how literacy is connected to identities

how literacy is connected to identities

Instructions/Descriptions

how literacy is connected to identities

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our WA 5: Final Reflective Project can take multiple forms, but your goal is to develop a writing project that looks back over your writing throughout the semester and makes a claim about how you understand literacy now. In this project, you should pull directly from your writing earlier in the semester as well as produce new writing.

Some questions you should address in detail include:

• Has your understanding of literacy changed throughout the semester? If so, how specifically? If not, how do you understand literacy now that is similar to when you began?
• What do you understand or think about literacy connected to identities (gender, race, class, linguistic, etc.)? Be specific and explain how you are thinking about this and why.
• What articles impacted you and why? Specifically, what about them impacted you?
• Were there moments in the class that challenged you? Interested you? Made you think deeply about literacy? What were those moments? Explain them for us.

The best projects will not answer these questions in order but rather will develop a narrative that showcases these points and articulates them with quotations and paraphrases from your previous papers and additional writing. You do not need to prove you did things well all semester. And, you also don’t need to provide a success narrative where you talk about how awesome your semester was and how literacy changed your life! Instead, try to really delve into these questions, show your audience what you understand and what you’re still thinking through. The best projects will also be specific throughout and give examples. You might even include examples that showcase different forms and genres of literacy (such as tweets, images, visuals, comics, articles, etc.). Be creative!

Article 1 for reference

The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me

Sherman Alexie

I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I suppose. I cannot recall which particular Superman comic book I read, nor can I remember which villain he fought in that issue. I cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the comic book. What I can remember is this: I was 3 years old, a Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state. We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually managed to find some minimum-wage job or another, which made us middle-class by reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear and government surplus food.

My father, who is one of the few Indians who went to Catholic school on purpose, was an avid reader of westerns, spy thrillers, murder mysteries, gangster epics, basketball player biographies and anything else he could find. He bought his books by the pound at Dutch’s Pawn Shop, Goodwill, Salvation Army and Value Village. When he had extra money, he bought new novels at supermarkets, convenience stores and hospital gift shops. Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms and living room. In a fit of unemployment-inspired creative energy, my father built a set of bookshelves and soon filled them with a random assortment of books about the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Vietnam War and the entire 23-book series of the Apache westerns. My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well.

I can remember picking up my father’s books before I could read. The words themselves were mostly foreign, but I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn’t have the vocabulary to say “paragraph,” but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My family’s house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our house, each family member existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and common experiences to link us. Now, using this logic, I can see my changed family as an essay of seven paragraphs: mother, father, older brother, the deceased sister, my younger twin sisters and our adopted little brother.

At the same time I was seeing the world in paragraphs, I also picked up that Superman comic book. Each panel, complete with picture, dialogue and narrative was a three-dimensional paragraph. In one panel, Superman breaks through a door. His suit is red, blue and yellow. The brown door shatters into many pieces. I look at the narrative above the picture. I cannot read the words, but I assume it tells me that “Superman is breaking down the door.” Aloud, I pretend to read the words and say, “Superman is breaking down the door.” Words, dialogue, also float out of Superman’s mouth. Because he is breaking down the door, I assume he says, “I am breaking down the door.” Once again, I pretend to read the words and say aloud, “I am breaking down the door” In this way, I learned to read.

This might be an interesting story all by itself. A little Indian boy teaches himself to read at an early age and advances quickly. He reads “Grapes of Wrath” in kindergarten when other children are struggling through “Dick and Jane.” If he’d been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity. He grows into a man who often speaks of his childhood in the third-person, as if it will somehow dull the pain and make him sound more modest about his talents.

A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non-Indians alike. I fought with my classmates on a daily basis. They wanted me to stay quiet when the non-Indian teacher asked for answers, for volunteers, for help. We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid. Most lived up to those expectations inside the classroom but subverted them on the outside. They struggled with basic reading in school but could remember how to sing a few dozen powwow songs. They were monosyllabic in front of their non-Indian teachers but could tell complicated stories and jokes at the dinner table. They submissively ducked their heads when confronted by a non-Indian adult but would slug it out with the Indian bully who was 10 years older. As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world. Those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied by non-Indians.

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I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky. I read books late into the night, until I could barely keep my eyes open. I read books at recess, then during lunch, and in the few minutes left after I had finished my classroom assignments. I read books in the car when my family traveled to powwows or basketball games. In shopping malls, I ran to the bookstores and read bits and pieces of as many books as I could. I read the books my father brought home from the pawnshops and secondhand. I read the books I borrowed from the library. I read the backs of cereal boxes. I read the newspaper. I read the bulletins posted on the walls of the school, the clinic, the tribal offices, the post office. I read junk mail. I read auto-repair manuals. I read magazines. I read anything that had words and paragraphs. I read with equal parts joy and desperation. I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life.

Despite all the books I read, I am still surprised I became a writer. I was going to be a pediatrician. These days, I write novels, short stories, and poems. I visit schools and teach creative writing to Indian kids. In all my years in the reservation school system, I was never taught how to write poetry, short stories or novels. I was certainly never taught that Indians wrote poetry, short stories and novels. Writing was something beyond Indians. I cannot recall a single time that a guest teacher visited the reservation. There must have been visiting teachers. Who were they? Where are they now? Do they exist? I visit the schools as often as possible. The Indian kids crowd the classroom. Many are writing their own poems, short stories and novels. They have read my books. They have read many other books. They look at me with bright eyes and arrogant wonder. They are trying to save their lives. Then there are the sullen and already defeated Indian kids who sit in the back rows and ignore me with theatrical precision. The pages of their notebooks are empty. They carry neither pencil nor pen. They stare out the window. They refuse and resist. “Books,” I say to them. “Books,” I say. I throw my weight against their locked doors. The door holds. I am smart. I am arrogant. I am lucky. I am trying to save our lives.

Article 2

Prologue from Fashioning Lives

Eric Darnell Pritchard

. Even at home I would look through my grandfather’s newspapers and books and wonder why there weren’t any of the pictures or names in them that I had learned from Black Facts.

Referencing the above line from the article Just add similarly i also memories with my grandfather where he would teach me words and phrases.. .

Chapter 2: Expanding Literacy – Language and Code-Meshing

In this chapter, we continue our exploration of literacies as experienced by ordinary people in our everyday lives, as scholars, as citizens, and as community members. We will begin by considering tensions writers have experienced because of their various identities and how that translates to the stories they tell and the writing they do. As we see in this chapter, our literacies are shaped by who we are and how we experience the world—including our positions of gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, and more. Sometimes this translates into us blending languages together as a form of “code-meshing,” which Vershawn Young et al. describe as the “combin[ation of] multiple dialects or different languages” (23). Other times, our experiences push us to find groups of people like us to tell our stories to and share our experiences with.

Many of the readings that you’ve read so far come from scholars in Composition and Rhetoric or from popular writers (such as Malcolm X and Sherman Alexie). However, as we know, writing occurs beyond traditional educational spaces by writers from different backgrounds. We will look at examples of writing from community members and students themselves. Pro(se)letariets is an example of this, as it is a publication by a community press called New City Community Press. Even more, Pro(se)letariets features writing from working-class people in both the United States and England. Some writers in this book, such as Oakley and Smart, discuss how their access to education or publishing opportunities differ based on socioeconomic identity, and yet, ultimately, they have been published in a book that you are reading in your college education. Pro(se)letariets emerged from a university-community partnership between Syracuse University’s Writing Program and the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP), a working-class writing network that began in London in 1976 and later spread transnationally. As you read these pieces, think about how literacy functions in various spaces (homes, schools, workplaces) and across geographic borders.

In addition, we will think about the material conditions in which texts are created, produced, and circulated. As you read this chapter, think about the various forms of writing you do (in class; at home; for organizations, work, fun, etc.). What types of writing do you produce? What genres (essays, lab reports, memos, fanfiction, blogging)? What types of language do you use? Where does your writing circulate? (Who reads it? How do they access this writing? Does it cost anything?) These questions show us that writing doesn’t just happen. Instead, our writing is shaped by our experiences, the tools we use to write, and the conditions around us, including financial, social, and sometimes even political factors.

To think about these points, we will read parts of Dreams and Nightmares, written by Liliana Velasquez. This provides another example of how literacy extends beyond local spaces to have transnational implications. That is, literacy happens not only in our local communities but also across national boundaries. Often, in the United States, we might think about literacy within the context of English and from what we know of as an American-based view of literacy. But, of course, literacy happens every day beyond these narrow examples—across linguistic and national borders. As you’ll see in your book, Dreams and Nightmares is written in both English and Spanish. Velasquez details her journey from Guatemala and the literacy practices she used in order to survive political, social, and economic hardship as she immigrated to America. Ultimately, this book was produced in America and is now read and accessed by anyone who can purchase the book online. In order for this book to be produced though, multiple people came together to raise money at universities, through CrowdRise, and pulled together resources. In this way, we see how the book you’re reading was impacted by factors beyond the writing itself.

how literacy is connected to identities

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