Shared Practice in Place: Literacy and the Construction of Community

Abstract

The portrait in this chapter focuses on Terry and Carol, who have played an integral part in the local church's community activity programme and Bible discussion groups. At these community events, engagement with texts of all kinds suggests a model of literacy which, rather than presupposing a narrow range of skills and the passing on of information, is open to interpretative possibilities. The chapter gives an overview of a social practice paradigm in literacy studies, which presents literacy as socially constructed and locally produced, and as a valuable resource in the negotiation of everyday lives. Such a perspective allows us to see how community is creatively and collaboratively constructed through shared experience, and the place of language and literacy within this process.