Okay. So I'm Lauren Goldstein, and this is
my literacy narrative. My earliest memory
of organized religion was when I was
about eight or nine. And my dad is Jewish,
and my mom converted before I was born,
but doesn't practice. She was Catholic,
and she remarried a guy who doesn't like
people of pretty much any other race or
religion, so he used to tell me I wasn't
Jewish and tried to change my name, even
though my last name is Goldstein, which
is quite obviously Jewish. So he would
make me go to church. I was really young,
I went to church, and I would ask that-- I
asked the minister one time where I was
listening to the minister preach, and he
said, "God has always been,"
and I thought, "Huh!"--even at ten years old--
"Well, everything has a beginning or an
end, when we tell stories or when we
watch TV or commercials or, you know, my
grandmother tells me a story there's
always a beginning." And so I remember
sitting on the steps of my grandmother's--
or, of my parents' duplex in Philadelphia,
and I sat on the cement steps and I kind
of stared at the cars passing by
and I thought, "Well, darkness right?"
Darkness would be nothing, but darkness
is something--at least the word... at least
the word means something not to get into
Saussure or Derrida or something like that.
So at 10 I thought, "Okay, okay, well
darkness is something," and I tried to
think about it for a couple of minutes
and it was like a--I would call
it a brain twinge. My head--I just kind
of hit a hit a blank wall, and every time
I tried to think about what was before
God or before creation, my brain, it felt
like it just kind of stalled out. So even
at 10 I knew there was something really
interesting about that. Some years later
when I was in high school, and I still--
she was still married to her second
husband, I still didn't self-identify
as Jewish, because he used to tell me
that I wasn't Jewish,
even though I clearly was. I went to
youth group and I asked my youth group
leaders, you know, why is it that when we
try to think about what was before
creation that we run into this brick
wall? Why do our mind stop when we try
to comprehend something that big? And
they told me, "Well, that's because God
doesn't want us to know." And maybe this
is part of the reason I'm a professor
now, but I thought, "That is the
worst answer to a question I've
ever heard." They also told me, those two
particular youth group leaders told me
because one side of my grandparents was
Catholic and the other set of
grandparents was Jewish, that technically
both of them were going to go to hell.
Which I--at which point I stopped going
to youth group, because those same people
said that God doesn't judge, we don't
know who's going to heaven or hell,
and at this point in my life I'm not
even sure what I believe about those two
places. So I realize that this literacy of
organized religion is really complicated
and convoluted. But I decided
when I was in--that I had nothing to do
with organized religion, but when
I got to college I had a really, really
wonderful professor named Karen Levine.
And Karen was the first example of a
Jewish woman that I knew that--
it was really central to her life, and
she went to Temple, and she knew lots of
people in the community, and she was
really a treasure of both the
university community and of the
religious community and of the of the
City of Omaha--she knew so many people so
many people. This was an Omaha, Nebraska.
And I thought, I want to be like Karen
Levine, and I knew that our commonality--
our common interest was that we
were both Jewish women. And she ended
up being my mentor. She introduced me to
people in the Jewish community in Omaha.
And she was very sick. She had breast
cancer that she had been fighting for 16
years, and she would teach on Tuesday/
Thursday, take cancer treatments on
Fridays, recover on the weekend, and come
back and teach again. But you wouldn't
know. She never talked about being very
sick. But she introduced me to many
people in the Jewish community, and I
wanted to be like her. She was the first
person who made me realize that
there is this part of literacy within
organized religion that is welcoming and
fruitful and not preachy or
hypocritical.
And so she really taught me a lot about
that and she helped me through college.
She was somebody who gave me breaks when
when I probably should not have had them,
and she's the reason I wanted to teach.
She's the reason I'm a professor now, and
she's the reason I practice Judaism now,
and that I fully embrace being Goldstein.
And she unfortunately passed away about
about five years ago, my first year of my
MFA program, and to this day when I--
you know, I've had many people I've
lost in my life, but losing Karen still just
hurts. Still just brings me to tears. And
I miss her so, so much. And she taught
me a lot about about literacy, about this
community, about literacy as a community
and that idea. And I think
about her living
through me as I teach. What's interesting
now is, as far as literacy goes, I think
of new media and digital literacy as
somewhat close to a very religious
experience. If you've ever created
something... We created. We were the
beginning of this movie project,
you know, or this audio project. And we
ended it. And we edited it. And we gave it
to other people. As I move through my
PhD program, I
get more and more into new media, and
I really see things like new media, the
creation of new media--and even I'm--I
practice yoga, even yoga I see as a very
spiritual experience. And some people I'm
sure would argue, but I would
say that new media and digital
literacy is very close to this kind of
creation and destruction and Old
Testament notion of these types of
literacy communities. And so there's many,
many more. I could talk about it all
day because I've had so many influences.
But in--Oh! In the same way that
I think about that brain twinge,
about wondering what came before nothing,
in Egypt this year during the riots, the
country shut down the internet, and the
same part of my brain that twinges when
I try to think of what was before
nothing
tends to have a little doomsday in it too,
so I think, well if Egypt could shut down
the internet, what happens if--what
happens at the end of the internet, if
that was even possible, what happens to
these syllabi and courses that we hinge
completely on multimedia and
multi-modality. So I also incorporate--I
think it's very important to--I think
it's very important to realize that
we're teaching community writing as
communication and literacy as something
that also goes beyond goes beyond
new media or is in conjunction with new
media,
because imagine if the internet
ended, how many how much how many hours
of course building we would lose.
We'd have to go back to teaching with pens
and paper. So there's that kind of
duality, and that's about it
for this, what I can say about
literate literacy without going into 20
different things? But I really, really
enjoyed this opportunity, and I look
forward to seeing others' literacy
narratives as well. Thank you.