Programs and Areas
Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy
Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Literacy Studies Approved
The Ohio State University Council on Academic Affairs recently approved a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization (GIS) in Literacy Studies. The GIS will provide graduate students an opportunity to work with scholars from across the disciplines and to pursue literacy-related research that will bring insight informed by multiple disciplines to bear on challenges in a variety of cultural settings. Pursuit of this GIS will complement, ground, and extend graduate students' concentration in any discipline.
This GIS in Literacy Studies 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 GIS 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).
The 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
