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Literacy Studies Spring Lecture: IRA SHOR asks, "Can Critical Literacy Change the World?"

Merging the study of formal technique with social critique is not simple... but this project is no more and no less "political" than any other kind of literacy program. The claim of critical literacy is that no pedagogy is neutral, no learning process is value-free, no curriculum avoids ideology and power relations.
-IRA SHOR, "What Is Critical Literacy?"
Critical Literacy in Action: Writing Words, Changing Worlds

Literacy-that is, the social practices of meaningful communication and the textual practices of writing and reading-has been a major site of conflict and confusion in schools and colleges. One set of opinions, perhaps dominant in society, poses literacy as a transformative force in the modern world, with great implications for personal success in careers and for prosperous development in society. In this lecture, IRA SHOR, a pioneer in the field of critical education, asks whether we can we imagine a "critical literacy" that challenges unequal power relations? Could teaching "critical literacy" enable students to become civic activists for social justice, promote peace not war, and against the dreadful inequality? Could "critical literacy" change the world in which we live and work?"

Ira Shor with Paolo Freire.
Ira Shor (left) with Paolo Freire
IRA SHOR is a Professor of Rhetoric/Composition at the City University of New York's Graduate Center (Ph.D. Program in English) and in the Department of English at the College of Staten Island (CSI). He started the new doctorate in Rhetoric/Composition at the CUNY Grad Center in 1993. There, he directs dissertations and offers seminars in literacy, writing theory, critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, the rhetorics of space and place, and working-class culture. As a member of the English faculty at CSI, Professor Shor teaches courses in writing, literature, and mass media as well as graduate classes for schoolteachers. Shor's work with Paolo Freire, the noted Brazilian educator, began in the early 1980s. He and Freire co-authored A Pedagogy for Liberation, the first "talking" book Freire published with a collaborator. Shor also authored the widely used Empowering Education and When Students have Power, two foundational texts in critical teaching. His Critical Teaching and Everyday Life was the first book-length treatment of Freire-based critical methods in the North American context.

The LiteracyStudies@OSU SPRING LECTURE will take place on Thursday, May 14, 4:00-5:30 p.m. at the George Wells Knight House at 104 East 15th Avenue.
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