Action Literacy: Position, Movement, and Consciousness

by Stacey Waite


Preface to the Landscape As a poet, a teacher, a gender theorist, a literary scholar, and a composition theorist, I have thought very much about the connections and disconnections that exist among the disciplines in which I work. I have come to think of these fields of academic discourse as far more connected than I ever would have expected before becoming a teacher of composition and creative writing. It had been communicated to me in several ways, for example, that creative writing is about the rendering of experience, while theory or critical writing is about the production or exploration of knowledge. I propose that this binary is as reductive and false as any other. The narrative and the scholarly are inextricably linked forms of critical inquiry (as we might discover by reading anthropologist Ruth Behar's anthro-political-narratives). I cannot, after all, propose a theory of literacy without providing the narrative literate context in which I have lived, learned, and taught. To focus on difference has not worked rhetorically, politically, pedagogically, or personally. It has proven far more productive for me to begin to understand interdisciplinary approaches in which, as scholars, we concern ourselves more with our areas of deep connection than with those arguably smaller areas of disconnection. As Gayle Elliot reminds us: "Recognizing that as academics we can, paradoxically, maintain the integrity of individual positionalities even as we distinguish various points of relation, we can begin to resolve divisions in our own discipline and, at the same time, address similar divisions within society. Many interdepartmental conflicts—which often pit one concentration of study against another—replicate 'self-other opposition'" (107).