CPS Event: Literacy Lessons from Ireland on Tuesday, April 4

Left: Dr. Jenifer Jasinski Schneider, associate professor at the University of South Florida, Tampa, studied Irish children's literature and adult education as a Fulbright scholar.

Family and Community: 

Literacy Lessons from Ireland

  

Tuesday, April 4, at 7 p.m. 

in Fox Hall

A CPS event co-sponsored by PEL and ASPEC

Imagining Justice, this year’s College Program Series theme, challenges the Eckerd community to explore the underlying causes of injustice, one of which is the inability to read and write at a functional level. Barely literate adults are limited in how they support their children’s schooling, further contributing to generational poverty, are less able to access and understand healthcare information, and are more likely to become incarcerated.

Dr. Jenifer Jasinski Schneider, associate professor of Literacy Studies in the College of Education at the University of South Florida, Tampa, will speak what it means to be literate in today's technology-mediated world. As a Fulbright scholar, Dr. Schneider worked for several months at the Waterford Institute of Technology in Waterford City, Ireland. Her project, “Creating Life-Long Readers through Children's Literature: A Collaboration Between Adult Further Education and Literacy Studies,” took her across Ireland to observe adult education programs and to visit sites important in the field of children’s literature.

We tend to think of illiteracy as a problem only in developing countries. But Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development statistics indicate that 18% of Irish adults are at Level 1 literacy or below. Ireland ranks 17th of 24 European countries in terms of literacy, 19th in terms of numeracy. We in the Tampa Bay area share similar troubling statistics, and St. Petersburg is home to five of the worst-rated elementary schools in Florida.

Nor is literacy only about traditional constructions of reading and writing. In today’s highly visual, multimodal, and technologically mediated world, much of what people encounter is not formatted as standard written text. The ability to “read” websites, for example, with their very different structure, icons, terminology, and layers of information is as much a part of what it means to be functionally literate as is the ability to read a traditionally-printed instruction manual. OECD statistics also indicate that 42% of Irish adults lack basic problem-solving skills in these kinds of technology-rich environments – and, again, our numbers are not much better.

In bringing Dr. Schneider to Eckerd College, we seek to help students, faculty, and community leaders working in or planning careers in education, or who are addressing literacy and education concerns in other ways, to re-conceptualize literacy and to reimagine a literacy and education framework that thinks outside current practices.

Dr. Schneider is the author of USF’s first open-access, e-textbook The Inside, Outside, and Upside Downs of Children's Literature: From Poets and Pop-Ups to Princesses and Porridge (USF Scholar Commons), was editor for Casework in K-6 Writing Instruction: Connecting Composing Strategies, Digital Literacies, and Disciplinary Content to the Common Core (2014, Peter Lang), was co-editor for Process Drama and Multiple Literacies: Addressing Social, Cultural, Ethical Issues (2006, Heinemann), and her articles appear in many peer-refereed journals.

Dr. Schneider's lecture is co-sponsored by the Program for Experienced Learners (PEL) and by the Academy of Senior Professionals at Eckerd College (ASPEC). Refreshments will be served.