NWTSJ

Keynote Speaker: Ira Shor

IRA SHOR is a Professor in the Dept. of English, College of Staten Island, and at the City University of NY Graduate Center, Phd Program in English, where he started the new doctorate in Rhetoric/Composition in 1993.

In the English Department at Staten Island, he teaches first-year comp, non-fiction writing, coming-of-age narratives, multicultural literature, mass media, and graduate courses in the teaching of writing. His 9 books include a 3-volume set in honor of the late Paulo Freire, the noted Brazilian educator who was his friend and mentor: CRITICAL LITERACY IN ACTION(college language arts) and EDUCATION IS POLITICS(Vol 1, k-12, and Vol. 2, Postsecondary Across the Curriculum). Shor’s work with Freire began in the early 1980s and lasted until Freire’s unfortunate passing in 1997. He and Freire co-authored A PEDAGOGY FOR LIBERATION in 1986, the first “talking” book Freire published with a collaborator. Shor also authored the widely used EMPOWERING EDUCATION(1992) and WHEN STUDENTS HAVE POWER(1996), two foundational texts in critical teaching. His CRITICAL TEACHING AND EVERYDAY LIFE(1980)was the first book-length treatment of Freire-based critical methods in the North American context. That book grew out of Shor’s literacy teaching for Open Admission students in the City University in the 1970s, where he helped build an open-access writing program recognized then by the NCTE as one of three successful efforts in higher education. Coming to the CUNY in 1971 after a PhD at Wisconsin, he experimented with critical literacy during the pioneering breakthrough of Open Admissions at that time.

Born in the South Bronx, Shor attended mediocre public schools for New York City’s white working-class until winning admission to the elite Bronx High School of Science, which opened his chance to become eventually a middle-class professor. In the Jewish South Bronx of the 1950s, he grew up in a rent-controlled apartment among Eastern European immigrants, his being Russian. Shor’s dad became a sheet-metal worker after he left school fatherless at 15. He learned his trade from a family friend, then built battleships at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in two wars between which he failed in his own small business and fell back into the working-class. Shor’s mother, also first-generation, was a zany bookkeeper for small businesses. She finished high school but could not afford to go to college, which broke her heart. She became a lover of Italian opera and kitchen comedy and a scourge of Bronx bacteria threatening her children.

After graduating from Science High, Shor attended the University of Michigan(BA, English, 1966), then the University of Wisconsin(MA, 1968, and Phd, 1971). His dissertation was on Kurt Vonnegut whose stances against violence, war, and cruelty drew Shor to this author. After finishing his Phd, Shor started teaching writing at Staten Island Community College, then a 2-year unit of CUNY. He was lucky to join CUNY when it was an historic frontier for Open Admissions, Free Tuition, and higher-education for the non-elite. In the 1970s, Shor began experimenting with critical practices in the classroom while also trying to defend Open Admissions and Free Tuition, under ferocious attach outside the classroom.