FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – A professor from the University of California, Berkeley, will visit to discuss how the literacy practices of today’s youth are transformed by digital technology. He will speak at a forum Oct. 7 sponsored by the Brown Chair in English Literacy at the University of Arkansas.

Jabari Mahiri, associate professor of education and chair of the Language, Literacy, Society, and Culture Program at UC Berkeley, will address a campus forum on literacy, youth, digital technology and material culture at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 7, in Giffels Auditorium in Old Main on the campus of the University of Arkansas. The forum is free and open to the public.

Drawing on his new book, A Second Life for Learning in Schools, Mahiri’s presentation will emphasize how the literacy practices of today’s youth – the texts they produce, as well as the materials and processes of text production and distribution – are transformed by digital technology.

In addition to his work at UC Berkeley, Mahiri served as a senior fellow at Brown University in the Annenberg Institute for School Reform from 1995 to 1998, as a visiting professor at Harvard University in 1998 and as a visiting scholar at the University of Iowa in 2004, at Michigan State in 2005 and at the University of Minnesota in 2006.

Since 2004, Mahiri has been a senior scholar for the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, and currently he is the principal investigator of Technology Equity and Culture High-Schools, a research initiative that collaborates with urban school and community partners on increasing educational equity and achievement for all students. He received UC Berkeley’s Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence in 2007 and the Outstanding Mentorship Award from Division G of the American Educational Research Association in 2008.

Mahiri is author of Shooting for Excellence: African American and Youth Culture in New Century Schools (1998) and editor of What They Don’t Learn in School: Literacy in the Lives of Urban Youth (2004). Additionally, he has authored a children’s book, The Day They Stole the Letter J (1989).

Mahiri received his doctoral degree in English (language, literacy and rhetoric) from the University of Illinois, Chicago. He was also a credentialed high school English teacher in the Chicago Public Schools from 1985 to 1991. Before coming to Berkeley, he helped found and chaired the inaugural board of directors of an independent school in Chicago, the New Concept Development Center, which has now been in existence for 35 years.