their communities. Currently, in her research with populations of adult learners, she is taking a lifespan development of writing approach as she looks longitudinally at how ordinary people relate to writing. Threaded through all her scholarship is a commitment to examining and advocating for equity through community engagement and public activism. From her experiences as a researcher and teacher, she has learned to encourage students to always look beyond the confines of the university so that they might understand how their writing can serve multiple purposes, such as problem solving, reflection, and interrogation of power relations. The same feminist imperative that informs her research--of listening intensively for more honest critical "action in cross-boundary exchange" (Jacqueline Jones Royster)--also shapes her teaching and administrative practices.