1. Changing Landscapes
Literature
and
Literacy

2. Dr. Teri S. Lesesne
Sam Houston State University
Department of Library Science
3. Where is the material?
www.slideshare.net/ProfessorNana
And at my blog at LiveJournal
ProfessorNana
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4. Sparknotes for Goodnight Moon
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Context

America after the Great War was full of economic prosperity and social upheaval. Margaret Wise Brown, renowned children's book author, made it her life's goal to both comfort the youth of the era and expose the flaws of human advancement through her didactic work. In Goodnight Moon, Brown explores the relationship between a young bunny and his material possessions set against the backdrop of the Cold War. The book was met with critical and commercial success. Margaret Wise Brown's work, which has been translated into countless languages and has sold over 40 million copies, still resonates with children's librarians and counter-culture revolutionaries for its duality as good-natured poetry and allegory of human alienation.
5. Goodnight Moon
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Plot Overview

A bunny says goodnight to the moon and other things.
6. Goodnight Moon
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Summary/Analysis

The book opens as a young bunny prepares for sleep in his bedroom. The first half of Brown's magnum opus is entirely devoted to the contents of "the great green room." As symbolic items such as a "balloon" and a "telephone" are described, our protagonist bunny, oppressively tucked into bed, resists the confines of sleep. Brown gives particular attention to a large number of animals that populate the room: "two kittens with mittens" and a "little mouse." The room also contains a picture of a "cow jumping over a moon" and "bears on chairs." Here, Brown twists our preconceptions of settingswhere the internal now is wild, but the external ("the moon" and "the stars") serene. The room full of raging wildlife mirrors the little bunny's desire to throw off his sheets and play.
7. Goodnight Moon
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At the midpoint of her Homeric epic, an antagonist is revealed: "a quiet old lady whispering hush." The bunny, first enthralled by the items, now must face an authority figure desiring quiet in the wild. Succumbing to his Oedipal desire to please his maternal figure, the bunny starts to settle and go to bed. Then, in a process of self-actualization, the young bunny says goodnight to everything both in and out of the room. The climax is realized when the bunny says goodnight to the "old woman who says hush," thereby making his amends and completing his quixotic journey to rid himself of his surroundings. In the denouement, the bunny turns his attention to the outer world in ways not unlike Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. At peace with the loss of his maternal authority figure, the young bunny says goodnight to the moon, whose presence loomed throughout the narrative.
8. Goodnight Moon
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Possible Essay Questions

1) Analyze the scene in which the bunny says goodnight to the lighthouse in relationship with the rest of the book. Cite textual evidence whenever possible.

2) Compare and contrast Goodnight Moon with The Sun Also Rises. Whose sentences are simpler: Brown's or Hemingway's?

3) What have you said goodnight to? Analyze what that says about you. Try not to cry.

9. This is NOT the direction we want to see if literacy and literature are going to continue to evolve andchange.
10. What I want to talk about today is not RIGOR (mortis) but CHALLENGE.
11. Where this all began
12. Mashups
Blur lines (genre crossing)
Re-envision classic(themes)
Re-imagine approaches (assessment)
13. The first dimensional shift has to do with literacy and how it is evolving. Literacy today involves not only text, but also image and screen literacy. The ability to "read" multimedia texts and to feel comfortable with new, multiple-media genres is decidedly nontrivial.
GROWING UP DIGITAL
John Seeley Brown
14. 15.
The developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner made a brilliant observation years ago when he said we can teach people about a subject matter like physics-its concepts, conceptual frameworks, its facts-and provide them with explicit knowledge of the field, but being a physicist involves a lot more than getting all the answers right at the end of each chapter.
John Seeley Brown
16. Decoding vs. Reading
17. Likewise, we can provide kids with all of the tools and skills of reading but not transform them into readers.Becoming a reader takes more than skills.
Me
18. "Above all, comprehension is the inner conversation that readers have with text." -- Steph Harvey
19. Why Be Concerned?
Recent Research on Reading
Common Core Texts
TexasData
20. Recent Survey Study
46% of kids responded that they would benefit from parents spending more time reading with and to them
More than 50% of parents reported difficulty getting kids to read outside of school
20% of the kids reported hardly ever reading a book; 30% read only occasionally
http://tinyurl.com/48mt4g5
21. Common Core Exemplars
Avg. publication dates of Common Core exemplar texts:
K-11963,
4-5 1937,
6-8 NF 1895,
9-10 1801,
HS NF 1897.
-- Daniels
22. 23. So, how do we change this?

Becoming familiar with the landscape

24. Learning to navigate it with our students