American Commons Photographing Public Libraries

An American Commons
Photographing Public Libraries
Across the Nation
6/24 – 8/15/11

Follow Robert Dawson and his son Walker across the United States as they photograph public libraries in some 22 states: New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Washington D.C., Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York and New England.

This project is a photographic survey of public libraries throughout the United States. There are over 17,000 public libraries in this country. Since I began the project in 1994 I have photographed hundreds of libraries in nineteen states. From Alaska to Florida and from New England to California the photographs show a vibrant, essential yet threatened system.

The modern library in the computer age is in the midst of reinventing itself. What belongs in a library? In what form do we want to preserve information and culture? More books are being published than ever before yet library budgets are shrinking. More is also being demanded of our libraries as they move beyond being centers for books to becoming centers for community. People without homes often find libraries to be one of the few safe places as homeless shelters are cut back. Access to the Internet is increasingly necessary to function in our society and many people have only the library to connect to the web. READ MORE !

Examples of earlier work 1994 – 2011

Founder and co-director of the Water in the West Project
Instructor of Photography at San Jose State University
Instructor of Photography at Stanford University

Teach Reading Without Using Labels

Teach reading without using labels
Sign On San Diego: 6.10.11 by John Corcoran

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” As children, we were taught those words. But as adults, we know that words and labels can and do hurt. One such label is “learning disability.”

Like the thorn in the lion’s paw, which others cannot see but the lion feels sharply, the pain caused by being labeled “learning disabled” cannot be discounted. Others may say the label is harmless, or that it is meant to be helpful in the allocation of educational resources. But that label, often given in childhood, can cause pain and shame into adulthood.

Coined in 1963 by Samuel Kirk, who was then a professor of special education at the University of Illinois, the term was first suggested to concerned parents as a means of describing “their children who had disorders in development of language, speech, reading and associated communication skills.”

Before the 1960s, terms that had been used by the medical and education community to describe these children included “brain damaged,” “minimal brain dysfunction,” “mentally retarded” and “emotionally disturbed.” Many parents embraced “learning disabled,” swallowing the psychological placebo in hopes it would make everything all better. But it has not.

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So what term should we use? How about “Susie” or “Jimmy”? Call each learner, child or adult by his or her name. Then identify their individual challenges with reading through diagnostic testing. Based on the results, prescribe the evidence-based treatment.

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It’s time to stop looking at learners with difficulties as disabled. They are “learning able.” I know because of my personal experience. If I had been in elementary school in the early 1960s, I would have been branded with that new label of “learning disabled.” Instead, when I was a little boy growing up in the 1940s, I was put in the “dumb row” because I was among the many children who had difficulties learning how to read and write.

The term “dumb” stuck with me until I learned to read at the age of 48. Finally, as an adult, I found a teacher who knew how to teach me. She gave me a battery of tests that diagnosed my difficulties (a severe auditory discrimination problem was the main one) and recommended proper treatment and instruction based on the findings. Never was I considered learning disabled by that teacher. She believed I was able to read with proper instruction.

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The way forward is clear. We have the research and the science to teach all learners. This is the level playing field that produces equal opportunity for all. Let’s do away with the labels and see each other for who we truly are: learning able. READ MORE !

Corcoran is a literacy advocate and author of “Bridge to Literacy: No Child – or Adult – Left Behind” and his autobiography, “The Teacher Who Couldn’t Read.” He has served on the National Institute for Literacy.

The Next Literacy - Mickey McManus, MAYA Design

TEDTalk - Innovate: Education -- The Next Literacy
Huffington Post: 6.7.11 by Mickey McManus, CEO-MAYA Design

What if there were a basic literacy beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic that we missed, or that wasn't necessary until this moment in our history?

What if that new literacy were the organizing principle between STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and SEL (social, emotional learning)?

What if it could help the least among us leapfrog over the mainstream? What if it could help build collaborative, resilient, creative, & critical thinkers in an age of exponential change? READ MORE !

For more information check out LUMA Institute.

Literacy: About More Than Reading & Jobs

Literacy is about a lot more than reading and jobsSan Francisco Chronicle: May 26, 2011 by Caille Millner

Recently I was invited to speak at a fundraiser for Jumpstart, a national nonprofit organization that focuses on developing literacy in low-income preschool children. Literacy is an important topic to me for many reasons. Americans are obsessed with educational budget cuts and government austerity right now, but the potential victims of all this big talk - a generation of under-educated children - could suffer in even larger ways than just their job prospects.

I was an unusual child in that I never got any instruction in literacy myself. That was because I taught myself to read at the age of 3. It was my only moment of genius, believe me.

But as it happens, I knew someone who spent his entire life without being literate. That person was my grandfather, who's now passed. There were so many things that my grandfather couldn't do, of course. Newspapers, novels, children's stories, letters. All things that I love.

He developed some pretty admirable ways to cope with these limitations - instead of spending the mornings with a newspaper, for instance, he'd spend the evenings with the radio. He asked other people to write down his letters - my mother did this for him a lot when she was a child.

But one of the important things about literacy is that it gives you a sense of life's possibilities beyond just survival.

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To get back to the idea of understanding life's possibilities through literacy - when you can read, you can read other people's stories. You can step into other people's lives, other people's existences. And when that happens, your own world expands. My grandfather, for example, never knew anything about the world outside of his own state, his own county, his own porch.

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So helping children become literate is our patriotic duty. They'll be better citizens, of course, because they can think critically and vote accordingly. They'll have richer and fuller personal lives because they can understand other people. And they'll be able to participate in the life of this country in a way that's constructive, positive and informed. READ MORE !

The Future of the Library

The future of the library
What is a public library for?
Seth’s Blog: 5.17.11

First, how we got here:

Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.

This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn't have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.

Only after that did we invent the librarian.

The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.

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The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

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We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime. READ MORE !

SETH GODIN has written thirteen books that have been translated into more than thirty languages. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything.

The Times in Plain English

The Times in Plain English

A new newspaper for adult learners that has important news from America’s best sources of information. The writing is in clear, readable English.

The stories with links to the full articles come from these newspapers:

Arizona Republic
Los Angeles Times
Miami Herald
New York Times
Wall Street Journal
Washington Post

Topics Include:

Education
Health
Immigration
In Brief
Law
Money & Work
New York
News
Of Interest

The editor of The Times in Plain English is Arthur Schiff, the publisher of City Family magazine published in New York in the 1990′s.

Learning To Read: How Young is Too Young ?

Learning to Read: How Young is Too Young?Huffington Post: 5.12.11 by Lisa Guernsey

Should reading be taught in first grade or in kindergarten?
Maybe preschool?
How about even younger?

Most literacy researchers agree that there's a limit to how young you can go and that in infancy and toddlerhood it makes no sense to try to start formal reading instruction. Don't tell that to Janet Doman, director of a small organization called the Institutes for Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia. Doman is trying to spread the idea that the process of learning to read can start in babyhood.

She suggests that parents train their babies by holding up cards with words written in large letters while speaking the words. Her father, Glenn Doman, is the Institutes' founder and co-author of a decades-old, self-published book, How to Teach Your Baby to Read.

To serious researchers, the Domans' ideas are disturbingly devoid of any basis in mainstream science and appear to rely entirely on anecdotal evidence. Yet among many parents and some childcare providers, the notion of very early reading is taking hold nevertheless.

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Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff, two nationally recognized developmental psychologists who co-wrote, with Diane Eyer, the acclaimed book Einstein Never Used Flashcards, have been urging parents to recognize the simple power of conversational moments with young children instead of drilling them on vocabulary words. READ MORE !