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Spring 2009 | Newsletter | Volume 5:3

Upcoming Talks, Seminars, and Special Events


Friday-Sunday, April 3-5, 2009 on the campus of The Ohio State University
Expanding Literacy Studies, an International, Interdisciplinary Conference for Graduate and Professional Students, sponsored by LiteracyStudies@OSU. View the Conference Program [PDF]

Friday, April 3, 2009 5:15–6:45 Knowlton Hall 250, 275 W Woodruff Av
The Literacy Myth: 30 Years Later. Expanding Literacy Studies conference keynote event. Author Harvey J. Graff will respond to a panel of graduate students.

Saturday, April 4, 2009 4:30–6:00 Knowlton Hall 250, 275 W Woodruff Av
Youth, Language, and Literacy. Expanding Literacy Studies conference keynote event. Shirley Brice Heath will respond to a panel of graduate students.

Sunday, April 5, 2009 10:45 a.m.-12:45 p.m. Knowlton Hall 190, 275 W Woodruff Av
The Field and Future of Literacy Studies. Expanding Literacy Studies conference keynote event. Participatory design pioneer Liz Sanders will lead an arts-based workshop. Registration required.

Friday, April 24, 2009 11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m. ICRPH Knight House, 104 E. 15th Av
Graduate Student Interdisciplinary Seminar on Literacy Studies: A student-led discussion of works by Ira Shor in anticipation of the Spring Lecture on May 14, organized and moderated by Audra Slocum (Teaching & Learning).

Thursday, May 14, 2009 4:00-5:30 p.m. ICRPH Knight House, 104 E. 15th Av
LiteracyStudies@OSU SPRING LECTURE: IRA SHOR (City University of New York): "Can Critical Literacy Change the World?"

Friday, May 22, 2009 3:30-5:00 p.m. Denney 311, 164 W. 17th Av
History of the Book: Discussion moderated by DAVID BREWER (English).

Friday, May 29, 2009 11:30 a.m. -1:00 p.m. ICRPH Knight House, 104 E. 15th Av
Graduate Student Interdisciplinary Seminar on Literacy Studies: Career Opportunities in Literacy Studies, organized and moderated by Karin Hooks (English).


Literacy Studies Spring Lecture: IRA SHOR asks, "Can Critical Literacy Change the World?"


Merging the study of formal technique with social critique is not simple...but this project is no more and no less "political" than any other kind of literacy program. The claim of critical literacy is that no pedagogy is neutral, no learning process is value-free, no curriculum avoids ideology and power relations.
-IRA SHOR, "What Is Critical Literacy?"
Critical Literacy in Action: Writing Words, Changing Worlds

Literacy-that is, the social practices of meaningful communication and the textual practices of writing and reading-has been a major site of conflict and confusion in schools and colleges. One set of opinions, perhaps dominant in society, poses literacy as a transformative force in the modern world, with great implications for personal success in careers and for prosperous development in society. In this lecture, IRA SHOR, a pioneer in the field of critical education, asks whether we can we imagine a "critical literacy" that challenges unequal power relations? Could teaching "critical literacy" enable students to become civic activists for social justice, promote peace not war, and against the dreadful inequality? Could "critical literacy" change the world in which we live and work?"

Ira Shor with Paolo Freire.
Ira Shor (left) with Paolo Freire
IRA SHOR is a Professor of Rhetoric/Composition at the City University of New York's Graduate Center (Ph.D. Program in English) and in the Department of English at the College of Staten Island (CSI). He started the new doctorate in Rhetoric/Composition at the CUNY Grad Center in 1993. There, he directs dissertations and offers seminars in literacy, writing theory, critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, the rhetorics of space and place, and working-class culture. As a member of the English faculty at CSI, Professor Shor teaches courses in writing, literature, and mass media as well as graduate classes for schoolteachers. Shor's work with Paolo Freire, the noted Brazilian educator, began in the early 1980s. He and Freire co-authored A Pedagogy for Liberation, the first "talking" book Freire published with a collaborator. Shor also authored the widely used Empowering Education and When Students have Power, two foundational texts in critical teaching. His Critical Teaching and Everyday Life was the first book-length treatment of Freire-based critical methods in the North American context.

The LiteracyStudies@OSU Spring Lecture will take place on Thursday, May 14, 4:00–5:30 p.m. at the George Wells Knight House at 104 East 15th Avenue.

Expanding Literacy Studies:Conference Program Preview

Expanding Literacy Studies is the first international, interdisciplinary conference on literacy studies for graduate and professional students. The Call for Proposals yielded a stunning response: more than 180 proposals involving nearly 250 presenters from 66 institutions and 6 countries. The students represent the Humanities, including English, History, Linguistics, Women's Studies, Rhetoric, Writing and Composition, Professional Communication, Comparative Culture, Literature, Spanish, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Literacy Studies, Creative Writing, and Media Studies; Education, including Teaching and Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, TESOL, Somatic Studies, Workforce Development Education, Multicultural Education, Educational Policy, Adolescent Literacy Studies, Learning Sciences; the Arts, including Fine Art, History of Art, Visual Design, Art Education, Dance; the Social Sciences, including Anthropology, Psychology, and Political Science; and Library Science.

The program[PDF] features nearly 100 organized panels, paper and poster presentations, creative performances, roundtable discussions, and workshops, plus three keynote events. For information about on-site registration, accommodations, or accessibility write expandingls@osu.edu.

Friday, April 3

3:30 - 5:00 p.m.

Panel: Women in Chains: The Cultural Constraints of Female Literacy

Panel: Literacy Stories as Classroom Texts

Panel: Professional Literacy

Panel: Literacy, Media, and Visual Texts

Panel: Literacy Debates in Communities

Panel: Research in Readers and Reading: From the Old West to the Electronic Frontier...

Panel: Visual Literacy

Panel: Letter Writing as a Wartime Literacy Practice

Panel: The New Work of First-Year Composition: Remixing Attitudes about Digital Literacy

Performance: The Body

5:15 - 6:45 p.m.

Keynote Panel: The Literacy Myth: 30 Years Later, with Harvey Graff

Saturday, April 4

9:00 - 10:30 a.m.

Panel: Queering Literacy Studies

Panel: Community Literacy Practices

Panel: Vernacular Literacies in the College Composition Classroom

Panel: Youth Literacy & Global/Social Change

Panel: Contesting Citizenship and Representation: Expanding Digital Literacies

Panel: Historical Issues of Literacy in Europe

Panel: Virtual Sites of Literacy and Identity

Panel: Literacies in Time of War

Panel: Pushing Theories of Literacy

Panel: Teaching Literacy and Promoting Social Change

Performance: Frederick Douglass and the New Literacy Studies: Illustrating the Connection

10:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Panel: Women and Literacy

Panel: Race, Culture, and Power

Panel: "Official" Literacies

Panel: Adult Literacies

Panel: I'll Meet You Behind the Words: Identity Politics in Language

Panel: Modes of Literacy in the Medieval Islamic World: Debate, Epigraphy, and Visual Cues as Markers of Exchange

Panel: Literacy Use in Online Communities

Panel: Hip Hop Literacy and Composition

Panel: Conceptualizing First-Year College Composition

Panel: Literacy and the Arts

Panel: Classroom Literacies

1:30 - 3:00 p.m.

Panel: From the Margins: Historical and Contemporary Black Literacy for Citizenship and Liberation

Panel: Postcolonial Perspectives and Marginalized Bodies

Panel: Comics and Literacy

Panel: Sites of Literacy

Panel: Fostering Communal Literacy: Utilizing Interactive Forums to Explore Shared Spaces

Performing Literacies

Panel: Literacies of Authenticity: Using Simulation and Visual Rhetoric in the Freshmen Writing Classroom

Panel: Wearing Colors: A Panel Investigation of the Development of Authority Through Literacy Practices of Gang Members and Police Officers

Panel: Remixing Rhetoric: What's Old about New Literacies?

Panel: The Future of Literacy in the Classroom

Panel: (De)Constructing the Expert, (Re)Constructing the Novice: Tearing Down a Smokestack, Reclaiming Joe Six-Pack, and Examining the Future of Civic Literacy

Dissertation Workshops (Closed Sessions)

3:15 - 4:15 p.m.

Roundtable: Terminological Conflicts in Design Disciplines

Roundtable: Exploring the Negotiations between Fundamental Religious and Secular Academic Literacies in the Writing Classroom

Roundtable: Classroom Interactions That Support Learning Over Time: The Social Construction of Learning Opportunities

Roundtable: Preservice Teachers' Perspectives in Equity Literacies: Issues Explored Within Classroom Contexts

Roundtable: Writing as Exploration and Discovery

Roundtable: Community Literacy Work and Graduate Students: Finding Best Practices for Building Community and Academic Connections

Roundtable: What is "Common Knowledge" Today?

Roundtable: Confronting the Media Panopticon and its Influence on the Development of Literacy

Roundtable: Urban Literature vs. The Textbook: A Comparison of the Construction of Urban, Adolescent African American Females

Roundtable: Meaningful Literacy Experiences Out of School

Roundtable: Practicing Literacy: Deliberations and Inquiries from Developmental and First Year Writing Students

Roundtable: Your Turn to Speak

Roundtable: Reading Revolutions: Interpreting Intersections of Literacy and Social Change

Roundtable: Moving Writing to the Center: Writing Studies

Roundtable: Cross Talk: An Opportunity to Discuss Student Inquiry Based Research Through the Framework of Multiple Literacies

Roundtable: "Positioning" as Pedagogy

Roundtable: Dialogic Dramatic Inquiry: A New Literacy

Roundtable: Global Literacy for a Global Society

4:30 - 6:00 p.m.

Keynote Panel: Youth, Language, and Literacy, with Shirley Brice Heath

Sunday, April 5

9:00 - 10:30 a.m.

Panel: Explorations of Literacy and Disability

Panel: Multiple Literacies as Political and Cultural Empowerment

Panel: Theorizing the Everyday

Panel: Literacy in a Global Context

Panel: Web-Mediated Collaborative Literacy

Panel: Cognition and Literacy

Panel: Literacy in Cross-Cultural Settings

Panel: Multi-Modal Pedagogy

Panel: Where the Classroom Meets the Streets: Literacy Convergences at Virginia Tech

Panel: Civic Literacy in the Southwest: Creating Conversations Across Communities

10:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Workshop: Teaching Towards Technology's Thought Patterns

Workshop: Pages: An Arts, Literacy and Writing Program

Workshop: Sharing a Photovoice Experience: Ethics, Methodological Concerns, and Opportunities

Workshop: Is One's Economic Class a Motivator for Service Learning and Community Literacy?

Workshop: Using Online Tools to Facilitate Collaborative Writing Communities

Workshop: Reading the Facebook: Cyber-Literacy of Social Networking Sites (SNSs)

Workshop: Biospheric Literacy: What It Is, Why We Should Care, and What We Can Do

Workshop: Literacy Myth and Epistemological Agency in the Practice of Literacy Narrative in College Composition

Workshop: Watching Literacy Emerge: Connections Between the Secondary Classroom and "Real-Life" for the Graduate Student- Teacher

Workshop: Coming Clean: Understanding Literacy through Ideological Self-Revelation

Keynote Workshop: The Field and Future of Literacy Studies, with Liz Sanders

News and Announcements

SUSAN JACOBY:Where did America's Rationality Go?
Bestselling author of The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment-from television to the Web-and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. Sparing neither the right nor the left, Jacoby asserts that Americans today have embraced a universe of "junk thought" that makes almost no effort to separate fact from opinion.

Image of Susan Jacoby.
Thursday, April 1, 2009 7:00 p.m. Jennings Hall 001
Jacoby began her writing career as a reporter for The Washington Post. Her articles and essays on law, religion, medicine, aging, women's rights, political dissent in the Soviet Union, and Russian literature have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Book World, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Newsday, Harper's, and The Nation, among other publications. She is program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City, a rationalist think tank.

This lecture is sponsored by the Departments of Entomology, EEOB, Anthropology, PCMB, Molecular Genetics and Microbiology; The Colleges of the Arts and Sciences, BMAPS, SBS and OSU Newark; The Office of Research, The First Year Experience, LiteracyStudies@OSU, Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, The Center for the Study of Religion, and the Batelle Center for Math and Science Education Policy.

For more information, contact Susan Fisher at fisher.14@osu.edu.
-Susan Fisher

Literacy Studies GradSem: Expanding Interdisciplinarity
During Spring Quarter the GradSem will host a discussion of the work of the LiteracyStudies@OSU guest speaker Ira Shor. The session will be held April 24th. Contact Shawn at casey.169@osu.edu. GradSem participant Karin Hooks is organizing a session for May 29th on career opportunities in Literacy Studies. Contact Karin at hooks.28@osu.edu.

-Shawn Casey and Audra Slocum, Co-Chairs

History of the Book: Thinking through Connections
Recent work in the humanities regarding the relations between persons and objects has proceeded along three surprisingly non-intersecting lines: book history, "thing theory," and the social anthropology of art. On May 22nd, David Brewer will lead a discussion of the latter two in order to help us think through the potential utility of bringing these modes of inquiry into closer contact with one another. 311 Denney Hall 3:30- 5:00 p.m. If you have a project you'd like to present to the group or if you have ideas for readings that the group might enjoy, contact me at farmer.109@osu.edu.
-Alan Farmer

Goldberg Speaker Series: Technology and Teaching
Edward A. Hill, Jr., MATRIX Learning Program Manager, will talk about "Mobile Computing and NextGen Learning" on Tuesday, April 7, 11:30-1:00, in 168 Dulles Hall. MATRIX partners are educators and researchers, software and game developers, and curriculum designers who are concerned about the lack of interest and ability in mathematics by many middle school students. They share a belief that new strategies and techniques can be borrowed from electronic games and simulations and small pocket-sized technologies that have already captured the interest and time of that same group of students. Please RSVP to David Staley at staley.3@osu.edu by Monday, April 6.
–David Staley

Literacy Narratives: Building an Archive
At a recent Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies meeting, Humanities Distinguished Professor Cindy Selfe announced a project that she and Louie Ulman are undertaking for the Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives (DALN). They're asking colleagues from colleges and institutions around the country to hold their own "Everybody has a literacy story...Tell us yours!" event on their own campuses. So far, they have heard from more than 30 institutions that want to host such an event, and are hoping for even more. For more information, write Cindy Selfe at selfe.2@osu.edu.

–Cindy Selfe
Send news items and announcements to literacystudies@osu.edu.

Locating LiteracyStudies@OSU

George Wells Knight House
104 E. 15th Ave
Columbus, OH 43201
PH: (614) 247-6539
FAX: (614) 247-6336
literacystudies@osu.edu

LiteracyStudies@OSU: An Initiative

LiteracyStudies@OSU is fostering a critical, cross-campus conversation and investigation into the nature of literacy, bringing historical, contextual, comparative, and critical perspectives and modes of understanding together to stimulate new institutional and intellectual relationships. We are building a sense of collaboration among different disciplinary clusters and their constituents, from the social and natural sciences to the arts and humanities, education, medicine, and law.

EXECUTIVE GROUP

Steve Acker, OhioLink; The Learning Center acker.1@osu.edu
Edward Adelson, Music; adelson.3@osu.edu
Mollie Blackburn, Education blackburn.99@osu.edu

Ginny Bumgardner, Medicine Ginny.Bumgardner@osumc.edu
Sandy Cornett, Health Sciences cornett.3@osu.edu
Marcia Farr, Education; English farr.18@osu.edu

Anne Fields, University Libraries fields.179@osu.edu
Henry Fields, Dentistry fields.31@osu.edu
Susan Fisher, Biology fisher.14@osu.edu

Carolina Gill, Industrial, Interior, & Visual Comm. Design gill.175@osu.edu
Harvey J. Graff, English; History graff.40@osu.edu
Terry Gustafson, Chemistry gustafson@chemistry.ohio-state.edu

Kay Halasek, English halasek.1@osu.edu
Kay Bea Jones, Architecture jones.76@osu.edu
Alan Kalish, Teaching & Learning Center kalish.3@osu.edu

Jeffrey K. McKee, Anthropology mckee.95@osu.edu
Beverly Moss, English moss.1@osu.edu
Leslie Moore, Education moore.1817@osu.edu

Doug Post, Medicine doug.post@osumc.edu
Marcy Raymond, Principal, Metro High School raymond@themetroschool.com
Cindy Selfe, English; selfe.2@osu.edu

Peter Shane, Law; shane.29@osu.edu
Amy Shuman, English; Folklore shuman.1@osu.edu
David Staley, History; Goldberg Center staley.3@osu.edu

Kevin Tavin, Art Education tavin.1@osu.edu
Andy Thomas, Medicine; Andrew.Thomas@osumc.edu
Lewis Ulman, Humanities; English ulman.1@osu.edu

Mindy Wright, Director, Community Partnerships in ASC; wright.7@osu.edu
Shawn Casey, Doctoral Student, English; casey.169@osu.edu
Karin Hooks, Doctoral Student, English; hooks.28@osu.edu

Susan Hanson, Assistant Program Director, Literacy Studies hanson.94@osu.edu
Randy Smith, Vice Provost; smith.70@osu.edu
Chris Zacher, Director, ICRPH; zacher.1@osu.edu

Literacy Studies is supported by the College of Humanities, Department of English, Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities, and the Arts and Sciences Colleges at The Ohio State University.

LiteracyStudies@OSU is supported by the College of Humanities,
Department of English, Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities (ICRPH), and the Arts and Science Colleges at The Ohio State University.