"Let the Blogs begin . . ."

...was the cry I heard in my head when I woke up this morning. Yes, it is that time—the academic year commences, and with it, my blog. In my blog, I will report out with commentary on what is happening in the DC area and how it will or might impact our work on our campuses, in our classrooms, and in the field. Having said that, I must confess that I am new to blogging, and not completely sure what shape or form my blog will take other than I will start a conversation with you about some of the events and issues that I see, and your comments to the blog or to me individually will help shape how this conversation develops.

So, what’s on my mind this week?

I just read a piece from Inside Education by John Lombardi about another report decrying our students’ lack of reading. He was referring to the National Endowment for the Arts’ report, Reading at Risk. The report points out that students read much less literary work than they used to. This, of course, is a serious issue for us in the literary business. Lombardi’s point is that it may not be all that bad that our students are reading less, as they are consuming texts from other sources, or media, at a very high rate, and we ought to be looking at that.

I have often thought that condemning our students’ reading habits was missing the mark. Particularly as I listened to them discussing films and videos and observed my own children’s habits of participating in stories. What we are decrying when we lament our students’ lack of reading is the demise of a medium. Human beings have always needed and used stories—the narrative line that informs us, enlightens us, and leads us into and through complex thinking activities. For all but a very short period of our history, the medium was primarily oral and visual. The mass of society did not have the skills or opportunity to read books until about the middle of the 19th century, and then the book became the medium of choice for information exchange in most of its forms until the latter part of the 20th century—at best a short 100 year period in our history. Throughout most of our history, we have valued narrative as the primary means of perpetuating our culture and values. Even though I find a book, whether good or not, a comfort to hold, carry, and read (and re-read), my children do not. They line their shelves with videos. Which they re-watch probably more often than I re-read the volumes of print on my shelves. My son-in-law is an expert game player. In that medium, he participates in creating a story. Is that less interactive than my imagining a scene from Seamus Heany’s interpretation of Beowulf?

What we are participating in is as huge a shift in medium as the invention of the printing press. But the shift and its shift in literacies is coming much faster than it did with the printing press. What the NCTE Executive Committee discovered when they undertook a study of multi-modal literacies is that we will have to rethink how we define literacy. John Lovas, Kathi Yancey, and Doug Hesse demonstrated that at the last three CCCC Chair’s addresses at the CCCC convention. We are moving into a new age.

Do not misunderstand me. Print literacy is still the primary medium, particularly for academic work, and we must continue to support, promote, and above all, teach that literacy. However, let us not condemn our students because they have a more sophisticated understanding of media that you or I do not understand. Let us instead come to terms with the shift in media and help our students gain the critical analysis skills we learned with books to apply it to books and other forms as we struggle to re-define what it means to be literate.