Posts Tagged ‘literacy’

I was asked to speak on a panel last week that discussed the practitioner’s perspective on providing accessible educational technologies for learning with disabilities. I wasn’t sure how to translate my experience into the role of “practitioner” – I’m not a special ed teacher or rehab counselor – then I remembered an essay I wrote 15 years ago that explained how my disability is my practice. There wasn’t enough time on the panel to explain this idea in detail, so I’ve revised the essay and posted it in the Fair Use Lab. Disability as Praxis draws on Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire’s influential 1973 book on literacy and liberation, to understand how the adaptations made and accommodations negotiated by people with disabilities represent a significant form of creative work and cultural production. The essay remains one of my clearest statements of what I know and believe about living with a disability.

I see red whenever I run into the pompous assertion that reading by listening to a book read aloud is not really reading. Then I ask (loudly, of course, to anyone who will listen), how did I read Ulysses (three times in as many decades) and Finnegans Wake (not quite once, completely)? How did I read À la recherche du temps perdu, Gravity’s Rainbow, and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? Was I deluding myself, or merely faking it?

NPR Talk of the Nation:
On this week’s opinion page, Jacob Weinberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, focuses on the new Kindle device. In a recent opinion piece on Slate.com, he asked: “Why should a civilization that reads electronically be any less literate than one that harvests trees to do so?”