I do recommend you to go to Peg's post here, and read the three posts entitled "Finding Your Way in Media and Materials", "Your Path—Content and Themes", and "Finding Your Voice, Your Path" by Susie Monday.
As a linguist, I disagree that alphabet is a building block for the spoken language; there are languages around the world that are spoken but never written, therefore, not read. Writing, ergo spelling, came later historically, as well as in individuals learning languages at a young age, most notably one's native language/s. This is also why Shakespeare spelled the same word differently; spelling was set in stone after the printing press. Language is entirely possible without writing systems, including alphabets. Though I know not how literacy is defined.
But this is just a very minor part of Susie's writing and one which doesn't at all get in the way of appreciating it.
Then, you can listen to a podcast here, by Susie's coauthor, Susan Marcus speaking about creativity as the next literacy. Susie and Susan wrote "New World Kid". More about the book here.
PS. It's not the muse stuff; it's about training children, and in my case, myself.
PPS. Yeah, yeah, another book I have to have...
3 comments:
HI Meg, glad you liked the post. Thanks for linking to it!
HI Meg, Thanks for the nice links -- and yes, I agree that the alphabetic reference has big weaknesses -- and you certainly have the linguistic bead on us, I think we are trying to get people to see a primacy to learning this sensory alphabet as a way to transfer information from within to without and between people and between fields -- with that as the alphabetic reference. It's a really hard thing to explain somehow, and making our "alphabet" somehow parallel to the alphabet and numeric symbol systems helps us to make a case. We'll have to keep trying to figure out better ways to explain it!
And yes, it's the training, not just for kids but all us grownup creatives, too. Hope you really enjoy the book. S
Thank YOU, Peg.
Thank you for visiting, Susie. I kind of guessed it was more an allusion rather than a fact, the reference to alphabets. At the same time childhood language acquisition is so different from adult language acquisition, and the former is what I studied in some depth.
Anyhow, I look forward to the book, and training myself.
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