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Talk, Tools, and Texts tackles a perplexing issue: how can we envision writing as developing throughout a lifetime, from the first purposeful marks made on paper to the last? How can we make accounts of writing development that keep the complexity of our lives in mind while also providing useful insight to researchers, teachers, and writers?

Drawing on eleven accounts of writers at different points in the lifespan (ages 12 to 80) and in different social circumstances (from a middle-school classroom to a bird-sanctuary newsletter), Talk, Tools, and Texts constructs a “logic-in-use” for following writers and their writing development at a variety of points in the lifespan. It also offers several strategies scholars can use in pursuit of their own research into lifespan writing.

A practical guide to teaching literacy in all its varied contexts.
 
Literacy education doesn’t just happen in schools, with young children. It can take place in many locations, and at many different points in people’s lives. Literacy educators, therefore, need flexibility and a deep toolbox to meet their students’ diverse needs, regardless of whether they work in traditional school and college settings or in other environments with varied populations. Teaching Literacy in Diverse Contexts shows how practical experiences can be used in creative ways to support educator development for teaching literacy in a global context. Mentorship between a developing literacy educator and an experienced teacher educator is central to the book, and to the practical experiences in training or professional development that it focuses on. Chapters share the creative solutions discovered during mentorship that supported developing literacy educators to teach with authenticity in a number of contexts, including the adult learning sector, a rural community in Africa, and alongside parents of very sick children. Together, the chapters build a crucial resource for preparing a broad range of literacy educators to teach literacy in many contexts where policy on how best to teach reading and writing to diverse student bodies ebbs and flows.

In Telling Stories, more than a dozen longitudinal writing researchers look beyond conventional project findings to story their work and, in doing so, offer otherwise unavailable glimpses into the logics and logistics of long-range studies of writing. The result is a volume that centers interrelations among people, places, and politics across two decades of praxis and an array of educational sites: two-year colleges, a senior military college, an adult literacy center, a small liberal arts college, and both public and private four-year universities.

Contributors share direct knowledge of longitudinal writing research, citing project data (e.g., interview transcripts, research notes, and journals), descriptions drawn from memory, and extended personal reflections. The resulting stories, tempered by the research and scholarship of others, convey a sense of longitudinal research as a lived activity as well as a prominent and consequential approach to inquiry. Yet Telling Stories is not a how-to guide, nor is it written for longitudinal researchers alone. Instead, this volume addresses issues about writing research that are germane to all who conduct or count on it. Such topics include building and sustaining good interpersonal research relations, ethically negotiating the institutional power dynamics that undergird writing research, effectively using knowledge from longitudinal studies to advocate for writers and writing educators, and improving both conceptual and concrete resources for long-range research in writing studies.

It almost goes without saying that the rise in popularity of television has killed the audience for "serious" literature. This is such a given that reading Fitzpatrick's challenge to this notion can be very disconcerting, as she traces the ways in which a small cadre of writers of "serious" literature--DeLillo, Pynchon, and Franzen, for instance--have propagated this myth in order to set themselves up as the last bastions of good writing. Fitzpatrick first explores whether serious literature was ever as all-pervasive as critics of the television culture claim and then asks the obvious question: what, or who, exactly, are these guys defending good writing against?

Fitzpatrick examines the ways in which the anxiety about the supposed death of the novel is built on a myth of the novel's past ubiquity and its present displacement by television. She explores the ways in which this myth plays out in and around contemporary fiction and how it serves as a kind of unacknowledged discourse about race, class, and gender. The declaration constructs a minority status for the "white male author" who needs protecting from television's largely female and increasingly non-white audience. The novel, then, is transformed from a primary means of communication into an ancient, almost forgotten, and thus, treasured form reserved for the well-educated and well-to-do, and the men who practice it are exalted as the practitioners of an almost lost art.

Such positioning serves to further marginalize women writers and writers of color because it makes the novel, by definition, the preserve of the poor endangered white man. If the novel is only a product of a small group of white men, how can the contributions of women and writers of color be recognized? Instead, this positioning abandons women and people of color to television as a creative outlet, and in return, cedes television to them. Fitzpatrick argues that there's a level of unrecognized patronization in assuming that television serves no purpose but to provide dumb entertainment to bored women and others too stupid to understand novels. And, instead, she demonstrates the real positive effects of a televisual culture.

Not just a sourcebook or a reference, but a complete multimedia guide, this innovative, comprehensive resource will help you stimulate the minds of your youngest patrons with rhymes, songs, fingerplays, books, and other creative activities. The engaging materials and methods in this book are equally useful for experienced children's librarians looking for new ideas and new librarians starting to build their own program for the very young. Through researching the latest in early learner and developmental theories, Ernst

• Carefully details the physical, mental, emotional, and social development of children 12 to 24 months
• Guides you through using Lapsit programming to perform effective outreach to all segments of your community
• Shows how to build and maintain effective partnerships with caregivers, child-care providers, early childhood educators, and others
• Offers tips for seeking funding for early childhood services

By uncovering how higher education and gender roles evolved in Appalachia over time, The Madison Women delivers a history that contradicts the stereotype of the region as hostile to education, highlighting colleges that proliferated the area in the 19th century. Indeed, many of these colleges were either coeducational or even specifically for women, ultimately contradicting another stereotype--that Appalachia is a region particularly hostile toward women. 

Incorporating captivating mini-biographies of women who attended Madison College and who went on to change their communities in ways large and small, this book reveals how the lives of its students impart lessons about history, regional culture, and how we can shape the Appalachia's future. 

The Quran is certainly one of the most important texts in human history. But it wasn’t originally a text at all. When the Quran appeared in the seventh century, it was a vocal recital performed by an unlettered man named Muhammad. It remains an oral performance for Muslims all over the world to this day.

The Prophet’s Whistle is a study of the ancient, nonliterary features of the Quran, many of which are often overlooked by historians and the public. George Archer corrects this striking absence by using observations from the anthropologies of living oral cultures, the cognitive sciences of literacy, and the study of other dead oral cultures. The Prophet’s Whistle shows that the thought systems of the Quran are oral, through and through, but by the end of the life of its Prophet, the Quran likewise hints at a personal and cultural embrace of writing and the mindsets of literate people.
 

For the first time, the story of how and why we have plumbed the mysteries of reading, and why it matters today.
 
Reading is perhaps the essential practice of modern civilization. For centuries, it has been seen as key to both personal fulfillment and social progress, and millions today depend on it to participate fully in our society. Yet, at its heart, reading is a surprisingly elusive practice. This book tells for the first time the story of how American scientists and others have sought to understand reading, and, by understanding it, to improve how people do it.

Starting around 1900, researchers—convinced of the urgent need to comprehend a practice central to industrial democracy—began to devise instruments and experiments to investigate what happened to people when they read. They traced how a good reader’s eyes moved across a page of printed characters, and they asked how their mind apprehended meanings as they did so. In schools across the country, millions of Americans learned to read through the application of this science of reading. At the same time, workers fanned out across the land to extend the science of reading into the social realm, mapping the very geography of information for the first time. Their pioneering efforts revealed that the nation’s most pressing problems were rooted in drastic informational inequities, between North and South, city and country, and white and Black—and they suggested ways to tackle those problems.

Today, much of how we experience our information society reflects the influence of these enterprises. This book explains both how the science of reading shaped our age and why, with so-called reading wars still plaguing schools across the nation, it remains bitterly contested.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

For the first time, the story of how and why we have plumbed the mysteries of reading, and why it matters today.
 
Reading is perhaps the essential practice of modern civilization. For centuries, it has been seen as key to both personal fulfillment and social progress, and millions today depend on it to participate fully in our society. Yet, at its heart, reading is a surprisingly elusive practice. This book tells for the first time the story of how American scientists and others have sought to understand reading, and, by understanding it, to improve how people do it.

Starting around 1900, researchers—convinced of the urgent need to comprehend a practice central to industrial democracy—began to devise instruments and experiments to investigate what happened to people when they read. They traced how a good reader’s eyes moved across a page of printed characters, and they asked how their mind apprehended meanings as they did so. In schools across the country, millions of Americans learned to read through the application of this science of reading. At the same time, workers fanned out across the land to extend the science of reading into the social realm, mapping the very geography of information for the first time. Their pioneering efforts revealed that the nation’s most pressing problems were rooted in drastic informational inequities, between North and South, city and country, and white and Black—and they suggested ways to tackle those problems.

Today, much of how we experience our information society reflects the influence of these enterprises. This book explains both how the science of reading shaped our age and why, with so-called reading wars still plaguing schools across the nation, it remains bitterly contested.

"The Word On the Street invites humanities scholars to move beyond the classroom and the monograph to share the pleasures of art in ways that engage the intelligence of the common reader, cultivating the critical imagination so vital to American cultural democracy.  Lively and thought-provoking, Teres lays out contemporary debates and wades into them with gusto."
---Nancy Cantor, Syracuse University

"At a moment when questions about the literary, 'bookishness,' and the future of print are being urgently raised, with incessant national attention to the perceived crises of literacy and reading, Teres' thoughtful, broadly democratic, but also tough-minded examination of both 'common readers' and academic readers makes a real contribution to the debate."
---Julie Ellison, University of Michigan

Despite significant changes since the mid-twentieth century in American critical culture---the culture emanating from the serious review of books, ideas, and the arts---it attracts only a small and declining minority of Americans. However productive this culture has been, American society has not approached the realization of Emerson's or Dewey's vision of a highly participatory American cultural democracy. Such a culture requires critics who are read by the average citizen, but the migration of critics and intellectuals from the public to the academy has resulted in fewer efforts to engage with ordinary citizens. The Word on the Street investigates this disjunction between the study of literature in the academy and the interests of the common reader and society at large, arguing the vital importance of publicly engaged scholarship in the humanities. Teres chronicles how the once central function of the humanities professorate---to teach students to appreciate and be inspired by literature---has increasingly been lost to literary and cultural studies in the last thirty years.

The Word on the Street argues for a return to an earlier model of the public intellectual and a literary and cultural criticism that is accessible to ordinary citizens. Along the way, Teres offers an illuminating account of the current problem and potential solutions, with the goal of prompting a future vision of publicly engaged scholarship that resonates with the common reader and promotes an informed citizenry.

Harvey Teres is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University.

Cover image: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times/Redux

The New Public Scholarship