past newsletters

Little more than a year ago the Literacy Studies Working Group and Literacy Studies @ OSU formed. We began meeting and organizing activities in an effort to initiate a campus-wide conversation, or set of conversations, about literacy. Literacy Studies @ OSU and the Literacy Studies Working Group had an extraordinary first year. From the beginning, across the mammoth OSU campus, we found an unanticipated degree of welcome, interest, support, and participation. The time and the place were right for an initiative to promote interdisciplinary, critical, and comparative perspectives and approaches to exploring literacy. In many ways, Mike Rose's very successful visit in May capped our experience. During the summer, Literacy Studies was recognized as a university-wide interest.

For our second year, we seek to maintain that level of interest and participation through more focused programs, a roster of smaller discussion and reading groups organized along topical lines, presentations from other Ohio-based literacy scholars, and an interdisciplinary campus-wide graduate student seminar. Autumn Quarter events, still developing, are featured in this newsletter. We invite everyone who participated last year to return with heightened commitment and expectations. We also invite other interested people to join and add to our explorations


This past year the Literacy Studies Working Group sponsored six public programs, with the help and support of the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, the College of Humanities, the Arts and Sciences Colleges, and the Department of English:

• Oct. 28, 2004 Literacy Studies at OSU: beyond "crisis;" beyond "many literacies": A new initiative, with presentations by Marcia Farr (Education), Kay Bea Jones (Architecture), Beverly Moss (English); moderated by Harvey Graff.
• Dec. 2, 2004 Dimensions of Literacy at OSU featuring Steve Acker (TELR), Steve Pentak (Art), Steve Rissing (Biology), Mindy Wright (Writing Workshop); moderated by Graff.
• Feb. 3, 2005 Health Literacies, with Edith Kang (Dentistry), Steven Reiss (Nisonger Center), Bonnie Garvin (Nursing, Public Health), Amy Pope-Harman (Medical School); moderated by Amy Shuman.
• Mar. 4, 2005 Co-Sponsor "Next Ground" with William Moorish, University of Virginia.
• Apr. 7, 2005 Visual Literacies across the Disciplines: Han-Wei Shen (Computer Science and Engineering); Blaine Lilly, (Design and Manufacturing), Carolina Gill (Design); moderated by Terry Barrett (Art).
• May 17, 2005 Mike Rose, UCLA; The Mind at Work: The Intelligence of American Workers.

In addition we consolidated and organized the specific interests of participants at meetings and programs into five reading and discussion groups:


Watch for news of their meetings on the Listserv.

We also began working on the Ohio Researchers Series: a series of programs and lectures featuring literacy scholars from other institutions in Ohio to speak at OSU. The Series launches this fall with Morris Young, Miami University (Ohio). In Spring Quarter, John Murray, Department of Economics, University of Toledo, will visit OSU.


In the 19th century, a native Hawaiian youth, Henry Obookiah, found himself transported to New Haven, Connecticut. A "heathen" in the eyes of the residents, it was Obookiah's desire to learn to read and write that persuaded his hosts that he was worthy of being educated and introduced to Christianity. With literacy in hand, Obookiah proceeded to create a dictionary and grammar for the Hawaiian language and translated Genesis into Hawaiian. After nearly a decade of education in New England and soon after joining the Foreign Mission School, Obookiah was stricken with typhoid fever. While his religious conversion inspired the first Christian mission to Hawai'i, his conversion from illiterate to literate, or to use Sylvia Scribner's term his literacy as a state of grace--also set in motion a cascade of events which changed Hawai'i and its people forever. This presentation will examine the implications of Obookiah's literacy, charting his transformation from student to citizen to advocate for education and the consequences of his literacy for modern day Hawai'i.

Morris Young is associate professor of English and faculty affiliate in American Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His research and teaching focus on composition and rhetoric, literacy studies, and Asian American literature. His essays and reviews have appeared in College English, Journal of Basic Writing, Amerasia, Composition Forum, and he has contributed chapters to many edited collections including The Literacy Connection (Hampton, 1999), Personal Effects: The Social Character of Scholarly Writing (Utah State UP, 2001), and East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (New York UP, 2005). His book, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship (Southern Illinois UP, 2004) received the 2004 W. Ross Winterowd Award for the most outstanding book in composition theory from JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory and the Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition.

Upcoming Events

Oct. 14

Oct. 25

Nov. 10

Watch for news about additional Autumn programs.

The Road Ahead
Looking ahead, our priorities include:

• Undergraduate Minor in Literacy Studies
• Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Literacy Studies
• LSWG/Literacy Studies @osu Communication website
• Exploring the possibility of launching an Institute for Literacy Studies
• Inter-university cooperation/collaboration across Ohio and nearby states