Aging Literacies:
Training and Development Challenges for Faculty
Angela Crow
What Are Literate Acts
At the core of Chapter 1 is a straightforward question: “How does change occur in a writing program … when the existing literacies remain the comfortable literacies for teachers” (p. 24)? This is no trivial concern since as Crow observes, “we cannot hope to meet the technologically rich literacy objectives in our program outcomes if we don’t develop viable plans for acquiring new literacies” (p. 24). Such plans understandably become problematic when, not always for generational reasons, the acquisition of a new orientation causes one to feel ineffective, challenges one’s sense of “what kinds of knowledge matters” (p. 16), and “undermine[s] values one might hold that reflect one’s enculturation into the field” (p. 22). At a time when institutions and students increasingly expect a technologized pedagogy, it becomes obvious that the “viable plans” to which Crow refers are of genuine consequence. For the present Crow leaves it to others to arrive at these plans, though she notes that cost, hardware, software, computer availability, and space are all significant variables. Of equal importance, however, is Crow’s insistence that faculty participants manage to “maintain their levels of authority and credibility” in the acquisition process (p. 21).