"Who Am I? What Am I Doing Here?" Linda Flower

This chapter brings up the questions of "Who am I and What am I doing here" when we enter a community that is different from ours.  She focuses on the idea that the college student or educated person goes into a lesser educated community to help educate them or do something for there benefit.  She ask these questions because she believes that it is important that the educated learn from the experience as well.  We can not simply just "study and assist" and not learn from the community as Harkavay and Puckett stated.  We must create a service learning environment were the educated will become more educated from participating rather than observing and helping.

In order to better understand how difficult it is to create a system that works, Flower discusses some logics that may be useful in creating one.  The Logic of Mission is the idea that we are on a mission to "help" a community, for example, to learn how read or improve there reading skills.  However, we must use the "middle-white class" tools to do this.  This doesn't seem to be working because there are still several African-American and Hispanic students struggling.  We need to design tools that benefit the individuals in a community; each community is different and needs different tools.  The Logic of Technical Enterprise is similar.  We create services to help individuals because we have the resources, but we don't really care for them.  We need to bring back the care and the compassion rather than just the services, which brings us to the next logic.  The Logic of Compassion and Identity can best be quoted:

It turns service from an act of charity or authority into an act of empathy that grasps an essential identity between the one who serves and the one who is in need.  Less motivated to blame or reform the victim, compassion is also not afraid to acknowledge the pain, the stress, the sense of dislocation, and even hopelessness that go with poverty, racism, diminished self esteem, and vulnerability.

 While Flowers notes that there are issues of interpretation of what it means to be compassionate, it is definitely a major part of what needs to be included in a system to help others.  The Logic of Prophetic Pragmatism and Collaborative Problem Solving is based on the ideas of John Dewey.  According to Dewey, all knowledge is a hypothesis of something and that it isn't true.  Knowledge is just an idea(s) backed up with evidence, but there is no certainty that it is the truth; therefore, when we go into a new community we must go in with an open mind and that we use our knowledge to create a relationship with someone rather than be a know it all.  Finally, The Logic of Intercultural Inquiry raises the question of how to deal with the differences we all have.  One suggestion is collaborative inquiry in which everyone involved participates in the instruction, so they can give there ideas and hopefully this will lead to a better understanding of each other.

The next part of the chapter talks about the resistance of these ideas of collaborative communities.  However, Flower continues to argue that collaboration is needed to help us move forward as a community and learn from one another.  She concludes the chapter with an assignment given to some college students who are trying to answer the questions: Who Am I? What Am I Doing Here?  The answer to these questions can best be summarized by this final quote:

Community/University projects offer a variety of ready-made identities, from the service provider, technical expert, organizer and advocate to the cultural critic, role model or buddy. However, these may lead to roles and relationships we do not want to claim, especially if they blind us to the agency and expertise of others. So the question of What am I doing here? can take on a special urgency and feel very much like a problem of identity. Yet, these reflections by mentors and writers suggest that, first of all, identity in this partnership is not something you bring with you; it is not about who or what you are. Identity is defined by the relationships you create. It is built around the shared goal of inquiry and literate action and your role in that partnership.....This identity.....appears to be constructed through collaboration and over time in an effort to confront competing voices, to explore alternatives, and to imagine for oneself a committed, revisable stance.

Flower, Linda. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. Carbondale: Southern      Illinois UP, 2008. Print