It is within this general context that we have designed the DALN to offer a space for the participatory engagement of citizens of any age, one focused on issues of literacy where ordinary people can “participate in national debates, narrate history, define legitimacy and articulate a moral order” (Bernal, 2006, p. 176) on their own terms and for their own purposes. Although many of the narratives in the DALN are the compositions of students who submit them as part of their regular classes, others come from individuals who make voluntary contributors to the DALN outside formal classes, individuals and members of other communities who simply want their own stories represented for their own particular reasons.

This commitment to participatory, vernacular involvement means, of course, that individuals’ narratives of literacy practices and values often diverge from those that educators want to hear: people identify themselves, as Edward Sampson (1993) notes, not as the “serviceable others” (quoting Toni Morrison 1992) that educators require “in order to continue to be teachers” but, rather, as individuals who construct the literate identities they “wish for themselves” (p. 1226). (See, for example, Al Smith’s “Short Bus” and Melanie Yergeau’s “Dropping out of High School.”) Understanding individuals who tell autobiographical literacy narratives as engaging in an ongoing dialogic and rhetorical process of negotiating their literate selves—with all the incoherence, multiplicity, and contradiction that such relational processes imply—also unsettles related monolithic conceptions of literacy, locating it, as Brandt (1995), Cintron (1997), Graff (1979), Street (1995), and others suggest, within a dynamic and shifting constellation of socially, historically, culturally, and materially constructed practices and values.

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[In narratives, we can] …enact the selves we want to become in relation to others—sometimes in concert with them, sometimes in opposition to them, but always in relation to them. Our sense of self-determination at any given moment is tempered by the constraints of specific social, cultural, and historical contexts, and especially for children and adults who are members of oppressed or disadvantaged groups, these constraints can seem, and can be, overpowering. Yet, we argue that people can develop agentive selves, using the unique repertoire of tools, resources, relationships, and cultural artifacts—the semiotic means, if you will—that are available at particular historical moments in particular social and cultural contexts….[M]ultiple media and modes, in combination with supportive social relationships and opportunities for participation, can provide a powerful means and motivation for forming and representing an agentive self.

(Hull and Katz, 2006, p. 47)