Speaker: Dr. Jennifer Jenson
Date and Time: Wednesday, June 13, 2018, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
Location: Ponderosa Commons Oak House, Room 1306A
From Walls to Bridges: A Lay Literacy Imperative for Digital Cultures
In this talk, I will revive Ivan Illich’s concept of ‘lay literacy’ – the notion that the book is the “decisive metaphor through which we conceive of Self and place” – as a way to rethink how education can best conceptualize and advance ‘literacy’ in a post-literate culture. We are, today, at a comparable watershed moment in the evolution of human communication as was Illich when he proposed an argument for the importance of lay literacy, only now, nearly 40 years on, it is not literacy but computation which has become the esoteric language of a new elite. And just as the text-bound literate cultures of the twelfth through twentieth centuries cultivated and sustained powerful obstacles to all but the literati, knowing, doing, accessing and understanding, digital cultures today present their own distinctive and powerful walls – cultural, social, economic, political, environmental – that sequester the latter day ‘common people’ from the new ‘digerati’. I hope to demonstrate how the work I have been engaged in for over two decades is a paradigmatic example of how to transform walls into bridges, creating abilities and opportunities for all to enjoy full participatory citizenship in digital cultures. I’ll suggest, also, that such approaches can help us respond to the considerable challenges of public education in the 21st century, in which coding and communication take central stage.
Dr. Jenson is Professor of Pedagogy and Technology in the Faculty of Education and Director of the Institute for Research on Digital Learning at York University