Nineteen Clues - Taylor, Denny

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Résumé :
What would it take to make Earth a child safe zone? Nineteen Clues: Great Transformations Can be Achieved through Collective Action makes the case that there are two threats to our children that impact every aspect of their present and future lives. The first threat to our children is the hostile take over the US public education system. Noam Chomsky calls it, the campaign to destroy those parts of the education system that enrich the lives of students, that interfere with indoctrination, with control, with imposing passivity and obedience. While Diane Ravitch writes, Never have public schools been as subject to upheaval, assault, and chaos as they are today. Across America parents and teachers are organizing in response to this dangerous threat to children, to democracy, and to the future of US society. Nineteen Clues traces the emergence of a powerful and dynamic children's civil rights movement, including the establishment of organizations such as United Opt-Out, BadAss Teachers, and Save Our Schools. The second threat to our children is the great acceleration in the changes taking place to the planet. Humanity is standing at a moment in history when a Great Transformation is needed to respond to the immense threat to the Earth, a group of Nobel Laureates writes in their summary of the 2007 Potsdam Memorandum on Global Sustainability. We live on a human-dominated planet, putting unprecedented pressure on the systems on Earth, Johan Rockstr?m said in his 2010 presentation. The planetary risks we're facing are so large, that business as usual is not an option. In fact, we're in a phase where transformative change is necessary, which opens the window for innovation, for new ideas and new paradigms. Society is taking substantial risks by delaying urgent and large-scale action, Lidia Brito and Mark Stafford Smith write in The State of the Planet Declaration, which was the consensus of more than 3,000 scientists at the 2012 Planet Under Pressure Conference. We must show leadership at all levels. We must all play our parts. We urge the world to grasp this moment and make history. Garn Press was founded so we can play our part, and Nineteen Clues takes up this challenge. It makes the case that what is good for our children is good for the planet, and that these are not separate struggles. The arguments presented in Nineteen Clues have been many years in the making, presented at national and international conferences, and critiqued in peer-review. Nineteen Clues unites the struggles of scientists, teachers and parents. It salutes their tenacity and grit, as well as the brilliance of their arguments and their endurance. It is written in the belief that this is a moment in history when we must unite in the struggle to make Earth a child safe zone, knowing that people can succeed when governments fail.

Biographie:
Professor Emerita, Denny Taylor is the co-founder of Garn Press, and a global scholar and activist. She was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame in 2004. In 2019 she received Columbia University's Distinguished Alumni Award and also the NCRLL Distinguished Scholar Award.

James Paul Gee writes, Denny is, in my view, one of the most brilliant and important scholars of sociocultural approaches to literacy in the 20th century-a field to which I contributed as well. Her work on literacy combines technical sophistication about language and a deep commitment to human dignity and social change. She has always worked at the intersection of human development both in terms of the development of language, literacy, and learning in children, but also in the sense of the development of more humane people, institutions, and societies.

Since 1977 Denny has been continuously engaged in research with families living in extreme poverty, and in regions of armed conflict and weather related catastrophes. The concept of family literacy originates in her doctoral research at TC, Columbia University.

Today, there are family literacy initiatives in most UN Member States established to build more just, peaceful and inclusive societies. Family literacy has become a conduit for many local and regional initiatives to address poverty and hunger, public health emergencies, gender inequality, and strengthen partnerships to address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Most recently Denny has used her evidence-based research on family, literacy and learning to focus on existential risks and science based macrostrategies for achieving the SDGs and human survival. Her many books span the sciences, and include novels and children's books as well as research texts. Accounts of her research on families, literacy and catastrophic events are available on her website together with many of her publications on family literacy in global contexts.