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Family Literacy

Posted by Bethany Silva on October 01, 2016

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Talking About Slavery with the First Grader

The first-grader came home from library day with books about Abraham Lincoln because he wants to understand slavery. Which means he's going to want to talk about race. Slavery is on the first grader's mind. At least fifteen times a day, the first grader asks about slavery and how it started and were the only slaves Black people and is it over and what was it like and why did people think it was okay. And I, like so many other White parents, have been seeking to develop my toolbox of ways to talk about slavery and race with him. Since I study literacy and education, my go to is to turn to research and theory as a place to start. So today, I'm going to turn to Boler & Zembylas's (2003) work on pedagogies of discomfort because it gives me some helpful ideas to respond to the ways my stomach churns when the first grader asks me to talk about topics like race. In their essay, Boler & Zembylas discuss the way that, in a classroom that engages with concepts...

21st Century Reader Response

I just read an article by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiuolo (Thomas & Stornaiuolo 2016) that looked at ways that young adults engage in textbending via social media. Textbending is "reimagining stories from nondominant, marginalized, and silenced perspectives" (p. 315). Thomas and Stornaiuolo argue that restorying via social media is a 21st century way for readers (who might not see their culture, gender, or other affinity group represented in literature) to engage in Rosenblatt's transactional theory of literacy , a theory that's marked by the ways a reader and a text interact. Thomas and Stornaiuolo's focus is on young adults, and reading their article made me think of some of the ways that restorying might be applied to early reading experiences. I've often heard people explain that they don't teach critical literacy to young children because they aren't ready for the types of conversations critical literacy brings up. Conversat...

The National Day on Writing 2023 📝

This week's blog post is brought to you by Erin Shea, CLC Program Assistant. The National Day on Writing is an annual celebration that serves as a reminder to individuals of the power of the written word. Since 2019, UNH has hosted a celebration of the National Day on Writing that invites participants to participants to engage in diverse activities that promote literacy and self-expression. Over the years, it has grown into a widespread event. This year I had the pleasure of attending UNH’s NDOW Celebration on October 17th. The event is put on as a collaboration between the Community Literacy Center, UNH English Teaching, and the NH Literacy Institutes. This year’s event was funded by a UNH Center for the Humanities grant. . It was open to UNH students, faculty and staff, as well as the broader community. This year, a middle school and high school group joined us! With more than 200 people in attendance, the event was a smorgasbord of ideas, stories, and creativity. The event took...

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