Literacy Myths Legacies Lessons

In his latest writings on the history of literacy and its importance for present understanding and future rethinking, historian Harvey J. Graff continues his critical revisions of many commonly held ideas about literacy. The book speaks to central concerns about the place of literacy in modern and late-modern culture and society, and its complicated historical foundations.Drawing on other aspects of his research, Graff places the chapters that follow in the context of current thinking and major concerns about literacy, and the development of both historical and interdisciplinary studies. Special emphasis falls upon the usefulness of "the literacy myth" as an important subject for interdisciplinary study and understanding. Critical stock-taking of the field includes reflections on Graff's own research and writings of the last three decades, and the relationships that connect interdisciplinary rethinking and the literacy myth.The collection is noteworthy for its attention to Graff's reflections on his identification of "the literacy myth" and in developing LiteracyStudies@OSU (Ohio State University) as a model for university-wide interdisciplinary programs. It also deals with ordinary concerns about literacy, or illiteracy, that are shared by academics and concerned citizens. These nontechnical essays will speak to both academic and nonacademic audiences across disciplines and cultural orientations.

In his latest writings on the history of literacy and its importance for present understanding and future rethinking, historian Harvey J. Graff continues his critical revisions of many commonly held ideas about literacy. The book speaks to central concerns about the place of literacy in modern and late-modern culture and society, and its complicated historical foundations.Drawing on other aspects of his research, Graff places the chapters that follow in the context of current thinking and major concerns about literacy, and the development of both historical and interdisciplinary studies. Special emphasis falls upon the usefulness of "the literacy myth" as an important subject for interdisciplinary study and understanding. Critical stock-taking of the field includes reflections on Graff's own research and writings of the last three decades, and the relationships that connect interdisciplinary rethinking and the literacy myth.The collection is noteworthy for its attention to Graff's reflections on his identification of "the literacy myth" and in developing LiteracyStudies@OSU (Ohio State University) as a model for university-wide interdisciplinary programs. It also deals with ordinary concerns about literacy, or illiteracy, that are shared by academics and concerned citizens. These nontechnical essays will speak to both academic and nonacademic audiences across disciplines and cultural orientations.

This book provides a critical account of the development of questions, approaches, methods, and understandings of literacy within and across disciplines and interdisciplines. It provides a critique of literacy studies, including the New Literacy Studies. This book completes a series that the author began in the 1970s. It criticizes and revises the New Literacy Studies and how we think about literacy generally. It is a revisionist study which argues that literacy and literacy studies are historical developments and must be understood in those terms to comprehend their profound impact on our traditions of thinking about and understanding literacy, and how we study it. Graff argues that literacy studies in its academic, institutional, and policy forums, but also in popular parlance, has lost its critical foundations, and this hinders efforts to promote literacy. He examines literacy over time and across linguistics; anthropology; psychology; reading and writing across modes of communication and comprehension; “new” literacies across digital, visual, performance, numerical, and scientific domains; and history. He underscores the value of new directions of negotiation and translation. This book will interest scholars and students in the many fields that constitute literacy studies across the humanities, social sciences, education, and beyond.

Scholars across the disciplines, specialists in higher education, administrators, and interested readers will find the book's multiple perspectives and practical advice on building and operating--and avoiding fallacies and errors--in interdisciplinary research and education invaluable.--Michael Bevis, The Ohio State University, School of Earth Sciences "The Quarterly Review of Biology"

In this detailed study of the history of universal literacy in Sweden, a group of renowned scholars review and explore the possibilities for the wider circulation and broader application of central dimensions of the early literacy studies, expounding upon the work of the Swedish Lutheran pastor and pioneering social historian Egil Johansson. Working initially with parish registers, especially examination registers from northern Sweden, Johansson discovered the extraordinary usefulness of these documents to determine how literacy in Sweden occurred well before any other European nation, despite the fact that Sweden was industrialized about 100 years later than the European norm. Egil Johansson also developed imaginative data-analysis techniques that help historians around the world to better picture the complete human cast of the past. With the help of numerous contributors Johansson founded a giant database of church records and other information, which now can help the understanding of preindustrial society. Johansson's work spans over many aspects of literacy and social history and their respective relation to religion and gender.

Movies are filled with scenes of people of all ages, sexes, races, and social classes reading and writing in widely varied contexts and purposes. Yet these scenes go largely unnoticed, despite the fact that these images recreate and reinforce pervasive concepts and perceptions of literacy. This book addresses how everyday literacy practices are represented in popular culture, specifically in mainstream, widely-distributed contemporary movies. If we watch films carefully for who reads and writes, in what settings, and for what social goals, we can see a reflection of the dominant functions and perceptions that shape our conceptions of literacy in our culture. Such perceptions influence public and political debates about literacy instruction, teachers' expectations of what will happen in their classrooms, and student's ideas about what reading and writing should be.

"...readers of LiCS will find a strong argument for how understandings of literacy are fundamental to the work that compositionists do, making this book useful not only to those doing similar work but also to be shared with colleagues who have less familiarity with literacy studies. The Lure of Literacy presents a model of how theories of literacy can be applied to the debates that beset compositionists again and again, offering a way out of their unproductive cycles." — Literacy in Composition The Lure of Literacy promises to transcend the stale and unproductive debate on freshman composition that has gripped English studies for more than a century. It is the first book to chart the origin of the discussion from the early twentieth century to the advent of the New Literacy Studies. Michael Harker recontextualizes proposals to abolish compulsory composition and reimagines pedagogical conditions in English studies in order to present a different model for first-year writing. This new model for compulsory composition programs focuses on students' attitudes about composition and interrogates the very idea of literacy itself.