Deborah Brandt at the 2008 Summer Institute

In addition to the sessions planned by institute leaders and the special-interest group sessions that will be initiated throughout the week by institute participants, we've planned several special events during the institute. Here's a preview of one of them.

On Wednesday afternoon, Professor Deborah Brandt, a renowned literacy researcher in the composition and rhetoric program in the English Department at UW-Madison, will be with us at the institute to present an exciting talk about her current research. She was a featured speaker at the 2003 institute in Madison, and we're delighted that she'll be joining us again this year. She will also join us for informal conversation over lunch on Thursday. Here's the title and description of her talk:

Writing over Reading

• From a pedagogical perspective, writing and reading are usually seen as mutually sustaining processes. But historically and culturally, mass writing and mass reading have developed through radically different sponsorship networks and rationales. These differences have become especially palpable of late given the changes in the kind of work Americans do and how they do it. For the first time in the history of mass literacy, writing is joining--and perhaps overtaking--reading as a basis of routine literate experience among a broad population. How do the competing legacies of reading and writing manifest themselves in the experiences of workaday Americans? How does "writing over reading" upset not only how we read but how think about and value literacy?

We're all in for a treat on Wednesday afternoon!

If you'd like to learn more about Deborah Brandt, see the featured local speakers section of the institute website and listen to a series of podcasts from our writing center, featuring interviews with her. Just go to the UW-Madison Writing Center, and click on podcasts.

More later . . .

Brad