Think. Pair. Share. with Dr. Ernest Morrell
From Beowulf and hip-hop to the power of literacy transforming lives and changing the world
Ernest Morrell, Director of the Center for Literacy Education, Coyle Professor of Literacy Education, and faculty member in the English, and Africana Studies Departments at Notre Dame, discusses the power of literacy, the limitless potential of children, and being a night person all while having Michelangelo and Raphael painting in his garage.
Notable Quotes
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“It doesn't get old, what literacy can do, why it's important, the potential of kids, the power of them interacting with stories, the beauty of being able to hear their own voice to contribute to the conversation, like what Walt Whitman says, ‘The powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.’”
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“I think you begin with story. So, kids are natural storytellers, but they are first, story experiences. And we tell them stories, you say you tell stories through documentaries. We also tell stories around the dinner table, or on a road trip, and just exposing young kids to more indigenous stories of who we are and how we came to be who we are. Reading to children. And so they understand that the world is full of story, it's a big place. You come into the world able to listen and understand before you're able to speak, and that's for a reason because there's a lot to learn.”
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“I have often said that literacy is a civil rights issue of our time. And I think about it in a couple of ways. One question that I ask is, "What can education do or what kind of education do people need to live faith filled lives of decency and dignity in the 21st century?" A lot of the problems we have in terms of inequity, in terms of life outcomes, have their origin in inequity, in terms of educational input. And the more literacy skills that people have, and the more they're able to read the word in the world and do things we've been talking about the last half hour, the more likely they are to be authors of their futures, and the more likely they are to have lives of decency and dignity. And sometimes we see inequity and we say it's because the people are unequal, when what really is inequitable is the distribution of resource: the literacy education.”
