Fair Use Lab » literacy

Disability, Praxis, and Cultural Production

Mark Willis — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:49:06 +0000

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” – disability is not my day job – 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.

Is An Audiobook Really a Book?

Mark Willis — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:34:21 +0000

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?

Yesterday on NPR, I heard novelist Neil Gaiman ask, is an audiobook really a book? He paraphrased Harold Bloom on behalf of the naysayers: “You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.”

Gaiman followed Bloom’s judgment with his own: “I find that astonishingly unconvincing. I think you can have a close and perfectly valid relationship with the text when you hear it.”

Then audio book director Rick Harris insisted that he wants the experience to be different:

It is not a book. An audiobook is a separate entity. A novel can be seen as many things, and one of the things it can be seen as is a script for an audio performance. But it is another thing; it is an audiobook that has its own validity, its own limitations, its own strengths. The human voice is unquestionably the most expressive musical instrument there is. Combine those two and you get an audiobook.

To my great surprise, I found myself nodding at this like a Bobble-head. I think commercial audiobooks are something different, not just from printed books, but also from the books I read that were recorded for the National Library Service for the Blind. The production values that commercial publishers foist onto “audio performances” are, well, cheesy. The abridgments, the musical interludes with 101 strings, the histrionic characterizations by overwrought actors — such dramaturgy imposes interpretations on the text that cut the reader out of it.

So the litmus test for determining when a book is a book isn’t whether you see or listen. It’s whether your “relationship” with the text is really yours.

[See Listening to the Literacy Events of a Blind Rader for an academic perspective on how I read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.]

Jacob Weinberg: A ‘Kindle Society’ Can Be Literate

Mark Willis — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:08:38 +0000

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?”