Aging Literacies:
Training and Development Challenges for Faculty

Angela Crow

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Crow broadly addresses the physicality of aging in Chapter 6, and her first main point is that as we age all of us wish to operate in settings where our particular requirements are recognized and met. For purposes of faculty training and development these needs would include room configuration, manuals, handouts, and online resources (p. 90). Evoking the Wysockian mandate to “design the architecture for information dispersal” (p. 91), Crow nonetheless notes that the diversity of the aging process curtails our capacity to predict the nuances of “older adults’ physical and mental experiences when learning new ways of teaching writing” (pp. 91-92). This diversity notwithstanding, Crow suggests that planners would be well advised to adapt and adopt, without “over-accommodating” or “under-accommodating,” the National Institute of Aging website construction guidelines, which she then synopsizes in the areas of visual function, motor coordination, and cognitive aging. The chapter closes with several meta-level observations on composition, one being that “[i]n our field, who is enabled and disabled by the changes in technology will affect the discipline” (pp. 102-103).