Turkey buzz

So I've tried a couple of times to post from my treo to no avail. It must be this beta version of blogger. I was at NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) and tried to post some reactions to some sessions I saw; frankly I wrote a nice posting during a boring one! Alas those ideas are floating around in cyberspace somewhere.

It's the day after Thanksgiving in the US and I'm working on this talk I have to give to the Mayor of Rochester's Literacy Summit on Tuesday morning. I feel like it's my one shot at making a difference. I know that's not literally true, but it's the first time I've been asked to give a talk to such a policy making audience. The mayor's public mission is to make Rochester "the most literate mid-sized city in America." But the path they are taking uses a definition of literacy as decoding, and they are using old, long discredited arguments about links between "illiteracy" and criminality and locating the "problem" in children and families. They didn't think of asking me originally, but my colleague pushed the issue. So now I'm on the agenda. I'm worried and nervous. I'm trying to figure out how to say what I need to say in a language and tone they will hear; all in twenty minutes! I've basically decided that if I can get the Mayor to question what he means by literacy and to think for a minute before he buys the commercial line hook, line, and sinker, then I've done something worthwhile. Maybe he'll want to talk further.

Wish me luck.

Sunday musings

I tried to add a post late last night from my Treo, but kept getting an error message. I wrote about writing from a Treo and how it connects to what Lankshear, Knobel, Kress and others call new literacies. It was interesting to be writing on a such a small screen and getting frustrated at how small the screen was. I'm so used to composing on a computer that now screen size is an issue. Kress is certainly right when he says we have moved from text to screen in contemporary times.

In my work with teachers, new and veteran, I wonder how to avoid pedagogizing new literacies or simply colonizing out of school literacies for school purposes. Whose purposes are those anyway? I have already seen "lessons" in keyboarding and other "skills" that make me worry about what on earth schools think they are supposed to do. I think Gee's right when he says school are irrelevant these days. Necessary for success in a new capitalist world, but irrelevant to any sort of authentic meaning. Yet somehow, I don't want to give up on schools. Or maybe it's the children in them that I'm worried about. I see a lot of damage being done these days and I can't live with that.

Introduction

I've tried to start a blog a few different times. Tried one that was personal and one that was professional. This one is both. As a literacy researcher, I am interested in exploring literacy practices of everyday life. As a professor at the University of Rochester (http://www.rochester.edu/Warner/faculty/larson.html) I teach courses in teacher preparation and doctoral courses in research methods and curriculum.

I called this blog "literacy, life, and laughter" because I want to write and think about all these things and to hear from others about what they are writing and thinking about along these lines.