Distinguished Scholar Lifetime Achievement Award Presentation and Address

Session Submission Type: Special Event

Abstract

We have been deeply wrong about what sorts of creatures we humans are. The dire effects of this mistake are in evidence everywhere as we live through the greatest extinction of life on earth, this time possibly including us. Of course, in a time like this, “business as usual” should cease, the very business that brought us to these dire straits, though it continues apace. Work on evolution, development, and the nature of life across a variety of collaborating disciplines is giving us a truer view of humans and insight into why we have made so little progress on equitable learning, respect for diversity, or panhuman collaboration in the face of disaster. I will try to illuminate this emerging view of humans and its implications for language, learning, literacy, and “cognition” (a topic about which we have been very wrong). - Professor James Gee

Content Area

• LRA Annual Conference

Chairs

• Tisha Lewis Ellison, University of Georgia

• Detra Price-Dennis, Teachers College - Columbia University

Discussants

• Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez, Vanderbilt University

• Raúl A. Mora, Literacies in Second Languages Project, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana

• Stergios Botzakis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• Arlette I. Willis, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

• Ana Christina da Silva Iddings, Vanderbilt University

• Wan Shun Eva Lam, Northwestern University

Individual Presentations

• Sense, Sensitivity, and Language: What We Got Badly Wrong About Human Beings and the Price We Paid - James Gee, Arizona State University