News and Events
New Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Literacy Studies
Professor Harvey Graff has worked tirelessly to spearhead the move for a graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Literacy Studies. At its June 20, 2007 meeting, the Council on Academic Affairs approved the proposal to establish the specialization.
This new specialization responds to the conjuncture of a number of intellectual and educational currents and their attendant pressures on universities such as OSU. In order to address those factors effectively, the graduate interdisciplinary specialization is broadly interdisciplinary, drawing from and seeking to contribute to the disciplines of the humanities (history, linguistics, literary studies, languages, comparative studies), the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology including human development and cognitive studies), the arts, communication, and education most directly, but also from human ecology, biological sciences and biomedical sciences (perception, consciousness, neuroscience).
More specifically, the GIS in Literacy Studies principal objectives include:
- Understanding literacy in its specific historical, social, cultural, political, and economic contexts
- Comprehending the uses, abuses, complexity, and contradictions of literacy as a social practice
- Exploring literacy’s place in cognition and communication
- Developing critical approaches to common assumptions about the importance, power, and centrality of literacy
- Practicing the application of that critical perspective
- Evaluation, critiquing, and redeveloping communication and understanding across different literacies
- Exploring and evaluating both traditional¬ reading and writing ¬and multiple, “new” literacies
- Distinguishing and evaluating the literacies of academic disciplines for their commonalities and differences
- Studying acquisition, uses, practice, and consequences of literacy and literacies across age, gender, race, class, ethnicity, geography, media
