Deborah Brandt's Literacy in American Lives: Challenge 1 Diversity of Literacy Sponsors

"Literacy instruction needs to develop from a sense of new role for schools, as a place where the ideological complexities (and inequalities) of literacy sponsorship are sorted through and negotiated. Basic literate ability requires the ability to position and reposition oneself among literacy's sponsoring agents as well as among competing forms of communication" (Brandt 198).


Questions for Discussion

1. How do you understand Brandt's message here? In what ways have you had to modify or adapt your literacy skills to meet new demands or technologies? 
2. What kinds of literacy transitions or adaptations might your students need to make?
3. How might educators help students increase access to literacy sponsorship opportunities that can support these transitions?

I think Brandt's message complicates the acquisition of basic literacy. It makes literacy a dynamic force between the students that obtain the literacy and the sponsor of literacy. Brandt makes this clear, when she describes basic literate ability as positioning and repositioning oneself. The literary sponsor might want the goal of literacy to meet one specific end that might benefit the sponsor but not necessarily the sponsoree. There is a push and pull momentum going on. Implicit in this distinction is the idea  that students are not simply empty vessels where they are de-coding words on a page and having the words being dictated to them. Here the banking method of Freire comes to mind: Students deposit knowledge through the medium of a teacher-depositor. Brandt's characterization of basic literate ability points to a more active role of the person that receives literacy; the student doesn't simply read the words on a page but actively as Freire puts it "reads the world" around him/her.

I'm curious as to what the "competing forms of communication" Brandt talks about are. Could they be different forms of communication like advertisements? Is this a sponsor of literacy?

The biggest literacy transition that I had to make was, by far, adapting to the digital literacy age. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the main medium for basic literacy will be through the complex interface of a smartphone/tablet. It isn't even necessarily the PC anymore. Increasingly, technology is becoming mobile (PC sales are at an all-time low and many experts in the industry have prophesied the impending doom of the personal computer)  and this even affects the literacy ability of navigating cell phones. Smart phones themselves can be a convoluted device for many people that suddenly had to transition from a handheld cellphone to a flashy Ipad or Android device. My parents, for one, consistently bug me on this issue and the idea of even a simple tap on the screen to update something gets my mother nervous.


I teach ESL mostly to immigrant adults primarily Hispanic/Latino/a populations. In my opinion most of the students that I've come across are inadequately equipped for basic language acquisition for the 21st century. We live in age where digital language learning resources are so prevalent that it is inexcusable for any language-literacy center to not have the proper infrastructure to support it. Technological devices should be made easily available in these centers to support the kinds of multi-faceted language tools that are available online for free.

Another issue that I've noticed is that many of the jobs that immigrants have do not provide, or are not interested in providing literacy acquisition in a challenging way. Certain jobs may require English language skills that provide economic incentives for students to learn English, but on the whole there is a dearth of language acquisition opportunities in their workforce life. Many of the immigrants that I've taught spend quite a great deal of time at work but do not get the opportunity for any basic literacy whatsoever. This has to change somehow.