Brandt, Deborah. Ch. 2 Literacy and Illiteracy in Documentary America. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. 47-72.
In this chapter of her larger work, Literacy in American Lives, Brandt describes the literacy histories of two writers, Dwayne Lowery and Johnny Ames. Both of the participants derive part of their literacy sponsorship through means that are facilitated by different aspects of civil rights struggles occurring in roughly the same time frame. Centered in her value for the histories of literacy, Brandt demonstrates how these participants’ positions within their social environments— Lowery, as a representative of his union, and Ames, as an inmate serving a life sentence in prison—led to the development of specific literacy practices and, further, illustrates the lengths that both these men must cross to become and maintain their literacy.
Through the two different lived experiences she outlines in this chapter, Brandt makes an argument for the roles that institutions play as sponsors of literacy. As she outlines in her introduction, sponsors contribute to “a range of human relationships and ideological pressures that run up at the scenes of literacy learning” (20). In the chapter on Lowery and Ames, she draws out how sponsors, whether passively or actively, facilitate this sponsorship as a result of their own changing needs. She concludes the chapter emphasizing how the “sponsor-reliant level of literacy” is the level that most impacts the practices that readers and writers take up. Ultimately, then, it seems that she creates a clear description of the social structures that catalyze literacy within rigid institutions; furthermore, her arguments help to demonstrate how, in large part, struggles for social and economic stability are inseparable from literacy practices.
Notes and Quotes
“…the course of an ordinary person’s literacy learning—its occasions, materials, applications, potentials—follow the transformations going on within sponsoring institutions as those institutions fight for economic and ideological position” (56).
I think that this quote applies for most (and not just ordinary) people—I’m not sure what would be implied by the unordinary here. For example, academics in English departments, as Berlin so nicely laid out, are embroiled in their own struggles to accept/reject literacy practices that help to maintain the valued systems of those departments in terms of administration, curriculum, assessment, and approaches to technology, to name a few.
“Nowhere can the ideological vicissitudes of institutional contexts for literacy be better felt than in the history of prison libraries, whose health and mission rose and fell not only with various reform movements but also with shifting social beliefs about literacy itself” (67).
This quote made me think about how projects like the Prison + Arts project functions as a literacy sponsor; a friend of mine who works with this program has described her students as some of the most well-read she will ever encounter. I wonder how the literacy practices those students have developed will be promoted or inhibited outside of the institution of prison.
“Sponsors deliver the material and ideological possibilities for literacy learning, often as a by-product of the struggles for economic or political ascendancy in which they are involved. Sponsors subsidize (or don’t) the development of people’s literate resources as a way to recruit or coerce those resources to their cause; they also can reject or discard the literate resources of people that no longer serve their interest” (70).
This quote seems to best reflect the inherent power (acknowledged or not) associated with literacy. I think it also points to how the changing tools we use to perform literacy practices are connected to Brandt’s mention of resources.
texturology 