Geneva College will host its second Orality and Literacy Conference on April 3-4, 2025. This year’s conference, entitled “Orality and Literacy in the Curricula,” invites application of Walter J. Ong’s ideas to academic curricula. Ong’s discussion in his books The Presence of the Word and Orality and Literacy on oral patterns of thinking, transitions in writing and printing, and modern communication technologies provoke stimulating questions. The conference will allow professors and practitioners in diverse fields to share connections between Ong’s reflections and academic curricula in their research, as well as network and engage in conversation with others on a culturally and educationally significant topic.
Registration details, a conference schedule, and contact information can be found here: https://www.geneva.edu/events/oralityliteracy. Geneva College encourages participation in the conference by scholars, practitioners, and students from within the Geneva community, as well as regionally and beyond.
The conference will include two keynote speakers: Andrew McLuhan and Tiffany Petricini.
Andrew McLuhan is director of The McLuhan Institute, created in 2017 to continue the pioneering work of his grandfather Marshall McLuhan and his father Eric McLuhan in the field of Media/Communications studies. He lectures globally at universities, teaches workshops, and consults at companies. Andrew has addressed audiences at the Münster School of Design, Carleton University, the University of Toronto, and La Universidad de la Sabana in Bogotá. In 2009, he began documenting and inventorying Marshall McLuhan’s annotated library, now at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, and named to UNESCO’s ‘Memory of the World Register’ of globally-significant cultural artifacts.
Tiffany Petricini is an associate teaching professor in communication at Penn State Erie, the Behrend Campus. She is co-chair of Penn State’s Joint Standing Committee on Responsible and Effective Use of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education. She also leads the Penn State Artificial Intelligence Community of Practice (AICoP) and the Humanities Institute’s Phenomenology Collaborative Colloquia. She is the co-founder of the Educational AI Collaborative (EAIC). Her publications have reflected interests in phenomenology, interpersonal communication, technology, philosophy, ethics, and media ecology, including her work Friendship and Technology.
Jonathan Watt, PhD, professor of English and Joel Ward, PhD, professor of communication have worked together to host and plan this year’s Orality and Literacy Conference. With regard to the purpose of the conference, Joel Ward states, "Public conversations around substantial or sea-change moments in a culture can be really useful for people to navigate unruly waters . . . We’re very interested in the changing landscape of how students learn. Will institutions of higher learning remain committed to high literacy as a model of education or will they abandon that approach and return to a more discursive, orality model of learning?"
The conference hopes to provoke thoughtful discussion and exploration of these and similar questions.
The Orality and Literacy in the Curricula Conference is sponsored in part by the Lilly Foundation. The Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities seeks to strengthen the quality and shape the character of church-related institutions of higher learning through supporting faculty development.
Reagan Shields '26
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