Text Box: Advanced Literacy Professor Stefan Fleischer Thursday 4:00 - 6:40 Permission of instructor required. Contact Prof. Fleischer at engstef@acsu.buffalo.edu Text Box: 494 Text Box: I see this course as especially appropriate for students pursuing an MA in English, whose goal might be to teach at the high school or junior high school level; for students who are presently in the first or second year of a teaching assistantship and who want to further develop their repertoire in teaching literature, writing, media, cultural studies for first-year and sophomore college courses. The course is also open to undergraduates (permission of the instructor required) who are thinking of teaching at the high school or college level. All such students, undergraduate and graduate both, are encouraged to sign up. The aim of the course: provide grounding in theory and practice of teaching high school and entering college students to achieve an advanced literacy. To me, the term advanced literacy suggests a well-developed ability to read critically, to analyze and interpret texts in a range of media, including literature (items in traditional canons, as well as items outside), newspapers, journals of opinion, film and television narrative drama, documentary, photographs, paintings, advertising, and communications/ information as disseminated in the medium of the Internet. But advanced literacy, as opposed to mere functional literacy, also requires a developing self-awareness, an understanding of the social, political, cultural matrix inevitably interweaving the student with the work under study. It is the job of the teacher to develop a critical self-consciousness, to develop the students awareness of his or her standpoint vis-à-vis the matter under study. We will try to map all this by means of topical survey and case study. Some topics: 1) The development of a 60s-70s strain of idealistic, even Utopian pedagogy with a particular focus on the figures of Kenneth Koch, Wishes, Lies and Dreams (1970) and Rose, Where Did you Get That Red? (1973), Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age (1967), H. R. Kohl, The Open Classroom (1969), and always in the background the influential figure of Paolo Freire. An enlightening example of this pedagogy put into practice can be found on the website http://www.middlebury.edu/~publish/middmag/features/swope/swope.html Here Mr. Swope gives an extensive account of teaching Wallace Stevens’s “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” to a class of public middle school children, many of them recent immigrants, in a poor neighborhood in Queens, N.Y. 2) The impact of the culture wars of the last 20 years on high school and college pedagogy, including a critical study of E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy (1987). 3) A critical study of the Educational Testing Service AP (Advanced Placement) English Literature program. AP courses are intended to promote the highest standard of a well-developed literacy among high school students. Past tests are widely distributed and make for valuable, interesting, challenging case study material. There is no doubt that most high school AP English teachers teach to the test. Last year, an astonishing number (212,000) of American high school seniors took the AP Literature exam and between 10% and 20% of these students scored high enough to be given Sophomore standing in English courses at most American universities. The critical questions are: Is this a good thing? If so, why so? If not, why not?