Aging Literacies:
Training and Development Challenges for Faculty
Angela Crow
Shaping Research/Hybridity?
In Chapter 4, Crow devotes her attention to a discussion of the need for “multiple research venues” taken from composition and other fields that are informed by aging, since in the aggregate these “may help us understand more about how to create the environment in which faculty are able to take risks” with respect to “the accumulation of new literacies” (p. 61). Drawing from the work of literacy theorists and researchers Crow ponders experimental designs that are attuned to actual learning perspectives and strategies, which she connects rhetorically to “locating ourselves as learners” and “the positions we take when learning” (p. 62). Among her suggestions is to strive for a collaborative dynamic, “a collective that works on [the often shifting] technology together” (p. 73), and a movement away from the “polarities of trainers and learners” (p. 74). This is helpful, Crow muses, since faculty training and development workshops that give rise to marginalization will in all likelihood lead to frustration and arrive at failure. Crow terminates the chapter with a request for sensitivity to “our desires, worries, and frustrations with this never-ending push to acquire new literacies” (p. 74).