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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

literacy

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Get Lit: Pro-Literacy Poetry

“The greatest lessons you will ever teach us will not come from your syllabus.
The greatest lessons you will ever teach us, you will not even remember…

“There are things missing from our history books.
But we were taught that it was better to be silent than to make Them uncomfortable.” —The Get Lit Players, “Somewhere In America”

Belissa Escobedo, Rhiannon McGavin, and Zariya Allen slam book censorship and ridiculous limits on student reading. All three are members of the Get Lit Players, high school students who work with a South Californian organization that addresses illiteracy, inequality, and injustice through informal education, literature workshops, and poetry competitions nationwide.

As of December 2014, the Queen Latifah Show is off the air and can no longer promote poetry like this. There aren’t just things missing from our history books: there worlds of experience and thought missing from our media as well.


h/t: Jennifer Jacobson

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From Science Fiction to Science Possibility

Dr. Ronald E. McNair was the second African-American to work in space (the first was Dr. Guion “Guy” Bluford), and died with his Space Shuttle crew members when the Challenger exploded shortly after take-off in 1986.

My alma mater, Texas Tech University, is one of 200 US universities that runs a McNair Scholars program for low-income, first-generation college students and graduate students from historically underrepresented populations. The program has been federally funded since 1986 as part of the Congressional response to the Challenger accident.

Three years ago, Dr. McNair’s brother, Carl McNair, shared with NPR how Ron had achieved his goal of becoming an astronaut. He achieved his goal because he dreamed and acted beyond the norms of his time. Carl has also written about Ron in the book In the Spirit of Ronald E. McNair – Astronaut: An American Hero (2012). In the clip below, Carl reflects on how both reading and Gene Roddenbery’s Star Trek: The Original Series inspired his younger brother.

A show came on TV called Star Trek. Now Star Trek showed the future where there were Black folk and White folk working together. And I just looked at it as science fiction, because that wasn’t going to happen really. But Ronald saw it as science possibility…

How was a colored boy from South Carolina wearing glasses, never flew a plane—how was he gonna become an astronaut? But Ron was the one who didn’t accept societal norms as being his norm; that was for other people. And he got to be aboard his own Starship Enterprise. —Carl McNair

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Sagan on Illiteracy

The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin. Even if we hardened our hearts to the shame and misery experienced by the victims, the cost of illiteracy to everyone else is severe—the cost in medical expenses and hospitalization, the cost in crime and prisons, the cost in special education, the cost in lost productivity and in potentially brilliant minds who could help solve the dilemmas besetting us.

Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.—Carl Sagan, The Demon-haunted World

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Confusing Clear English

A Fresh View of George Orwell (Salon)

The essential promise of Politics and the English Language was that “if you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.” Does this ring true in 2013? From the US State Department’s carefully-worded missives to the tightly-constructed soundbites of Whitehall Britain’s counterpart to the White House, our contemporary political discourse is replete with evidence that it is perfectly possible to obfuscate by plain speaking, and journalism is right in the thick of it. — Houman Barekat

If I could radically improve three things about public education, both through formal schooling and in informal learning, improving our collective analytic, communication, and creative intelligence would be my triad. These are forms of literacy that make civic participation comprehensible and feasible, but we’re undermining our public sphere by treating them as optional extras.

Addressing common concerns and sharing common spaces aren’t simply about knowing the components of the current order or how the system is supposed to work. They aren’t about the facts alone. They’re also based on shared meaning, and shared meaning emerges from conscious relationship.

We’re all in relationship as co-passengers on our respective continents, but being co-located isn’t enough to build community or to ensure that we understand each other enough to work together. In societies divided by class, culture, and interests, shared meaning has become a chimerical vision that we appeal to in order to induce others to comply with us rather than the thing it is: a process of discourse, negotiation, and learning that moves us forward together.

Simply said: I see no possibility of flourishing collectively without it.