Literacy in American LivesLiteracy in American Lives traces the changing conditions of literacy learning over the past century as they were felt in the lives of ordinary Americans born between 1895 and 1985. The book demonstrates what sharply rising standards for literacy have meant to successive generations of Americans and how--as students, workers, parents, and citizens--they have responded to rapid changes in the meaning and methods of literacy learning in their society. Drawing on more than 80 life histories of Americans from all walks of life, the book addresses critical questions facing public education at the start of the twenty-first century. |
Contents
LITERACY OPPORTUNITY AND ECONOMIC CHANGE | 25 |
LITERACY AND ILLITERACY IN DOCUMENTARY AMERICA | 47 |
ACCUMULATING LITERACY How Four Generations of One American Family Learned to Write | 73 |
THE POWER OF IT Sponsors of Literacy in African American Lives | 105 |
THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE Reading versus Writing in Popular Memory | 146 |
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Common terms and phrases
accounts adult African American associated basic became born Chapter children's literature church civil rights civil rights movement cloisonné competition contexts cultural Danbom early economic change eracy especially European American experience farm father forms of literacy Genna Henry Schmidt high school history of literacy Hunt ideological individual literacy information economy institutions interviewed Jack Johnny Ames labor learned to read learned to write literacy achievement literacy development literacy learning literacy practices literate skills lives Lowery mass literacy mass media material memories ment mother nomic opportunities organized Palmer Method parents political prison production racial radio reading and writing recalled regional relationships remembered rural sharecropping social society sponsors of literacy stories Sunday school teachers teaching technologies things tion traditions transformations twentieth century University Press Wisconsin workers World War II writing and reading wrote
Popular passages
Page 11 - Each new cohort makes fresh contact with the contemporary social heritage and carries the impress of the encounter through life.
Page 19 - Sponsors, as I have come to think of them, are any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, and model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold, literacy - and gain advantage by it in some way.
Page 11 - The members of any cohort are entitled to participate in only one slice of life — their unique location in the stream of history. Because it embodies a temporally specific version of the heritage, each cohort is differentiated from all others, despite the minimization of variability by symbolically perpetuated institutions and by hierarchically graduated structures of authority.
Page 10 - The point is that people live their lives within the material and cultural boundaries of their time span, and so life histories are exceptionally effective historical sources because through the totality of lived experience they reveal relations between individuals and social forces which are rarely apparent in other sources. Above all, the information is historical and dynamic in that it reveals changes of experience through time, as opposed to the static analysis of social surveys and statistical...
References to this book
Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the ... No preview available - 2004 |