BiblioVault - Books about Literacy

The Darker Side of the Renaissance

Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization, 2nd Edition

Walter D. Mignolo

University of Michigan Press, 2003

The Darker Side of the Renaissance weaves together literature, semiotics, history, historiography, cartography, and cultural theory to examine the role of language in the colonization of the New World. Exploring the many connections among writing, social organization, and political control, including how alphabetic writing is linked with the exercise of power, Walter D. Mignolo claims that European forms of literacy were at the heart of New World colonization. It has long been acknowledged that Amerindians were at a disadvantage in facing European invaders because native cultures did not employ the same kind of texts (hence "knowledge") that the Europeans valued. Yet no one but Mignolo has so thoroughly examined either the process or the implications of conquest and destruction through language. The book continues to challenge commonplace understandings of New World history and to stimulate new colonial and postcolonial scholarship.
Walter D. Mignolo is Professor in the Department of Romance Studies and the Program in Literature, Duke University.

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The Darker Side of the Renaissance

Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization

Walter D. Mignolo

University of Michigan Press, 1995

Winner of the Modern Language Association's Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize.

The Darker Side of the Renaissance weaves together literature, semiotics, history, historiography, cartography, geography, and cultural theory to examine the role of language in the colonization of the New World.

Walter D. Mignolo locates the privileging of European forms of literacy at the heart of New World colonization. He examines how alphabetic writing is linked with the exercise of power, what role "the book" has played in colonial relations, and the many connections between writing, social organization, and political control. It has long been acknowledged that Amerindians were at a disadvantage in facing European invaders because native cultures did not employ the same kind of texts (hence "knowledge") that were validated by the Europeans. Yet no study until this one has so thoroughly analyzed either the process or the implications of conquest and destruction through sign systems.

Starting with the contrasts between Amerindian and European writing systems, Mignolo moves through such topics as the development of Spanish grammar, the different understandings of the book as object and text, principles of genre in history-writing, and an analysis of linguistic descriptions and mapping techniques in relation to the construction of territoriality and understandings of cultural space.

The Darker Side of the Renaissance will significantly challenge commonplace understandings of New World history. More importantly, it will continue to stimulate and provide models for new colonial and post-colonial scholarship.

". . . a contribution to Renaissance studies of the first order. The field will have to reckon with it for years to come, for it will unquestionably become the point of departure for discussion not only on the foundations and achievements of the Renaissance but also on the effects and influences on colonized cultures." -- Journal of Hispanic/ Latino Theology

Walter D. Mignolo is Professor in the Department of Romance Studies and the Program in Literature, Duke University.

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Data Literacy in Academic Libraries

Teaching Critical Thinking with Numbers

Julia Bauder

American Library Association, 2021

We live in a data-driven world, much of it processed and served up by increasingly complex algorithms, and evaluating its quality requires its own skillset. As a component of information literacy, it's crucial that students learn how to think critically about statistics, data, and related visualizations. Here, Bauder and her fellow contributors show how librarians are helping students to access, interpret, critically assess, manage, handle, and ethically use data. Offering readers a roadmap for effectively teaching data literacy at the undergraduate level, this volume explores such topics as

the potential for large-scale library/faculty partnerships to incorporate data literacy instruction across the undergraduate curriculum;
how the principles of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education can help to situate data literacy within a broader information literacy context;
a report on the expectations of classroom faculty concerning their students’ data literacy skills;
various ways that librarians can partner with faculty;
case studies of two initiatives spearheaded by Purdue University Libraries and University of Houston Libraries that support faculty as they integrate more work with data into their courses;
Barnard College’s Empirical Reasoning Center, which provides workshops and walk-in consultations to more than a thousand students annually;
how a one-shot session using the PolicyMap data mapping tool can be used to teach students from many different disciplines;
diving into quantitative data to determine the truth or falsity of potential “fake news” claims; and
a for-credit, librarian-taught course on information dissemination and the ethical use of information.

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Del Otro Lado

Literacy and Migration across the U.S.-Mexico Border

Susan V. Meyers

Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

In Del OtroLado: Literacy and Migration across the U.S.-Mexico Border, author Susan V. Meyers draws on her year-long ethnographic study in Mexico and the United States to analyze the literacy practices of Mexican-origin students on both sides of the border.

Meyers begins by taking readers through the historical development of the rural Mexican town of Villachuato. Through a series of case studies spanning the decades between the Mexican Revolution and the modern-day village, Meyers explores the ever-widening gulf between the priorities of students and the ideals of the public education system. As more and more of Villachuato’s families migrate in an effort to find work in the wake of shifting transnational economic policies like NAFTA, the town’s public school teachers find themselves frustrated by spiraling drop-out rates. Meyers discovers that students often consider the current curriculum irrelevant and reject the established value systems of Mexico’s public schools. Meyers debunks the longstanding myth that literacy is tied to economic development, arguing that a “literacy contract” model, in which students participate in public education in exchange for access to increased earning potential, better illustrates the situation in rural Mexico.

Meyers next explores literacy on the other side of the border, traveling to Marshalltown, Iowa, where many former citizens of Villachuato have come to reside because of the availability of jobs for unskilled workers at the huge Swift meat-packing plant there. Here she discovers that Mexican-origin families in the United States often consider education a desirable end in itself rather than a means to an end. She argues that migration has a catalyzing effect on literacy, particularly as Mexican migrant families tend to view education as a desirable form of prestige.

Meyers reveals the history and policies that have shaped the literacy practices of Mexican-origin students, and she raises important questions about not only the obligation of the United States to educate migrant students, but also those students’ educational struggles and ways in which these difficulties can be overcome. This transnational study is essential reading for scholars, students, educators and lawmakers interested in shaping the future of educational policy.

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Dido's Daughters

Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France

Margaret W. Ferguson

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Winner of the 2004 Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and the 2003 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.

Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in Dido's Daughters, this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing.

Fegurson's aim in this long-awaited work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido—builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome—Ferguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.

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Diverse by Design

Literacy Education within Multicultural Institutions

Christopher Schroeder

Utah State University Press, 2011

Diversity, despite what we say, disturbs us. In the U.S., we debate linguistic rights, the need for an official language, and educational policies for language minority students. On the one hand, we believe in the rights of individuals, including (at least in the academy) the right to one’s own language. On the other hand, we sponsor a single common language, monolingual and standard, for full participation and communication in both the academy and in U.S. society.

In Diverse by Design, Christopher Schroeder reports on an institutional case study conducted at an officially designated Hispanic-Serving Institution. He gives particular attention to a cohort of Latino students in a special admissions program, to document their experience of a program designed to help students surmount the “obstacle” that ethnolinguistic diversity is perceived to be.

Ultimately, Schroeder argues for reframing multilingualism and multiculturalism, not as obstacles, but as intellectual resources to exploit. While diversity might disturb us, we can overcome its challenges by a more expansive sense of social identity. In an increasingly globalized society, literacy ideologies are ever more critical to educational equity, and to human lives.

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Doing Difference Differently

Chinese International Students’ Literacy Practices and Affordances

Zhaozhe Wang

Utah State University Press, 2024

Doing Difference Differently ethnographically recounts the stories of four Chinese international students navigating the complex socio-academic environment of a North American institution for higher education. Zhaozhe Wang traces the ecologically situated and distributed literacy practices of these individuals across rhetorical contexts, both on and off campus, and reconstructs the digitally networked, spatiotemporally emerging, rhetorically potent, and ecologically afforded literacy worlds of Chinese international students.

Doing Difference Differently provides an in-depth, nuanced understanding of the multifaceted literate lives of this often-marginalized cultural group, highlighting their diverse aspirations, personas, communities, challenges, and strategies. The book reconceptualizes the linguistic and cultural differences of Chinese international students as active processes of embracing, performing, resisting, negotiating, and redefining the identities that institutions impose on them through everyday literacy practices. Wang offers an analytical heuristic for researchers and educators to better understand these students’ backgrounds and to more effectively and ethically support and advocate for them. This case study critically engages broad and interconnected concepts that are essential to educators’ collective understanding of Generation Z students brought up in cultural and educational contexts outside of the European-American sphere.

This book appeals to scholars, researchers, teachers, and administrators working in North American higher education and English-speaking countries, particularly those in the fields of writing studies, second language studies, applied linguistics, multilingual education, literacy studies, and international education. Educators across disciplines seeking to better understand the growing population of Chinese international students in North America will likewise benefit.

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