Producing good citizens: Literacy and citizenship training in anxious times.

摘要

In the field of rhetoric and composition, scholars commonly mobilize the concept of the citizen in calls for critical pedagogy, letter-to-the-editor assignments, service learning, and in discussions of the public sphere. Yet the desire to create participatory citizens does not often move beyond prevailing rights and participation models in which students need only enact good citizenship in order to become a full citizen. As a result, the terms and boundaries of citizenship are often left unexamined.; My dissertation takes on the question of how concepts of citizenship have been embedded in the practices of literacy training by examining literacy's role in the construction of citizenship. Through a study of documents from literacy and citizenship training in the early twentieth century, such as those sponsored by labor unions and Americanization programs as well as by institutions of higher education, I argue that themes of productivity emerged from this training to shape the concept of the good, productive citizen-worker and eventually led to the equating of citizenship habits with good work habits. I look at the documents that reveal the goals and rationales for teaching literacy---how teachers and architects of programs imagined students acquiring citizenship and literacy through their courses and what students would do with that citizenship and literacy once they left the classroom.; By examining a range of spaces where those hoping to acquire full citizenship may have encountered literacy, I investigate how citizenship and literacy have been mutually but often contradictorily implicated for often disenfranchised individuals. Literacy became a way to measure the potential productivity of industrial workers, many of them immigrants, during a period that established many of the legal and cultural requirements of U.S. citizenship in parallel with the proliferation of mass manufacturing. Additionally, this study reveals how workers and immigrants themselves position literacy as a tool for social and economic mobility in their quests for full citizenship.