ENG 110 Blog

One of the pieces to be analyzed is a scholarly text by Kara Poe Alexander; “ Successes, Victims, and Prodigies: “Master” and “Little” Cultural Narratives in the Literacy Narrative Genre,” in which she focuses on defining narratives in a way that allows for further analysis. In initially defining literacy narratives and the goals thereof, she writes: “Ultimately, literacy narratives aim ‘to define who we are and what we want to become, both as individuals and as a community,’” (Alexander 609) Speaking to the fact that these narratives, when analyzed, one can pick up on even the most minute details of the narrative and construct themes and ideas in their own mind based on the experiences of another, and allow one to deconstruct these ideas to their origin. She also writes to define a commonality between narratives: “dominant, archetypal stories,” or that which “follow conventional patterns of narration and correspond to prevailing cultural representations of literacy perpetuated through literature, film, [etc]… They also help organize and configure reality, thus shaping our understandings of ourselves.” (Alexander 609) Understanding this can allow us to use the narratives to connect the individual story to society as a whole. These are the premisse that will be used in this piece mainly as a lens, simply for understanding how these narratives are important in the way that they allow us to capture what makes a person who they are in relation to the rest of the world.

With constructing this paragraph, I wanted to add a proper introduction to the ideas of Alexander. I used two of her quotes to get the information “straight from the horse’s mouth” to the reader, allowing the major ideas and definitions that I will be using to be properly introduced.

Sometimes the effects done on the narrative by sponsors can run deeper; In “Reading Gone Wrong” by Shaylee Amidan, she explores how the withholding of literacy from one by a sponsor can damage their views on their personal life and passions. She talks about how “so many people are shot down for being different by their own choice..” (Amidan) This is a key theme perception for the author, as she references frequently how literacy (or the lack of acquisition thereof), is perceived as a make or break for success in life. Her experience with a teacher not allowing her to participate shows how some sponsors are all too willing to ostracize a student or other narrator without a willingness to conform; effectively taking away their choice in the matter. The choice being, how one goes about their journey to literacy, and how too often some sponsors will withhold, or attempt to define this long and winding road for someone. But again, this lack of establishment of literacy can and did cause problems for Amidan, and as Kara Poe Alexander explores in her piece, “Costs include social, cultural, and permanent displacement which leads people to alienation, [and] despair.” (Alexander 610) In Amidan’s case, this despair goes hand-in-hand with the fact that she felt alienated from the rest of the class; that she was not on the same intellectual level as other students for her need for a tutor. This is derived from the far-too-common narrative that defines literacy as a success factor; that without it, you will fail and be a reject of society.

In reconstructing this paragraph, I opted to add more of my own voice to it and remove some of the quotes that took up the paragraph, as well as bridging the gap between the narrative and Alexander that previously existed. I also added a bit more to make it relevant to the rest of the piece.

1. My peers think that I should provide a little bit more evidence from the narratives, and to connect it to the articles. My narratives focus specifically on the withholding of literacy by sponsors and how that defines the perspective of the individual and how that impacts the way they view themselves.
2. I believe that I should improve my overall introductions to each text. I mainly attempted to combine the introductions to each inside of the normal analysis body paragraphs, but I find that the introductions I provided are not sufficient in fully encapsulating the specific work of the authors that we are using.
3. One idea I am looking into specifically is using an additional narrative to contrast with the ones I am already using so that I can build up both sides of the table and make it more effective. I think that my narratives and articles are fairly balanced in terms of evidence, I think my main issue is making a more concise, prominent claim in my paper.

Introduction: 

In my paper’s introduction, I had to clarify some of my sentences to make my claim a bit more clear overall. I did not change the opening sentences, as I felt it very clearly shows the reader where the paper starts and allows it to grow from there.

Evidence and Explanations: 

Moving from rough to final draft, I added quite a bit more evidence into the paper. My rough draft focused more on introducing and developing these authors and making their major claims visible, but moving into the final draft I took more time to provide more analysis-type evidence that would support my thesis even more. 

Reorganization: 

I added even more concise information to existing paragraphs and added some new ones to help better analyze the conversation between the authors. There wasn’t as much moving around between the original and the final, as I used the original as a strong basis for the final by building off of it. 

New Paragraphs: 

In my opinion, my new paragraphs established after the rough draft were essential to the success of my paper. For the rough draft I did a good job at establishing the pieces by function of their authors. This was the beginning of the final paper, as it was able to introduce each author and what they brought to the rest of the paper with their claims. I added the new paragraphs following this introduction so that the reader had a basis as to what these authors were talking about. 

An example of the withholding of literacy by sponsors in the lives of students is in A Child’s Education, where author MaryKate Fitzgerald explores where literacy is indicative of success. In this, the narrator discusses a situation in which a teacher withholds literacy by segregating them from the other students, in class and out, and suggesting a tutor for them; Fitzgerald writes, “The thought of this irked me, making me think I was less intelligent than all the other kids who didn’t need to spend time with a tutor.” This gets right into what I find to be the most important aspect of the story: How this withholding of literacy impacted the student personally. In society today, success is often viewed as having a strong correlation with the acquisition of literacy; as Kara Poe Alexander explores in Successes, Victims, and Prodigies: “Master” and “Little” Cultural Narratives in the Literacy Narrative Genre, too often today we find people “buying into the trop that literacy leads to enlightenment and liberation.” (Alexander 610) In Fitzgerald’s case, the mere fact she could not associate with the other students lead to a feeling of being separate, and almost trapped in this state of being illiterate. This, by deduction, implies that the acquisition thereof would lead to a state of freedom in the mind of the narrator, with their illiterateness being a mere trap of the sponsor. Additionally, Deborah Brandt explores this in Sponsors of Literacy, in which she writes that “People’s literate skills have grown vulnerable to unprecedented turbulence in their economic value, as conditions, forms, and standards of literacy achievement seem to shift with almost every new generation of learners,” (Brandt 166) meaning that this situation is likely similar to many others, but also different as each individual defines their own perspective on how valuable that literacy is to them. 

But sometimes the damage done by sponsors can run deeper. In Reading Gone Wrong by Shaylee Amidan, she explores how the withholding of literacy from one by a sponsor can damage their views on their personal life and passions. She talks about how “so many people are shot down for being different by their own choice..” The choice being, how one goes about their journey to literacy, and how too often some sponsors will withhold, or attempt to define this long and winding road for someone. Deborah Brandt explores this in Sponsors of Literacy, in which she writes that “A focus on sponsorship can force a more explicit and substantive link between literacy learning and systems of opportunity and access.” (Brandt 169) In Amidan’s case, her restriction from literacy by the hand of the teacher caused her to feel like she was not connected to the global literacy, or that she couldn’t form that “link” between literacy learning and opportunity to grow and be a part of the rest of the class, so to speak. But again, this unestablishment of literacy can and did cause problems for Amidan, and as Kara Poe Alexander explores in Successes, Victims, and Prodigies: “Master” and “Little” Cultural Narratives in the Literacy Narrative Genre, “Costs include social, cultural, and permanent displacement which leads people to alienation, [and] despair.” (Alexander 610) In Amidan’s case, this despair goes hand-in-hand with the fact that she felt alienated from the rest of the class; that she was not on the same intellectual level as other students for her need for a tutor.

On this page, I am drawing connections to other scholarly articles and detecting themes of the paper.

In my search for relevant narratives, I decided to focus on narratives relating to the withholding of literacy by sponsors, and how that impacts the narrator/student/writer both on an emotional level, and how it affects their place in society.

Authors:

Shaylee Amidon*

Paige Matthews

Meghan Mazzocchi

Marykate Fitzgerald*

Sarah Manuels

Katherine Parker

Kayla Farrell

* = the ones I did Barclay paragraphs for

Passion For Writing

Concept: Success

Passage: “..they do so by generalizing about literacy and its power of pointing to future success.” (Alexander 617)

Narrative Passage: “I think they were somewhat in disbelief because they knew I was never big into school” 

Explanation: The author talked about how his family was in disbelief about his acquisition of literacy and how it was able to lead to his success. 

Expect the Unexpected

Concept: Success

Passage: “..they end with this positive, abstract conclusion about literacy’s power and tendency to lead to success” (Alexander 617)

Narrative Passage: “I realized it doesn’t matter what you are writing about, you should be creating a piece of work you can always be proud of.” 

Explanation: The narrative author very clearly was attempting to create an ending that was conclusive over the positive and ambiguous future effects of literacy.

Recess and Destress

Concept: Sponsorship, and somewhat child prodigy. 

Passage: “..they conceived of themselves and their literacy abilities as exceptional, highlighting moments when their literacy skills were put on display to amaze and astonish.” 

(Alexander 619)

Narrative Passage: “I see now it was because she was holding me to a higher standard because she knew I had the ability to succeed in my work..” 

Explanation: This was a literacy moment in which the narrator felt a certain sense of empowerment at their own abilities, that were released by the teacher as a sponsor. 

Turn Around? 

Concept: Victim

Passage: “The popularity of the victim narrative in student texts indicates that students associate school-based literacy practices with oppression, and even cruelty.” (Alexander 618)

Narrative Passage: “I always got negative feedback, red x’s, and bad grades in his class. It just seemed to slowly eat away at any confidence in writing that I had leftover.”

Explanation: The narrator is very clearly attempting to create a sense of victimization by this teacher’s class, and how this one teacher just completely annihilated any sense of passion or excitement surrounding writing and reading for the narrator.

• • The above examples from Brandt are extremely prevalent in the acquisition of literacy- specifically the suppression and enablement of the literacy narrators in their stories. We see some of these sponsors shown in Alexander’s piece when he notes the archetypes of narratives, and the ones I think would apply specifically to those descriptors would be Victims and Success stories. Victim’s narratives often follow paths of those who had a sponsor of literacy that negatively influenced their viewpoints on reading or writing, through the suppression of the narrator, or the “victim” of their own narrative. This idea of how one “casts the blame for negative literacy experiences” is often written as consequence of the suppression of one’s life/viewpoints/etc. On the other hand, the aforementioned enablement is often a descriptor for sponsors of the success stories, and how a person (peer, parent, teacher, cousin, etc) lead to their enablement in their journey for literacy, whether they expected it or not. My personal literacy narrative somewhat explored this, through multiple people. I discussed some of my peers in a program I was in, and how we all have been attributors to each other’s success. 

• • The valuation of literacy in different environments, times, conditions, etc has changed so much throughout time, yet the theme has remained the same. Literacy became extremely equated with success, with the idea that success cannot be acquired without literate knowledge becoming more and more prevalent as the educational system grows and grows. Many people have different experiences and relationships to reading and writing as a direct consequence of this, as with such diverse backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities, social classes, we find that the acquisition of literacy is quite different for many people. This has a lot to do with the topics we discussed on the last paper, where everyone’s learning is often attributed to being a  direct result of their intersectionality, both in the way they perceive the content and in the way that the content is taught to them. 

• • In the literacy winner category by Alexander, we find that the narratives surround one’s rise to the acquisition of literacy. The sponsors, as Brandt would note, are the teachers or peers that introduce the opportunities in which the students claim in order to “win” literacy. This could be someone that tells them, “Hey, you should sign up for the ____ competition/event.” This introduces the idea of some sort of competition, not necessarily externally, in the mind of the author. However, in the Victim category introduced by Alexander, we find that the sponsor of literacy is not one encouraging anything of the literacy narrator, but rather the opposite, by in some way going against the literate learning of the narrator. This causes the narrator to, typically through their own personal motivations or goals, be altered by this sponsor, as they typically will describe how someone “took the fun out of reading and writing.” (Alexander 615)

Works Cited:

Gee, James. “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction.” Journal of Education, vol. 171, no. 1, 1989, pp. 5-17.

Jordan, June. “Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan.” ProQuest Education Journals, vol. 58, no. 3, Aug. 1988, pp. 363-74.

Delpit, Lisa. “The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse.” Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook, Ellen Cushman, Eugene Kintgen, Barry Kroll, Mike Rose. Bedford/St., 1998, pp. 545-54.