Reading Response #11

Summary: In her article "Sponsors of Literacy," Deborah Brandt discusses the idea literacy is an acquired skill. She talks about how sponsorship directly links literacy learning and systems of opportunity and access. She argues that people are influenced by other people around them so they can't learn to become literate on their own.

Synthesis:

I can correlate Dawkins article on "Teaching punctuation as a rhetorical tool" to this article because in Dawkins article he discusses the mechanics of writing and how writing can be done. In Brandt's article, she discusses the influences that are involved in literacy which is kind of like how someone would write a paper. Therefore, the influences that the literacy sponsors have on a writer has all the difference in the way that the paper is written mechanically.


Before you read:

1. When comparing notes with my one roommate about our personal literacy experiences, we both agreed that our schools encouraged us to read challenging books or books, compared to books that are an easy read.  Some activities that supported the readings would be things like group discussion or activities describing the character.

Questions for discussion and journaling:

1. Brandt defines literacy sponsors as older relatives, teachers, priests, supervisors, or anything that influences a way someone acquires literacy. Some characteristics of a literacy sponsor would be someone who serves as a leader or someone who understands more of something and able to help shape the way that someone understands literacy.

Applying and Exploring Ideas

2. I have had literacy sponsors who have withheld certain kinds of literacies from me in the fact that we weren't allowed to read certain kinds of books for some English projects. I was then indeed able to find other sufficient sources to read that were more complex and had more information for me to cover for said projects.

Opinion:

I liked Brandt's article because I never really thought about the way that other people influence the way that someone understands literacy. I thought that it was a really good point when she was talking about the way that literacy is learned and the impacts of people that you would have not of normally thought would have impacted you have.