Literacy and Culture Voorhees, Terry >>SPEAKER: Say your name and where you work and say my story is about and start going. >>TERRY: Well my name is Terry Voorhees and I work [Inaudible] and my story is about coming to teach writing and coming to understand literacy and the American situation based on my personal experience and my professional experience. I speak English as a foreign language actually. My first two spoken languages were French and Dutch and then I moved to Israel so we learned Hebrew so I can understand the value of literacy not only in a cultural sense to get by in your family and community but for my family it meant we had to be familiar with the appropriate literacy values for many languages. I grew up with this really strong relationship with words and I grew up with this idea that there are words and they may be from different languages but the sense about them are similar. It's almost like saying a love story in Dutch is still a love poem so that's the kind of sense that I have in languages and different languages. So when I started to pursue education I originally went into linguistics because I was so interested in - I don't know if it was sort of a self-medication thing or whatever. So I started to study linguistics and after I finished my Master's before I went into my doctorate - I was hired to teach language at a college and I got pushed into teaching basic writing and then composition courses. Now you might ask why somebody in linguistics is teaching basic writing and composition courses. Well at the time it was because I was there and it seems to have worked out. So from doing that I started to really look at what do these kids bring with them? Even if they're coming up in a background that is sort of "impoverished" in terms of what's available in terms of print. I started to think that they come to these classes, these basic or developmental programs, with the stuff already there. So I wouldn't say come into fit as to how we think you should be but how do we use that stuff to get you to where we think you ought to be rather than sort of imposing our will. So I went into a doctoral program that basically focused on literacy and basic writing and that kind of thing - am I totally off? Is it making sense? I didn't start out as an English major and I didn't start out as that interested in comp theory. When I got into my doctor's program, even though it wasn't a comp prep program and it was a literacy writing program, there was a lot of comp theory in there and I started to realize, not with everybody, but with a lot of what people were doing in the field I said, "This really jives with my idea." Sort of like in one way getting people where they need to be accepted in how they write and how they communicate but doing it in a way that doesn't sort of impose things on them from the outside but using what they already have. So then in doing that I started also getting really interested in this idea of literacy ethnography. I had an instructor, Vicki Purcell-Gates, who wrote a book called "Other People's Words" which is about regular cycles of literacy in Appalachian folk and [Inaudible] just the way they looked at everyday occurrences and weighs that it sort of illustrates relationships with words and I just thought that was fascinating and then I thought well why don't we use these with our students and go with the same idea? Why don't I have my students go out and look at their places and where they come from and see what kind of materials they can get from that and see how that enriches their experience and see how that changes their attitudes about writing. Most of them have been told and have a bad attitude about writing because they're been told either that they can't write or that belongs to the others. So I guess that's my story. >>SPEAKER: I think that's a wonderful story. Thank you very much.