Joomla!

We ask ourselves this year’s Curriculum Study Commission questions every day: Why Literature? What Literature? How? Whether we set out to explore The Iliad, A House on Mango Street, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” or online-novels.blogspot.com, we navigate district and state mandates that might challenge our preferences and passions. Within our classrooms we try to find the focus between diverse student needs and state common core standards. We measure the force of new technologies on students’ habits of mind. When the literary scholar, Northrup Frye, asked Why Literature? a half century ago, he answered that literature educates the imagination, where we live every day of our lives, in all our private and public decisions. In what ways is Frye’s assumption true? Who has the answer to What Literature? And who has the best answers to How? In what ways, old and new, will we meet our students’ wants and needs?

This year we offer two new ways to continue the conversations around these questions online and in person. The Asilomar tradition expands online through Twitter as we invite attendees to follow us @Asilomar61 where we consider answers to literature’s why’s and what’s and how’s, while the Let’s Talk forums (also new this year) invite informal conversations around shared interests held in various settings between sessions throughout the conference.