We're Abuzz with Literacy and the Tucson Festival of Books!

The college is proud of its involvement with the Tucson Festival of Books, a community-wide celebration of literature. All proceeds from the festival are used to sustain the event and support local literacy programs, such as Reading Seed, Literacy Connects, and UA Literacy Outreach Programs. Since 2009, the festival has contributed more than $1,050,000 to agencies that improve literacy in the community.

This year's festival is March 12-13, 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. The festival is offered free of charge to the public. Parking at the UA is complimentary during festival weekend, although use of public transportation is strongly encouraged.

On Saturday, March 12, at 4 p.m., please join us in the College of Education, Kiva Auditorium, for a special presentation by Jonathan Kozol, a celebrated crusader for a 

balanced public school education and author of Savage Inequalities and The Shame of the Nation Art, among other books.

In the passion of the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1965, Kozol gave up the prospect of a promising career in the academic world and moved from Harvard Square into a poor black neighborhood of Boston to become a fourth-grade teacher. He has since devoted his life to the challenge of providing equal opportunity to every child in our public schools.

His talk, The Influence of Testing and Accountability on Curriculum: A Feast of Riches, explores how art, aesthetics, inquiry, and critical thinking are being crowded out by obsessive testing and punitive accountability within public schools, especially schools serving our poorest children. He will address why these virtues are essential for the learning of all students and offer a critical view of current issues within public schools.

DETAILS

Jonathan Kozol
The Influence of Testing and Accountability on Curriculum: A Feast of Riches
Saturday, March 12
4-5 p.m.
College of Education, Kiva Auditorium

Followed by a book signing

Tickets for this featured session will be available on the Tucson Festival of Books website on March 7-11. Individuals are allowed to request two tickets per day for any ticketed events at the festival (no charge for the tickets). In addition, tickets will be available at the event on a first-come basis. Friends of the Festival can request tickets beginning March 2.

And for K-12 students...

Another exciting event, offered by our friends in the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences, is on Sunday, March 13, at 10 a.m. in the SBS tent: The Power of Fairy Tales is an interpretive reading of fairy tales put on in conjunction with the student-run Fairy Tale Review and Tiny Donkey literary magazines. Here's more.

Also, inspired by UA English Professor Aurelie Sheehan's book Demigods on Speedway, not to mention the phenomenal success of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, SBS will host a Myths Revisited session on Sunday, March 13, at 11:30 a.m. Students can attend a reading and talk about the importance of myths in literature and how we might go about retelling them. Here's more.