Thank you, Professor Lewis. Thank you, as a former student of mine and my replacement, for taking on one more assignment for me. I am deeply honored to be with you and everyone here, although I miss the Amphitheater and its chirpy bird setting. I hope those birds are using their words in spite of the weather.

I am especially honored that so many people have allowed me to teach their children, in public schools and at this stunning college, for over 53 years. In case this weekend and this campus beauty are not enough awe for you, I am here to share some thoughts about how to be just as awed by others as we are by the tree peonies and the rose garden. I want us to work better at living into what Martin Luther King called “beloved community.” 

The great novelist Toni Morrison said, in her Nobel Award speech: We die. That may be the meaning of our lives. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. 

Language has been what we have been swimming in our whole lives. It is our natural habitat, whether we read with our eyes, ears, or fingers; whether we write with our hands or chisels, paintbrushes or knitting needles. Whether we are talking about language, literacies, or the language arts, we swim in this bedazzling water of language every day and, I believe, we take it for granted. We also fight about it. We create dramas big and small. We fight about the place of phonics in decoding instruction, we fight about whether we should still teach cursive, we fight about whether audiobooks count as reading. In these times we fight about what books should be banned and which ones are okay. It is kind of funny that when books get banned, that’s when their sales go up! Btw, there is a banned book author sitting in the audience today but I won’t tell you who they are. So there!

Today, I want to share some social views on literacies because we humans are awesome when it comes to language. As the writer Ocean Vuong has said: “Reading and writing, like other crafts, come to mind slowly, in pieces.” (2016, The New Yorker). So let us take a bit of time today to craftily piece this quilt of literacies together through a few ideas and some stories that focus on people, many of them from this campus.

First, here are some ideas about literacy before I tell some stories. By the way, stories are what we humans do REALLY well with language.

• Literacy is reading and writing. No! It is so much more. Jerome Harste has said literacy is “a particular set of social practices that a particular set of people value.” We are used to thinking of literacy as only reading and writing. But it is any sort of code and communication. It is speaking, listening, art, music, theater, dance, beautiful brickwork, knitting, ropes and knots, plumbing, and the tying of fly-fishing lures. Literacy is codes and communication used every day among people. And, in the case of fly-fishing, among humans and fish.
• Here is a wonderful fact: Young children demonstrate reading fluency better while reading to dogs and, I presume, stuffies rather than to teachers and parents. But why? I suspect the dogs are less judgmental and are grateful for the attention.
• Scientists tell us that the ability to read is not hard-wired in the human brain, although talking and listening are. Some would have us believe that there is only one right way to teach all children how to read. This is not true. No child or adult should ever be denied the keys to the codes, but human differences show us over and over that we each come to reading through many technologies: alphabetic principles; phonemic, semantic, and syntactic awareness; background knowledge; memorization, and, practice, practice, practice in what we call communities of practice, i.e. among other humans. Or among dogs, as I mentioned before.
• Although we might not be hard-wired to read, and most of us need some instruction, we are truly hard-wired to talk, to listen, to gesture, to make faces, and to make marks, including the carefully spaced crayon dots I made as child in the mortar between the fireplace bricks. Oops!
• The Chinese invented paper a long, long time ago. Humans make inks out of berries, oak galls, charcoal, and iron. I obviously should have gone for the paper, not the fireplace. But look at us now! We invented colleges where we use so much paper that our copiers now have controls to stop us from randomly printing and wasting paper! This is TRUE!

Now you might think that I’ll veer in the direction of telling you to read more books, to read more to the young ones in your life, and to get off your phones. You can do all of this, I won’t stop you. I WANT you to read more, to immerse children in reading, and support more authors.  But I also want you to play with words, to learn another language, to sing love songs, and to say please and thank you. And, in doing so, to marvel at your linguistic abilities and those of all the people you encounter.

But too often our narrow views of language and literacy have us comparing people, putting them into boxes, or placing them on some bell curve of narrow accomplishment. These ways keep us from truly seeing and coming to know one another, keep us from deep appreciation for language practices and one another. So today, instead, I’ll tell you a few true stories of literacies to expand how we think about this miracle so that we might appreciate one another more deeply.

Story 1: Reading her name for the first time

Once upon a time there was a three year old. Her name was Penn, P E N N, and she had written her name many times but she wasn’t exactly a reader yet. She was only three! But she was walking down the road to an ice cream store in a little coastal town in Maine when she stopped in her tracks. She looked at her parents, and back to a sign in the window that said OPEN, O P E N. Then she quietly said, “Mom, that’s my name. PEN.” The world, her parents, and perhaps the setting sun, stood still, taking in the glorious moment when a young child attaches personal meaning to a word and, suddenly, the road to literacy opens up. Pun intended. Although it would be a few more years, and books, and instruction, that would turn her into an avid reader of graphic novels, that was a moment of awe. And yes, each of us who have learned to read have had that moment. What if we celebrated everyone’s first moment of seeing personal meaning in print? What is the population on earth? We could have so many celebrations!

Story 2: Raising pigeons and reading

Once upon another time, early in my teaching career, I was trying to teach a low-income, rural 7th grade student who I was told read at a “2nd grade level” to read. He was described as a “reluctant reader,” a “slow reader,” a “non-reader,” and he barely talked to me. I tried all the tricks and cajoling that had worked on so many other students —comic books, newspapers, having him dictate stories, flash cards, including the teaching method of kindness. My eventual irritation and lack of empathy got the best of me, 

“Is there anything you read?” I asked. “You must read SOMETHING! Anything at all?”

“A pigeon journal,” he told me. “I breed and raise pigeons and I need to take care of them properly, feed them right, do everything the right way.”

“Bring in the pigeon journal,” I said.

It turned out to be a professional, scientific journal regarding the breeding, feeding, and medical care of pigeons. It was difficult for me to read because of its technical language and my lack of prior knowledge on the subject. But he both read and comprehended it. We had a place to begin. That summer we worked together to turn his out-of-school literacy into something that looked like schooled-literacy so that he could be affirmed in what he already knew how to do, and to claim all the rights and privileges that come with a literate social identity, like being respected for what he knew and knew how to do.

This is an example of what Smith (1987) and Gilmore (2003) suggest are “internalized and stigmatized identities.” That may be the actual literacy problem. If teachers do not know what the actual struggle is, and how broad it might be, then they cannot locate how people already are literate, and they cannot empathize with the complexity of the struggle to learn and have one’s literate identity validated. If teachers don’t know the vastness of what children already know, including their first languages and background knowledge, we limit our ability to support them in new learning. It is our lack of openness to the ways that people are already literate that closes the door for too many learners. Those pigeons, by the way, drove me into graduate school.

Story 3: Changing one another’s lives through our words

When you think of colleges, you might think of professors as the teachers and students as the learners. But this is not the full story. On this campus, we are surrounded by teachers and learners and they are not always who you think they are. 

I’ve been working with a program here on campus called Learning for Life since 1998. In this program, staff members and students work as partners and through workshops, in mutual and reciprocal learning, where we try to live into our deepest inclusive learning mission. I’m going to tell you about some of what staff and students have learned from one another at this College.

Once upon a time I came to know the lovely Miss Liz. Liz worked for Environmental Services at the College and she was exceedingly kind, smart, and dedicated to the higher education of her four children. She showed me the supply closet, always made sure I had what I needed to teach, and she became my friend. Miss Liz helped to inspire our Learning for Life program. She was generous in working in student partnerships, learning algebra, sharing her tap dancing, teaching students of her migration from a southern state to Chester, Pa., learning and teaching, back and forth, one on one. She eventually became a spokesperson for the L4L program at national education conferences, perfecting her public speaking skills and then taking those oral literacies into her church leadership. And when she went through an unwelcomed cancer diagnosis, she did not limit herself to the literacies of cancer, all of the new vocabulary and paperwork. No, Miss Liz became a poet, lived fully into her literate identity, using that literacy practice to see her through a difficult time. I quote a line from one of her published poems: Patience. Wait for the next moment. Enjoy now. 

We should listen to Miss Liz. I can tell you that her inspiration helped to get me through my cancer experience.

Once upon a time there was a student I’ll call Lucas, studying to become a doctor by majoring in comparative literature, the epitome of the liberal arts student. On top of this, he made time to get to know people, including a Learning for Life partnership with an EVS worker. When Lucas started hanging out at the gym at 7:30 a.m., Miss S became his steady workout partner for four years. They learned workouts together, often with other staff joining them. Miss S taught Lucas some cooking, using spices that he did not know, resulting in something Lucas called “delicious and stew-y at the end.” 

Lucas claims that his participation with Miss S and the program changed his life. He came to college interested in global health but realized “the (health) inequities I read about, the same issues, even in institutions like our College, opened my eyes to what was under my nose. Reciprocal, bi-directional learning is a nice tool of engagement…. We talk about people who are vulnerable.... but what about the strengths of people?” 

Lucas described a day at the gym when Miss S shared that she was reflecting upon the violent death of her son. He listened as she shared her sadness but noticed she described how this anniversary always brings her family together in love and care. He suddenly saw the context of resilience and strength in her and her community. He shared: “I was naïve in the moment… thinking I could help people to rise up. That experience shook the whole thing up for me. I was in awe of this woman who was teaching me about strength. Strength in a community that already exists… ”

Lucas shifted what he called his “saviorism” in the global medical world to a focus on local and community health, in an asset-based approach to medicine. While much of medicine focuses on disease and deficits, he now focuses on “an approach that is strength-based. What are the assets and strengths in a community? How can we in medicine partner in an equitable way with a community? What are the different types of expertise in local stakeholders? Who are the key members of a community and how can we get them on our research team? How can we build power and capacity in communities through skills and grants?”

Lucas was granted proximity to someone across class, race, and a powerful campus hierarchy and he learned to listen, he learned what he did not know, something that he did not even know that he did not know. But he knew Miss S, and therefore, when she shared her terrible experience and the deep support of her family and community, there was little room for feeling sorry for her, there was only what he called “awe.” He held on to this life-changing learning through medical school, adding a degree in health sciences, with a focus on community health. 

This kind of learning cannot be transmitted in lectures; it can only be learned in context, in proximity, and human apprenticeship to others. 

I have so many other stories of remarkable staff on this campus, who teach and lean among the rest of us. I’ll mention a few more. 

• Miss Vivian used her literacies to advocate successfully for a children’s playground in her community. After she passed recently, her city named that playground the Vivian Hart Community Playground.
• Another student had a learning partnership with a dining staff member and helped him to make a marriage proposal video for his girlfriend. The student was blown away by the love she saw and it left her in awe. Perhaps that is how she later found her way to marry a Swattie.
• Mr. D worked in EVS but really saw himself as a writer. He found his author home writing an opinion column for the Swarthmore College newspaper, The Phoenix. 
• Miss Donnie works in EVS and teaches dance at the BCC.
• Debbie keeps the Provost’s office running AND she shares her knitting expertise with staff and students through L4L. She does so much for wellness through knitting, even though it is not in her job description. The staff and students rave about her teaching.
• Miss Nonna wrote a book. A BOOK!
• Josh runs the MakerSpace and makes everyone welcome with his literacies of materials, technologies, and safety.
• Mr. B was the night supervisor for EVS. He figured out that if his staff were learning new skills, such as making movies, developing computer skills, doing the radio station with students, and learning photography, they would love coming to work and get their work done more thoroughly and joyfully. He figured out that students would respect staff more if they saw their work up close so he helped to start Take a Student to Work events. 

What do these stories have in common? These are wonderful community members who use their words and expertise, as teachers, for the good of others in this beloved community.

Story 4: Going to college to actually, for real, BECOME a (capital R) Reader

In case you are wondering, yes, learning also takes place in classes at Swarthmore, too! Our students study all of the majors you have seen listed but there is one aspect of literacy learning that also matters and that is identity. While it is important to learn skills, theories, and information, it is equally important to come out of learning environments having taken on an identity, such as scientist, mathematician, writer, or social justice change agent. Although our students constantly write, often long, long papers, and we assign too much reading, they do not always feel that they are full-fledged readers and writers. Isn’t that something odd?! Allow me to tell you one last story. 

Once upon a time, more recently, as the pandemic perched at our doorsteps, I had a student in a course on the critical reading of children and young adult literature. Now, you would think that all students at Swarthmore can claim identities as readers and writers before they even get here. One, who already knew two languages, was a diligent student, and was happy to participate in engaging both literature and theory. But she told me, quite clearly, “I’m not a reader, Professor Diane. I don’t really like reading. I’m taking the course because you’re my advisor.” She just wasn’t, as she said, a “reader.” 

We spent tons of time joyfully reading and discussing picture books and young adult novels in small groups, trying to think like children and teens while we also read theory and research. The books represented diverse young people as well as stunning writing. Much of our work was about analyzing what made children’s literature artistically communicative, historically significant, and engaging of student identities.

About 4 weeks into the Spring 2020 term, this student approached me after class, tears dripping down her shining face, to say, “Professor, I’m a reader! Professor, I’m a reader.” Two weeks later the College shut down and there we were, on Zoom, doing the best we could, but she was already a joyous reader! That experience, for that student, was a moment of pure joy, one for which I am eternally grateful to her for sharing with me. But, she should not have had to wait that long to BE a reader. Like Penn, from our first story, she should have felt that every day of her reading life. 

Incidentally, she is now a Philadelphia teacher, churning the ripples of literacy for others.

Closing

I haven’t even mentioned the times you are walking along and see a twig that looks like the letter Y, or two jet trails in the sky that make an equal sign or an X, or find a rock in the shape of a heart, because that’s how they often fracture, like our own hearts. I believe that literacy is truly everywhere, especially in our daily immersion in language with others, if we just pay attention. Yet we are so often caught up in measuring, comparing, and ranking one another that we miss the best parts of our language journeys.

These stories can remind us of how intertwined language, love, and awe are. They remind me of what the great Brazilian critical educator Paulo Freire has said: “There cannot be a reading of the text without reading the world, without reading the context.” Freire has also said that “reading has to be a loving event… because it has to do with the reader re-writing the text.” You might have noticed that, in all of these stories, love is a protagonist.

So I ask you, as we sit in awe of these beautiful graduates, I ask you to pay attention to all of the everyday language practices of all of us. I ask you to be joyously gobsmacked by those who speak a different language than you, or who speak five languages, or who speak and listen through the gestural language of American Sign Language, or who read through their fingers or their ears. I ask you, if you do not feel that you are a reader or writer, to think about the last time you read a street sign, wrote a list, or listened or spoke with love. Because you have all read and written, spoken and listened, TODAY. You, too, are a member of the Literacy Club of Swarthmore College, an esteemed organization that I just made up. With you.

Let me close with two assignments for all of you, especially you graduates: Please leave here today, committed to paying attention to our many ways of speaking and listening, reading and writing, that water of language that we swim in, with love. AND write a thank you note to the people who have supported you to this glorious moment, your families, a professor, or a staff member at this College. Or look them in the eyes and use your words, to say THANK YOU. Promise me, pinky swear. That’s your assignment.

From the bottom and top of my very full heart, thank you for laughing at my jokes, listening to my stories, and crafting your own literacy stories, once upon a time.