Thus, I want the reader to grasp the literacy as growth thesis from what I have written in my theoretical discussion of student experience by appropriating my text to their own experience, even if to do so is to question my presuppositions. The literacy as growth thesis is a theoretical construct that I resonate with at a highly experiential level that, as "felt" could, in principle, be readily grasped by practitioners, regardless as to theoretical background, at the least, in an implicit manner. At the same time, there is a level of abstractness in the argument, which is also essential for its full articulation, that may make it difficult for practitioners to grasp its meaning, and thereby, its practical application and significance. The "growth" hypothesis, which, in Conflicting Paradigms, I link broadly with the new literacy studies, is a perspective on literacy development that cannot be easily translated into measurable standards of external measurement, or accounted for in wide-scale studies of research that depend on the gold standard of random sampling. Thus, there is something on its face about this effort to articulate the literacy as growth thesis as a mediating pedagogy of literacy, that tends to operates against the grain of a common sense understanding that influences both governmental policy and the viewpoint of practitioners who may not necessarily have a strong theoretical background.

There's much compensation here, whether writing about pedagogy or the politics of literacy, in a search for a level of imaginative influence that I do not always have in my daily practice. There is also a desire to identify issues and perspectives that I could never articulate without taking this somewhat distanced stance. In this, the tension I experience between my roles as a daily practitioner and a writer are (a) those of the intellectual in a highly pragmatic culture, and (b) those of a practitioner who is always looking a bit beyond the current reality and never quite fully fitting in.

My embrace of John Dewey, the philosopher who sought the intellectual organization of experience, is the most imaginative way that I have been able to figure out how to come to terms with these tensions, in search of integration. I embrace this Deweyan vision as an enormously fruitful heuristic even as I maintain an underlying sense that the hoped for fusion is practically impossible, if not downright undesirable in the very danger of collapsing the practitioner-theorist tension as perhaps the unintended consequences of any such integration. Another strategy is to ignore the tension as much as possible while internalizing it in my writing in a manner that allows me to say something in printed text that I cannot say, or have direct influence on, in my daily practice as a program director. In this respect, my objective is to construct another world, an imaginative one, to be sure, where possibilities beyond the given can be given voice. While there is a certain illusory and elusive dimension to this, there is also the problem that in muting that voice, an imaginative world needed for reconstruction cannot be articulated in which only the "real" is given credence. That, too, is limiting, which I seek to actively work against based on the calling of my most fundamental vocation as a public intellectual situated in a very pragmatic setting.