ENGLISH 90LS: Literacy Stories
Course description:
This seminar explores literacy, literacy instruction, and literacy movements past and present, in theory and practice. By engaging with 20th and 21st century fictions and memoirs by authors such as Elena Ferrante, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Ocean Vuong, with African-American slave narratives from the 18th and 19th centuries, with memoirs of so-called "Indian boarding schools" such as the Carlisle Indian School, and with materials from the history of alphabet books and children’s literature, “Literacy Stories” investigates the rich, ambivalent ways in which literature has depicted the literacy needed to consume it. Given under the auspices both of the English Department and Harvard’s Mindich Program for Engaged Scholarship, “Literacy Stories” also involves collaborations with various community organizations devoted to literacy advocacy and instruction. Through those collaborations, we will be practicing a form of "public humanities," as it's sometimes called, and/or "applied humanities."
This class will give us the opportunity to reflect—something we’ll do in part by learning about the many ways of relating to texts that flourish beyond the limits of Harvard Yard—on the contradictory ways in which we value reading. We’ll consider, for example, the friction between solitary and social reading: how the pleasures of this activity lie sometimes with how it separates us from others and sometimes with how it connects us. We will be thinking about literacy’s long-standing association with individual self-determination and thinking about how that association is put into question whenever people’s reading matter gets weaponized as an instrument of their domination. Literacy, the literary and theoretical texts on the syllabus will alike remind us, has a politics. Learning to be literate often involves experiences of unequal power relations and exclusion. Reading with (rather than “to” or “at”) others is an ethical challenge—one that all humanities concentrators and all students interested in social justice ought to explore.
Course format:
"Literacy Stories," which will meet once a week for two hours, is taught as a seminar: discussion will be central to our learning methods. For that reason, the course is capped at 15 students.
This class involves a little less reading than many 90-level, English Department courses, but please be aware that it involves a little more talking, a little more writing and, more important, it involves quite a bit more doing, quite a bit more action in the world.
A Mindich course invites you to make a difference in the community beyond Harvard. It invites you to integrate your academic learning with the learning that you do outside school, through interactions with people who are not your instructors or classmates. Many of you will already be involved (perhaps through the Phillips Brooks House Association) as volunteers and organizers in service programs that take you off-campus (K-12 after-school programs, for instance). (If not, we can suggest some opportunities for you.)
In the last iteration of the course, students were involved, variously, in setting up a book club for older, isolated residents of Cambridge; in volunteering for a Books for Prisons program; in after-school programs involving practice in reading and lessons in civics; in volunteering in English as a Second Language programs for newcomers to Massachusetts
We hope that through our class discussions as well as through this work in the field, you’ll learn something new about how to use reading matter to engage your community in an intentional, responsible way.
Typical enrollees:
This course is open to all Harvard College students. The last time it was taught, in Spring 2022 English concentrators and secondary students took it for departmental credit , but so did students from Philosophy and Social Studies and Psychology and History and Literature.
The course counts for credit, as well, toward the secondary degree in Educational Studies offered by Harvard's Graduate School of Education. It also counts toward the new Harvard College Certificate for Community Engagement.
Assignments and grading:
Your final grade for English 90ls will be based on 4 components .
1. Short papers in which You Make Connections (both connections among assigned reading materials and, as occasions for your writing, connections with other people beyond Harvard)
You must complete 5 of 7 of these short, 300 word/1 page papers, which are due throughout the semester and keyed to the reading assignments for individual class meetings. A list of prompts, which will give you lots of choices, will be supplied closer to the start of the semester. Basically, these prompts will ask you to build on the readings and take them somewhere new. For instance, we might ask you to describe the big idea you took from the readings and speculate how that idea might take you in a new direction in your life. Or we might ask you to draw on quotations from the readings and make a proposal for something--a new public policy, or a new public mindset--that might improve community life. Or describe who else should be doing this course reading and how they might benefit from it. (There will be many other options. This is just an initial list.)
These will be worth, in total, 25% of your final grade.
2.
An Interview --with a public librarian; or with a literacy advocate; or with a book-club organizer; or with a family member; or with a member of your hometown community-- worth 20% of your final grade.
3.
Capstone Project: a Literacy Memoir (in which you may, indeed should, build on those Connections papers and your interview) 35% (10-12 double-spaced pages), due in two stages. In this paper you will consider your own experiences of literacy, the schoolroom, childhood reading, but you’ll also, I hope, think about those experiences analytically, systematically, and comparatively.
4. Collegiality: Worth 20% of your final grade
Like any small seminar, this class is something that we will be making together, collaboratively. For that reason, I am not assessing a “participation” grade, but instead assessing a “collegiality” grade. Sometimes Harvard students see a reference to a “participation grade” and conclude that their success can be quantified according to how much and how often they speak in class. Collegiality involves more than that, however--for instance, it can often involve silent, engaged listening to other people.
Enrollment:
If you are interested in enrolling in this course, please email me at deidrelynch@fas.harvard.edu a couple of sentences describing your interest in this course AND submit an enrollment petition in my.harvard by 11:59pm ET on Tuesday, April 16. I will approve or deny pending enrollment petitions by 5:00pm ET on Wednesday, April 17.
Past syllabus:
Here is the syllabus from Spring semester 2022. LiteracyStoriessyllabusJan2022.pdfI will likely change this a little bit. I would like us to read the whole of Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night a Traveler for instance, rather than just the excerpts I assigned two years ago. I will likely add more poetry to the mix, by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Kathleen Jamie, and maybe some writing by Cathy Park Hong.
Course Summary:
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