We review, in short, some of the best material we’ve come across in the past week. We’ve got an award-winning short story, the story behind the KIND bar, a literary parody, an audiobook–and a round up of some favorite links.
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We live in a world with limited resources. For non-profit literacy organizations, that often means choosing between supporting early readers and writers and developing complex literacies in adults. The good news? These aren’t mutually exclusive goals. In celebration of International Literacy Day, we bring three examples that demonstrate one key fact: helping adults grow offers untold benefits to their families, too.
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A poem is a beautiful thing, teaching us to see the world differently, ornamenting common sentiments with elegant turns of phrase. For Labor Day, these two poems take a different tack. By stripping down everyday work to its elements, they highlight the beauty in everyday work and workers. Gas station attendants and window cleaners, as much as writers and coders, do meaningful work.
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The kids are back in school. Here and there, the trees have begun to change their colors. Though Labor Day is still a week away, summer has reached its end–and so has summer reading. Over the past three months, we’ve all ready deeply both for work and for pleasure–and we each want to share the most provocative texts, old and new, fiction and non-fiction alike, we’ve come across.
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Recently, Program and Curriculum Director Jessica Isaac sat down with a group of SUNY-Fredonia professors to talk about their experience with Books@Work. What she learned surprised her. Without the teaching objectives they are required to use in the classroom, these faculty felt adrift, even nervous–at the same time, they were invigorated. Many working in education complain that we live in an age of overassessment. They rarely talk about how assessment can be comforting and comfortable. But is comfort really the mark of a quality educational experience?
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Thinking carefully about public humanities work, as this special issue does, is necessary to conscientiously promoting it from within the academy. But as many of its contributors emphasize, there is a very clear next step–conversation with and beyond the academy.
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The public humanities are not a top-down approach to culture, wherein, professor-experts are required to offer the public their knowledge. Instead, the humanities are practiced, publicly, when we use the skills we learn from the humanities in public. This special issue, like the MLA panel it developed from, is aimed at humanities professors, and as such it thinks much and specifically about how faculty engage with public humanities projects. The essays offer food for thought for nonprofits and people – PhDs or otherwise – engaging in public humanities work, especially as we foster partnerships with academics and academic institutions. Here are 5 big takeaways from them.
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I think that hard conversations reveal that we possess a fundamental sense of justice and responsibility and care. Hard conversations show us, experientially, that we are moral beings, and any education worth the name will allow us to reflect upon, and understand, that personal moral core. . . The last thing I would want my students to do is take a purely dispassionate approach to Chris Burden’s self-destructive performance pieces, the systemic, institutional racism and torture found in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, the traumatic historiographic ambitions of the World War II combat film genre, or the extremely graphic murders described in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.
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In our Required Reading this week, Ann discusses her struggles with meditation and mindfulness, and some tools that are currently working for her. Capria tells us about her recent 600+ mile motorcycle trip around Northern Michigan, which helped her think about some great literary journeys. Jessica, too, is thinking about journeys–in this case, the Great Migration. And then, how do stories shape our lives? How are bestsellers marketed? What separates human skills from machine skills?
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For Shklovsky, art extends life–by making the familiar unfamiliar, it invigorates our attention and in so doing ensures that even minor things make an impression on us. Who among us hasn’t driven or walked a familiar path, only to arrive at the destination with no memory of the trip? Art has the capacity to remind us of the curve in the road, even the sound of cars driving by.
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