Aging Literacies:
Training and Development Challenges for Faculty

Angela Crow

Introduction: The Seduction of Change

In the opening unit, whose subtitle announces her theme of the often appealing but sometimes misleading nature of change, Crow takes the necessary step of defining the book’s titular terms, “aging literacies,” a definition that in fact is triadic: “a literate awareness of aging studies as a field; the issues we face as we age in our abilities to learn and accumulate literacies; and the difficulties we may face when we see literacies gain or lose value” (pp. 3-4). These three threads are woven into the central objective of the book, which is to understand the role that aging could play in faculty comfort and discomfort with the attainment of new competencies. Crow charts this course so that future researchers might know what needs to be considered in their investigations of “aging literacies,” because as she puts it, “none of us wants to contribute to divides and gaps, to establish groups that can acquire the technologically based literacies and those that cannot” (p. 6). Ending with an overview of the chapters, readers discover that Crow’s itinerary consists of alternating emphases between composition and a variety of other fields.