SUNY series, Literacy, Culture, and Learning: Theory and Practice – serie

This book examines the linkage between literacy and linguistic diversity, embedding them in their social and cultural contexts. It illustrates that a more complete understanding of literacy among diverse populations and in multicultural societies requires attention to issues of literacy per se as well as to improving an educational process that has relevance beyond members of majority cultures and linguistic groups.The focus of the book is on the social and cultural contexts in which literacy develops and is enacted, with an emphasis on the North American situation. Educators and researchers are discovering that cognitive approaches, while very valuable, are insufficient by themselves to answer important questions about literacy in heterogeneous societies. By considering the implications of family, school, culture, society, and nation for literary processes, the book answers the following questions. In a multi-ethnic context, what does it mean to be literate? What are the processes involved in becoming and being literate in a second language? In what ways is literacy in a second language similar and in what ways is it different from mother-tongue literacy? What factors must be understood to better describe and facilitate literacy acquisition among members of ethnic and linguistic minorities? What are some current approaches that are being used to accomplish this? These are vital questions for researchers and educators in a world that has a large number of immigrants, a variety of multi-ethnic and multi-lingual societies, and an increasing degree of multinational activity. Beyond addressing applied concerns, attending to these questions can provide new insights into basic aspects of literacy.

Examines the escalating literacy demands of the new workplace, and makes suggestions for reshaping traditional English classes to better equip students with new skills to meet these needs.1999 Best Collection of Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication presented by the National Council of Teachers of English Expanding Literacies presents eighteen fresh essays that explore how English teaching at both secondary and post-secondary levels can be made more work-relevant. The book shows teachers, administrators, and workplace trainers how to put aside disabling dichotomies of school versus work in favor of preparing students with new skills for new workplaces. Within a theoretical context that encourages development of situated uses of language, the volume identifies ways to reshape traditional English classes so that students are prepared to be successful in work environments that demand teamwork, problem solving, and complex communication skills. Some chapters examine the escalating literacy demands of specific workplaces: manufacturing, health care, chemical and nuclear industries, and high-tech settings. Other chapters examine what we currently do in schools and describe new models and theoretical approaches to better equip students for a changing workplace. The book has a wealth of practical ideas for structuring classrooms, making assignments, and choosing materials that will help students make the transition from school to work.

This book recognizes and embraces the complexities of modern English teaching. It presents English teachers and teacher educators with a critical view of current professional issues and concerns in the belief that these groups need, and want, to participate in curricular and professional reform movements that affect them and their students.The book examines such issues as the interconnectedness of the study of language, literature, and composition; curricular problems in language instruction in teacher education; the relationship between our traditional notions of literature study and our emerging view of literacy in the contemporary information age; and the ways in which current theory and research can be translated into innovative designs for the teaching of written composition.On Literacy and Its Teaching is a powerful response to the current challenge for innovation and change in English teacher education. With its broad scope, it provides a balanced overview and timely analysis of the field of English Education.

This book raises important questions concerning the "shame" of illiteracy. What does it mean to students to be drawn into a world where family and friends cannot follow? Can the same person appear literate and illiterate at the same time? Is literacy, for that matter, an either/or condition? Does it "hurt" to be illiterate in more than one language, more than one culture? To whom can literacy education be a threat instead of a promise?The chapters in this book confront the unknowable implication of joining literate systems, and carry us toward an understanding that can help literacy practitioners and policy-makers at local, national, and international levels to better understand the issues involved in this important area of work.

This book redefines the nature of textual difficulty in literature and shows the implications of the new definition for teachers at all levels of education. Contrary to the traditional use of grade levels or readability formulae, the authors redefine difficulty in terms of readers and the texts they meet. They base their arguments on contemporary linguistic theory, on historical and comparative studies of criticism, on literary theory about readers and texts, on post-Freudian psychology, on empirical research concerning the nature of reading literature, and on studies of classrooms, curricula, and testing. What emerges is a coherent work that builds a case for seeing difficulty in literature as a human phenomenon more than a textual one.

This book explores the gendered historical and social contexts and discursive traditions that have characterized journals and diaries in academic discourse. The tension between the term "journal," which has a variety of positive public and scholarly connotations, and the term "diary," which is currently understood as a feminized, trivial, and confessional kind of writing inappropriate for school, is a critical part of the problem. This book uses the developing and shifting notions of diary and journal to explore several critical questions about the larger relations between gender, language, canonicity, and academic discourse.

Making all children "ready to learn" is the first, and probably the most important, national education goal for the year 2000. What does it mean for children to be "ready to learn?"This book is about the beliefs of the people who are shaping preschool policy. McGill-Franzen tells us what key decision-makers are thinking about preschool education - what counts as school, who should pay for it, what should be taught, and especially, whether there should be reading and writing programs for four-year-olds.This book also explores the history of these beliefs. The author locates contemporary early childhood concepts about "developmental appropriateness" in the ideas of physicians and psychologists of the 1920s, 1930s, and in even earlier periods of time. She believes that these ideas no longer work within the broader framework of literacy as embedded in the interactions of cultures children know and the lives they live.

How is language acquisition possible? How is it that humans, within a few years of birth, can speak and understand language, transcending both its limited experience and biological limitations?In this challenge to the narrow confines of psychology and philosophy, Christina Erneling argues that language acquisition results from the interaction between linguistic creativity inherent in language and a biological and social framework of learning.Erneling explains and critically analyzes the idea that language acquisition requires a meaningful "language of thought," contrasting this with Wittgenstein's ideas on language and learning. Erneling shows that the assumptions in J. Fodor's development of Chomky's ideas into a theory of "language of thought" have significantly influenced developmental theories, yet fail to resolve the conflict between linguistic creativity and the necessity of a framework for learning. She argues that the later Wittgenstein was more concerned with the conditions of learning than is generally appreciated and shows how his remarks can be developed into an alternative approach to language learning.Understanding Language Acquisition has profound implications for evaluating hidden metatheoretical assumptions, as well as for empirical research and methods for teaching language and treating language disorders.

This text provides a variety of practical and theoretical approaches to computer classroom design. Pedagogical, ethical, and political issues are discussed as well as nuts-and-bolts construction, adapting teaching styles to a CAI environment, use of specific hardware and software, and speculation regarding future electronic learning environments.

Does literature serve a humanizing function? Can it achieve social transformation? What roles does literature play for defining self, creating community, and achieving global perspective? This is the first book to thoroughly explore the methods by which educators, creative writers, and policymakers have constructed workable models of teaching literature in multicultural classrooms.The authors provide an interdisciplinary dialogue on the setbacks, solutions, silences, and successes that often occur in classes of multicultural literature. They all take the stance that definitions of literacy and literature originate as much outside the classroom as within it.With the inclusion of essays by writers themselves-a feature provided by no other book on this subject-the authors offer a unique vocalization of the nationalistic, economic, empowering, and moral purposes that reading and writing serve. The book also includes a current guide to selected resources in multicultural literature, in hopes of encouraging and facilitating instructors in the transformation of their own literature courses into multicultural ones.

This book examines Eastern philosophies of meditative silence in the context of Western rhetoric and discourse theory, arguing that silence is an authentic mode of knowing. Rather than an emptiness that is nihilistic, the void of meditative silence is, according to the author, a fullness in which meaning occurs. Kalamaras calls for a rethinking of the implications of such a concept of silence on contemporary theories of composition and the teaching of writing.

Literacy as Social Exchange examines the intersection of culture and literacy education. In particular, it explores the roles that class, race, ethnicity, and gender play in students' learning to negotiate the conventions of academic discourse. It argues that recent literacy scholarship has tended to isolate class, gender, and culture as discrete, marginalizing factors, but such isolation may unintentionally silence voices from non-Western, non-mainstream cultures. Writing program administrators and writing teachers who are interested in constructing programs that address the needs of all students in increasingly multicultural classrooms, will need to examine how cultural factors influence the way students learn to read, write, and think critically.The author points out that some of the most influential scholars writing about the plight of underprivileged writers teach at some of the most exclusive institutions in the nation. These "basic writers" are not nearly so disadvantaged as many of the student writers most writing teachers encounter every day. The author explores enrollment trends in higher education that indicate conclusively that writing classrooms will soon be filled with students from non-Western, non-mainstream cuiltures. Because these students' rhetorical and literacy traditions will be unlike both those of their teachers and of the "basic writers" upon which so much literacy scholarship focuses, educators and literacy scholars need to increasingly conceptualize literacy in its larger political, social, and economic contexts.

Stressing the social dimensions of composing, this book inquires into the problems of interpreting and representing writers' talk in both academic and self directed writing groups, arguing for the value of such talk as a distinct mode of knowing that both complements and criticizes more traditional forms of inquiry. Emphasizing the role of writers' talk in shaping the text that they produce, it discusses the problem of representing and interpreting writers' talk in the context of composition studies, using feminist theoretical perspectives to illuminate the difficulty in representing the writer as a knowing subject, neither essentialist nor totally constructivist.Revisioning Writers' Talk also investigates the idea of the social in social-constructivist theories of composing, arguing that they maintain rather than demystify hierarchies of discourse and, in turn, the subjects and objects of composing. Cain's own story of composing is told in the context of her educational experiences as a writer. Finally, the book discusses the constructions of power and authority by both academic and self-directed writing groups.

This book presents a selective, introductory reading of key texts in the history of magic from antiquity forward, in order to construct a suggestive conceptual framework for disrupting our conventional notions about rhetoric and literacy.Offering an overarching, pointed synthesis of the interpenetration of magic, rhetoric, and literacy, William A. Covino draws from theorists ranging from Plato and Cornelius Agrippa to Paulo Freire and Mary Daly, and analyzes the different magics that operate in Renaissance occult philosophy and Romantic literature, as well as in popular indicators of mass literacy such as "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and The National Enquirer.Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy distinguishes two kinds of magic-rhetoric that continue to affect our psychological and cultural life today. Generative magic-rhetoric creates novel possibilities for action, within a broad sympathetic universe of signs and symbols. Arresting magic-rhetoric attempts to induce automatistic behavior, by inculcating rules and maxims that function like magic ritual formulas: JUST SAY NO. In this connection, the literate individual is one who can interrogate arresting language, and generate "counter-spells."

This is a book about the usual teacher-student relationship in composition courses. It disrupts and rewrites the commonplace conception of the relationship by revealing the uneven ways in which power is deployed in and around the classroom. And it offers a responsible alternative. The author not only offers teachers a way of learning about power relations at their own specific sites, but also works towards a more equitable redistribution.Drawing from testimonials about teaching practice published in the journal College Composition and Communication, Helmers explores conventions in this form of writing that portray students in a negative light and show the teacher to be powerfully triumphant in his or her creative pedagogy. Several prevalent modes of representation are discussed in the book, all of which define the students as distinctly different from the teachers, in other words, as an other.The texture of the work is rich because Helmers takes an enormous amount of post-structuralist theory and recasts it in the sphere of the teacher-student relationship, itself an underexplored realm.

This dialogue between teachers of writing in China and America on what constitutes "good writing," reveals that standards are culturally situated.Writing comments on student papers is a time-honored and widely accepted practice in writing classrooms in most countries. Teachers offer text-specific advice to each student and communicate to the student writer, among other things, the criteria of good writing. A close look at the teacher's comments, therefore, reveals the criteria with which teachers measure student papers.This study builds a dialogue between teachers of writing in China and America on what "good writing" is, revealing the fact that "good writing" resides not just with student texts, but with the teachers who read and judge student papers.

This dialogue between teachers of writing in China and America on what constitutes "good writing," reveals that standards are culturally situated.Writing comments on student papers is a time-honored and widely accepted practice in writing classrooms in most countries. Teachers offer text-specific advice to each student and communicate to the student writer, among other things, the criteria of good writing. A close look at the teacher's comments, therefore, reveals the criteria with which teachers measure student papers.This study builds a dialogue between teachers of writing in China and America on what "good writing" is, revealing the fact that "good writing" resides not just with student texts, but with the teachers who read and judge student papers.

Describes the experiences of a group of adult Brazilian women in a literacy program with explicit emancipatory objectives.This book explores the involvement of nineteen women in an emancipatory literacy program conducted under the administration of Paulo Freire in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The study presents the classroom experiences of these women and the psychological, cognitive, and behavioral changes they undergo over a three-year period. Their low limited acquisition of literacy and their limited reading and writing practices are explored in the context of their circumscribed environment of poverty, living in families and societies that place definite boundaries and expectations regarding the everyday tasks they must perform. The analysis of the women's individual experiences is linked to a political and structural inquiry into the grassroots groups and the political party implementing the literacy program. In this way, contradictions, ambiguities, and antagonisms within and among social forces regarding literacy for social change are made transparent. Literacy acquisition is shown to be a process fraught with multiple exogenous demands that distance these women from the constant exposure to print required for literacy competence.

This glimpse into factories, hospitals, other work settings, and work-related literacy programs, shows the massive changes in expectations for workers' "skills" in the twenty-first century, especially regarding language and literacy.Changing Work, Changing Workers looks at U.S. factories and workplace education programs to see what is expected currently of workers. The studies reported in Hull's book draw their evidence from firsthand, sustained looks at workplaces and workplace education efforts. Many of the chapters represent long-term ethnographic or qualitative research. Others are fine-grained examinations of texts, curricula, or policy. Such perspectives result in portraits that honor the complex nature of work, people, and education.For example, one chapter examines the shop floor of a computer manufacturer in Silicon Valley and shows how well-intentioned organizational changes, such as the imposition of self-directed work teams, often go awry, particularly in multicultural workplaces. Another chapter provides the history of a federally funded literacy project designed for garment workers in New York City, documenting the struggles and achievements that accompanied this attempt to prepare immigrants for alternatives to work in a rapidly downsizing industry. Other settings and topics include a community college where minority women are prepared for the skilled trades; an auto-accessory plant with a "pay-for-knowledge" training program; a union-based literacy program designed for hospital workers; and the popular vocational curriculum called "applied communications."

This glimpse into factories, hospitals, other work settings, and work-related literacy programs, shows the massive changes in expectations for workers' "skills" in the twenty-first century, especially regarding language and literacy.Changing Work, Changing Workers looks at U.S. factories and workplace education programs to see what is expected currently of workers. The studies reported in Hull's book draw their evidence from firsthand, sustained looks at workplaces and workplace education efforts. Many of the chapters represent long-term ethnographic or qualitative research. Others are fine-grained examinations of texts, curricula, or policy. Such perspectives result in portraits that honor the complex nature of work, people, and education.For example, one chapter examines the shop floor of a computer manufacturer in Silicon Valley and shows how well-intentioned organizational changes, such as the imposition of self-directed work teams, often go awry, particularly in multicultural workplaces. Another chapter provides the history of a federally funded literacy project designed for garment workers in New York City, documenting the struggles and achievements that accompanied this attempt to prepare immigrants for alternatives to work in a rapidly downsizing industry. Other settings and topics include a community college where minority women are prepared for the skilled trades; an auto-accessory plant with a "pay-for-knowledge" training program; a union-based literacy program designed for hospital workers; and the popular vocational curriculum called "applied communications."

Presents a clear and forceful counter-statement about tensions and trends in contemporary English studies, offering at the same time a carefully reasoned critique of rationalistic forces within education and culture generally.What could be more commonsensical than the notion that students need to become more critical readers and writers, subjecting the ideas, beliefs, and attitudes they encounter to closer, "critical" scrutiny? Yet is not the deep suspicion of common sense one of the founding principles of critical pedagogy? Here at last is a book that attempts to look closely at the broad cultural and historical assumptions behind efforts to remake how we teach both composition and literature, in the latter case, how the rooting out of authorial or textual bias is replacing traditional notions of identification and empathy. The result is a broad cultural history of English studies and how its distinctive notion of deep language has fostered a special kind of resistance to reforms over the last two hundred years.

Using Bakhtinian theory, this study reveals how and why readers routinely refer to the words and ideas of others to interpret the meanings and implications of the books they read.In a public high school classroom in the San Francisco Bay area, a group of twelfth graders have decided themselves to enroll for Advanced-Placement English. Faced with unprecedented diversity for such a class in terms of academic and ethnic backgrounds, veteran teacher Joan Cone dared to trust her students to lead their own discussions of a variety of provocative authors including Baldwin, Didion, Malcolm X, and Woolf. Voicing Ourselves examines a year's worth of such sessions, revealing how a teacher's role is transformed, and, moreover, offering an important component in any teacher's repertoire of instructional strategies: student-led discussion. Above all, the book shows the startling success of students licensed to engage one another directly in talk about books, revealing the richly social tapestry of such conversations.

Examines the escalating literacy demands of the new workplace, and makes suggestions for reshaping traditional English classes to better equip students with new skills to meet these needs.1999 Best Collection of Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication presented by the National Council of Teachers of English Expanding Literacies presents eighteen fresh essays that explore how English teaching at both secondary and post-secondary levels can be made more work-relevant. The book shows teachers, administrators, and workplace trainers how to put aside disabling dichotomies of school versus work in favor of preparing students with new skills for new workplaces. Within a theoretical context that encourages development of situated uses of language, the volume identifies ways to reshape traditional English classes so that students are prepared to be successful in work environments that demand teamwork, problem solving, and complex communication skills. Some chapters examine the escalating literacy demands of specific workplaces: manufacturing, health care, chemical and nuclear industries, and high-tech settings. Other chapters examine what we currently do in schools and describe new models and theoretical approaches to better equip students for a changing workplace. The book has a wealth of practical ideas for structuring classrooms, making assignments, and choosing materials that will help students make the transition from school to work.

Brings the insights of narrative theory to bear upon the genre of nature writing, to explore the social or ethical purposes of solitude in stories of retreat in nature.What do stories of nature tell us about the social or ethical purposes of solitude? And what do stories of solitude reveal of the "character" of nonhuman nature? Dramas of Solitude brings the insights of narrative theory to bear upon the genre of nature writing, to explore the social or ethical purposes of solitude in stories of retreat in nature.Through discussions of texts by Henry D. Thoreau, John C. Van Dyke, Wendell Berry, and student writers, among others, this book complicates social views of literacy with depictions of a solitude held in dynamic relation to a not-only-human community. It will inform the efforts of literary critics and writing teachers alike who hope to reintegrate English studies upon ecological terms.

A cultural history of the origins of composition studies that sheds new light on contemporary debates regarding the role of rhetoric in student transformation.The Resistant Writer integrates two lively sub-fields in rhetoric and composition: nineteenth-century composition history and contemporary issues about teaching cultural studies in composition. Examining the broad cultural anxieties that nineteenth-century intellectuals faced reveals that training in composition was envisioned as more than the means for producing competent writers. The training also reacted to and tried to ameliorate the nineteenth-century "crisis in public discourse," this one brought about not by television, commodity capitalism, or the World Wide Web, but by the then-dominant medium of public discussion, the newspaper.Paine carefully reveals that today's writing teachers are not the first to desire that the composition classroom have social import beyond the academy. These thoughtful new insights from composition's origins form an intriguing critique of contemporary "cultural studies and composition" theories of student transformation.

Analyzes interviews with students, teachers, and administrators to develop a new set of literacies essential for student success in the digital age."To read John's work is to take on the role of a patient listener … A book, like a piece of music, is scored for time, and I feel Time to Write is scored adagio.… I believe that Time to Write can be read as a critique of [the] time-chopping approach to education-and an argument for presence, for being fully open to experience, for being there … To do good work, we must enter something like 'island time' or what John calls 'existential time'-or what is sometimes called 'flow' when we lose, at least temporarily, a sense of clock time." - from the Foreword by Thomas NewkirkTwenty-five years ago, John Sylvester Lofty studied the influence of cultural time values on students' resistance to writing instruction in an isolated Maine fishing community. For the new edition of Time to Write, Lofty returned to the island to consider how social and educational developments in the intervening years may have affected both local culture and attitudes toward education. Lofty discovered how the island time values that previously informed students' literacy learning have been transformed by outside influences, including technology, social media, and the influx of new residents from urban areas. Building on the ethnographic findings of the original study, the new edition analyzes the current conflict between the digital age time values of constant connections and instant communication, and those of school-based literacy. Lofty examines the new literacies now essential for students in a technologically connected world, both those who aspire to continue the traditional island work of lobster fishing, and for the many who now choose to pursue other careers and attend college on the mainland.