Projects, ideas, etc.

Mark Bittman's Food blog on the NYTimes.

The True Cost of Tomatoes (Bittman)

Here's the passage that caught my eye:

Most of us eat or buy industrially produced tomatoes, and it doesn’t seem too much to ask that the people who pick them for us be treated a little more fairly. Speak to your supermarket manager or write to the head of the chain you patronize (the easiest way to do this is to visit this page on the CIW site). Supermarkets, I expect, are as susceptible to public pressure as fast-food chains.

There are few places in the country where migrant and immigrant farmworkers are treated well; in Immokalee, at least, they’re being treated better. Bit by bit.

This is a case study...the course could be organized around case studies with digital literacy projects in response to the studies....

Contribution from David Barton (ecologies of literacy)

This morning, I'm reading the chapter "Public Definitions of Literacy" in David Barton's book, Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. As I'm reading, I'm thinking that this would be an excellent chapter to ask students to read early on in a WAW course to get them thinking about the question: What is literacy or what is writing? The chapter unpacks common misconceptions about literacy--or what Barton sees as misconceptions. Specifically, it focuses on the skills and cultural literacy views--but there is a lot more in it that is of use.

Because students have internalized these "public definitions of literacy" and because they guide their thinking about literacy, asking them to read this chapter and interrogate these assumptions could be enormously useful in framing the start of a WAW course.