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121 books match the query 'Literacy' and 6 start with d

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Data Literacy in Academic Libraries

Julia Bauder

American Library Association, 2021

We live in a data-driven world, much of it processed and served up by increasingly complex algorithms, and evaluating its quality requires its own skillset. As a component of information literacy, it's crucial that students learn how to think critically about statistics, data, and related visualizations. Here, Bauder and her fellow contributors show how librarians are helping students to access, interpret, critically assess, manage, handle, and ethically use data. Offering readers a roadmap for effectively teaching data literacy at the undergraduate level, this volume explores such topics as

the potential for large-scale library/faculty partnerships to incorporate data literacy instruction across the undergraduate curriculum;
how the principles of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education can help to situate data literacy within a broader information literacy context;
a report on the expectations of classroom faculty concerning their students’ data literacy skills;
various ways that librarians can partner with faculty;
case studies of two initiatives spearheaded by Purdue University Libraries and University of Houston Libraries that support faculty as they integrate more work with data into their courses;
Barnard College’s Empirical Reasoning Center, which provides workshops and walk-in consultations to more than a thousand students annually;
how a one-shot session using the PolicyMap data mapping tool can be used to teach students from many different disciplines;
diving into quantitative data to determine the truth or falsity of potential “fake news” claims; and
a for-credit, librarian-taught course on information dissemination and the ethical use of information.

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Del Otro Lado

Literacy and Migration across the U.S.-Mexico Border

Susan V. Meyers

Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

In Del OtroLado: Literacy and Migration across the U.S.-Mexico Border, author Susan V. Meyers draws on her year-long ethnographic study in Mexico and the United States to analyze the literacy practices of Mexican-origin students on both sides of the border.

Meyers begins by taking readers through the historical development of the rural Mexican town of Villachuato. Through a series of case studies spanning the decades between the Mexican Revolution and the modern-day village, Meyers explores the ever-widening gulf between the priorities of students and the ideals of the public education system. As more and more of Villachuato’s families migrate in an effort to find work in the wake of shifting transnational economic policies like NAFTA, the town’s public school teachers find themselves frustrated by spiraling drop-out rates. Meyers discovers that students often consider the current curriculum irrelevant and reject the established value systems of Mexico’s public schools. Meyers debunks the longstanding myth that literacy is tied to economic development, arguing that a “literacy contract” model, in which students participate in public education in exchange for access to increased earning potential, better illustrates the situation in rural Mexico.

Meyers next explores literacy on the other side of the border, traveling to Marshalltown, Iowa, where many former citizens of Villachuato have come to reside because of the availability of jobs for unskilled workers at the huge Swift meat-packing plant there. Here she discovers that Mexican-origin families in the United States often consider education a desirable end in itself rather than a means to an end. She argues that migration has a catalyzing effect on literacy, particularly as Mexican migrant families tend to view education as a desirable form of prestige.

Meyers reveals the history and policies that have shaped the literacy practices of Mexican-origin students, and she raises important questions about not only the obligation of the United States to educate migrant students, but also those students’ educational struggles and ways in which these difficulties can be overcome. This transnational study is essential reading for scholars, students, educators and lawmakers interested in shaping the future of educational policy.

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Dido's Daughters

Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France

Margaret W. Ferguson

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the 2003 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.

Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in Dido's Daughters, this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing.

Fegurson's aim in this long-awaited work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido—builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome—Ferguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.

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Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline

An Action Guide for Libraries

Carrie Scott Banks and Jill Anderson

American Library Association, 2026

The school-to-prison pipeline impacts communities across the country; often, this system and families impacted by it remain invisible. But librarians, educators, and others who work with youth know first-hand that libraries and reading can be life-altering for youth impacted by incarceration. Written by public librarians who have supported youth before, during, and after incarceration, this book draws from their own experiences while showcasing insights from other library workers, researchers, educators, people who work in the juvenile justice fields, and mental health professionals. Designed to empower libraries and their staff to provide children and teens with information, visibility, knowledge and skills, recreation, and role models, it shares practical strategies for helping youth avoid the school-to-prison pipeline or contend with it. Readers will discover

a concise explanation of the school-to-prison pipeline, including statistics on how and why it disproportionately impacts LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and disabled youth;
concrete, proven strategies for disrupting youth incarceration pathways by giving young people the tools and support they need to avoid incarceration;
steps for bolstering youth engagement during out of school time;
guidance on how to align disciplinary approaches with trauma-informed practices when dealing with rowdy youth and other disruptive behavior;
an overview of what libraries are doing to provide programs and services inside a youth facility, including literacy support, high school equivalency/GED programs, and televisiting;
strategies for combatting the isolation of children of incarcerated parents by creating inclusive and welcoming library environments;
information about the complex and difficult process of reentry for incarcerated youth, with adaptable ideas and lessons from the work being done in libraries for reentering adults; and
an inspiring vision, extrapolating from work in adjacent fields, of what libraries can do to overcome barriers to bringing more youth into the library.

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Diverse by Design

Literacy Education within Multicultural Institutions

Christopher Schroeder

Utah State University Press, 2011

Diversity, despite what we say, disturbs us. In the U.S., we debate linguistic rights, the need for an official language, and educational policies for language minority students. On the one hand, we believe in the rights of individuals, including (at least in the academy) the right to one’s own language. On the other hand, we sponsor a single common language, monolingual and standard, for full participation and communication in both the academy and in U.S. society.

In Diverse by Design, Christopher Schroeder reports on an institutional case study conducted at an officially designated Hispanic-Serving Institution. He gives particular attention to a cohort of Latino students in a special admissions program, to document their experience of a program designed to help students surmount the “obstacle” that ethnolinguistic diversity is perceived to be.

Ultimately, Schroeder argues for reframing multilingualism and multiculturalism, not as obstacles, but as intellectual resources to exploit. While diversity might disturb us, we can overcome its challenges by a more expansive sense of social identity. In an increasingly globalized society, literacy ideologies are ever more critical to educational equity, and to human lives.

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