Literacy, Culture, and Identity Web resources
http://www.nifl.gov/nifl/facts/facts_overview.html
Have students look at links between socioeconomic status and literacy rates as they read Kozol's Illiterate America? What do the statistics show? What does the book show that is different?
Try to determine from this website what the producers of it mean by "literacy"
Find statistics about which you have questions. Here's an example:
In the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), the average annual household income of the total adult population
at prose literacy Level 1 was $15,480, compared to $8,520 for welfare recipients;
at prose literacy Level 2 was $25,010, compared to $9,540 for welfare recipients;
at prose literacy Level 3 was $35,020, compared to $11,710 for welfare recipients; and
at prose literacy Level 4 was $45,610, compared to $15,820 for welfare recipients.
(Barton, p53, Table 4.7)
Does all of this mean that welfare recipients are achieving greater levels of literacy with less income?
http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Bibs/Literacy.bib.html
Howard's literacy bib
http://www.reconstruction.ws/053/benton.shtml
This one's an essay on public sphere. It's brief and online and I think could raise some interesting questions for students regarding the kinds of literacy it takes to be active in a public sphere. It alludes to media literacy, political literacy, basic literacy. . . I really should assign this one.
www.exhibit13.com
Blue Man Group's tribute to 9/11
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Literacy, Culture, and Identity
What is it that I hope students will get from this course?
High priority:
* A sense of literacy as much more complex than just reading and writing
* An understanding that functional literacy is not enough to be successful, that just teaching people to read and write does not give them access to social networks and status, etc.
* Increased facility in one of the following areas: visual, critical, cultural literacy (more able to read and use visual rhetoric, better at identifying root causes of social problems, more aware of the assumptions they make based on their cultural backgrounds)
What is it that I hope students will get from this course?
High priority:
* A sense of literacy as much more complex than just reading and writing
* An understanding that functional literacy is not enough to be successful, that just teaching people to read and write does not give them access to social networks and status, etc.
* Increased facility in one of the following areas: visual, critical, cultural literacy (more able to read and use visual rhetoric, better at identifying root causes of social problems, more aware of the assumptions they make based on their cultural backgrounds)
