Another new focus of the Foundation is to encourage communities to use the fine arts to tell the stories of women who have influenced history and who have improved the status of women. Currently we are working to build a statue on the Iowa Wesleyan campus in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, to commemorate Belle Babb Mansfield, the first woman to be admitted to the practice of law in the United States and an advocate for women’s rights. The Foundation will also support work I started as First Lady of Iowa to tell the story of governors’ spouses. As a teacher of adolescents for 32 years, I am committed to providing strong role-models for young women and encouraging their activism.
The Foundation will also support creativity and innovation at the community level in Iowa for the purpose of collaborative problem-solving and community-building. Recently we facilitated a community discussion among parents and teenagers in Ankeny, Iowa, about screen time and the impact of adverting images on children. This discussion was led by Dr. Doug Gentile, a professor of psychology from Iowa State University.
As First Lady of Iowa my major goal was to find ways to connect people in communities to one another through books, libraries and storytelling. I encouraged people to talk about books in their everyday conversations. I raised resources to give a book to every Iowa kindergartner and facilitated literacy projects in 70 Iowa communities. I advocated for resources for Iowa’s public libraries and lobbied to mandate certified teacher-librarians in Iowa’s schools. I started an on-line reading club for middle school students. I rode my bicycle across Iowa every summer on RAGBRAI to call attention to Iowa’s 573 libraries.
Now that I’ve closed that chapter of my life, I want to build on what I started. I feel like Charlotte, the spider of E.B. White’s classic children’s book. I am the web-writer trying to entice visitors into my "cyber web"—to linger, to browse, to get entangled in some program or issued mentioned here.
Through this website and my foundation I want to expand the definition of literacy to include media and information literacy.
--IF YOU ARE A PARENT, teacher or community activist, visit the new Tech Savvy Awards section to read about 4 regional award-winning programs and our national award winner. These are programs that are helping parents empower their children to be savvy consumers of the electronic media for education, recreation and communication. These awards will be announced at the National Center For Family Literacy conference in Orlando, Florida, March 4.
--IF YOU ARE A PARENT who’d like to know more about technology, you can link here to the Verizon Literacy portal where you can choose from an extensive list of online classes that will help you with your technology needs.
--IF YOU ARE A PARENT who would like to set some ground rules for computer use in your home and communicate with your children about making wise decisions online, you can link from here to a number of websites that will suggest ways to have a conversation with your children and will suggest possible guidelines.
--IF YOU ARE A PARENT who needs a helping hand with parenting, check out the reviews of two books on parenting that I recommend.
--IF YOU ARE A MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENT check out my online book club. Over 400 middle school students are talking about books there and connecting to other websites that help them delve more deeply into subjects introduced in the novels we’ve chosen. In the Middle Reading Club allows readers to meet authors, talk with other readers, express opinions about books and explore other websites for factual information.
--IF YOU ARE A MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHER OR TEACHER LIBRARIAN, check out my In the Middle Book Club for use in your curriculum, in after-school programs and for independent reading.
--IF YOU ARE THINKING OF DEVELOPING A PROGRAM OR WANT TO ADVOCATE FOR A MEDIA LITERACY PROGRAM IN YOUR COMMUNITY THAT TARGETS FAMILIES, CHECK OUT A LIST OF PROGRAMS ACROSS THE COUNTRY THAT ARE WORKING TO BRING PARENTS UP TO SPEED ON MEDIA LITERACY ISSUES.
--If you want to find out more about our Belle Babb Mansfield statue project and how public art can help tell a story and encourage young women to dare to take risks and challenge conventional thinking, visit the Belle Babb Mansfield project to find out more about the first woman in the United States to be admitted to the bar.
--If you’re interested in finding out more about the work done by Iowa Stories 2000 between 2000-2007, you can visit the archives.
