This course has literally been life changing for me. Before taking this class I thought I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was going to graduate (eventually) then go on to get my teaching credential and teach high school english or theatre. But then I took this class. I’ve realized through our readings and through the projects we’ve completed, that literacy studies is something that I’m really passionate about, and have been, long before I even knew what it was. So what is literacy studies? This is something I get asked so often as I try to tell people about all these great things I’m learning and as I begin to change the path I’ll be taking after graduation. We played with many different definitions of literacy in class and two that I really liked were “literacy as doing, as a social practice,” from Barton and “literacy as accomplishing things with reading and writing,” from Brandt. Brandt’s work resinated a lot with me, in her focuses in sponsor ship and opportunity. Sponsors of literacy can we good or bad, having a huge influence on a person’s pursuit of literacy. Ever since I first started going to school, I’ve wanted to be a teacher. Teachers are some of the biggest sponsors of literacies in a student’s life, and it’s important to me to find ways to be that positive sponsor, someone who allows their students to pursue the types of literacy that they’re passionate about. We talked a lot this semester after we read the Williams article. When people aren’t familiar with a certain form of literacy we automatically assume they’re dumb or inept, but maybe they haven’t had the opportunities yet. This goes for my generation looking at older generations and tech, and older generations looking at us with things like cursive and “classic” works of literature. Past generations define what literacy is, while discrediting anything the newer generations have to offer. This goes back hundreds of years, every time there’s a new generation or a new form of literacy, the old generations don’t count it as real literacy, and claim that we’re illiterate. This has always frustrated me, especially people who are so anti technology, claiming that my generation is just always on our phones, but what they don’t realize is often we’re reading articles and other literacies to keep up with things going on in the world and to learn.

Education is valued very highly in my house and it was always just kind of known that I would go to college. I’ve realized now how privileged I was to be raised in the family that I was. Two parents with masters degrees, bookshelves lining our walls, never having quite enough shelves to hold all of the books we owned, having a computer and access to educational games, and so many other things that influenced my growth and learning. I’ve always been aware that not every child has all the access that I’ve had, but I’ve never really looked at is as far as how that really influenced my education and ambitions. When students don’t have the opportunity to learn, to achieve more, then they won’t. It’s important for teachers to find ways to give every child access to technology and to books, because they may not have the opportunity at home.

Many of the things we’ve talked about in this class that has gotten me excited was the variations on traditional classroom experiences, things that remix and reshape the modern classroom. My learning style has not always matched up with the traditional ideas of learning so I’ve been excited to learn ways to change things up for my future classroom. In my book club, I learned about remixing classic works and working with students to make those works more accessible to a modern, youthful audience.

So we’ll see where this all takes me, whether that be getting a teaching credential and molding young minds, getting my masters and credential, or getting my masters and eventually pursuing a phd. All I know is that I want to keep exploring the topics of this class. I’m not done asking questions yet.

I found all of the different presentation groups really interesting, but I particularly enjoyed the hip hop and literacy group and parts of the video games and literacy group.

In the hip hop group, I really enjoyed the focus on poetry and the idea of bringing poetry into the classroom through a genre that the students are familiar with and and understand. The video they showed with Kendrick Lamar going to the high school and how they used aspects of the hip hop culture in the classroom was really cool because it showed students getting excited for something that often students groan about. Using the hip hop culture in the classroom got students into the curriculum in a different way and allowed them more freedom of expression, something that I find really important. It allowed students to play with the english language in a different way, maybe a way they are more familiar with and can understand. In that high school in the video, the students had a role in the development of the curriculum and that gave them a real sense of pride in their work. As a future teacher I like the ideas that this program brought up. I’m not that familiar with hip hop culture myself, but the sense of pride that the students get and the freedoms they feel, are things I really want to be prevalent in my classroom.

What I really enjoyed in the video games and literacy group was the scavenger hunt/quest we went on. It was interesting to think about tasks and reward. When we got back from the scavenger hunt and debriefed it was interesting the different things those of us who went on the quest expected to get when we got back. Thinking in the sense of video games, some of us expected a reward (like coins or gold in a game) and some expected experience points to level up. Leveling up was an interesting thing to think about in the context of education, we talked about how gaining new information was like getting experience points and how as you gain that knowledge, you “level up” in life gaining new knowledge to go new places.

The idea of Maker Culture and hacking education is an interesting one to me. As a kinesthetic learner myself, the idea of making things and finding new ways to look at things in the classroom is something that i wish there had been more of when I was in school. One of the articles I’ve read comes from edutopia.com and it discusses a private school in Manhattan that has a Maker program built into the curriculum where students are encouraged to just create and explore. They’re hardly ever given instructions, but instead freedom to make mistakes and to get creative. A reoccurring theme in Maker culture, especially in education is to not let the students feel afraid to try. Anne Balsamo, a Media Studies professor and researcher, talked about the idea of tinkering in videos and articles posted on her website designingculture.net. According to Balsamo, “tinkering involves strategies of improvisation and iteration.” Tinkering encourages the ideas of open-ended possibilities and pushing ideas past their original context. I think that this idea of tinkering is really important in education because I think it gets lost when teachers are teaching to the test and putting all the emphasis on the right answer. I think this makes students scared to try to push the boundaries and limits of ideas.

As much as I like the idea of Maker programs, my problem with this system is that in many ways Maker culture seems like a privileged experience. Of course a private school in Manhattan can have a Maker program built into the curriculum because they have private funding and don’t have to worry about following the same standards as public schools. A low-income public school is going to have a harder time building something like this into its curriculum because they’re going to have less funding and are more likely to spend their money on basic resources and keeping their students engaged in the normal materials. I would love for Maker culture to be available for everyone because I think there is such great value in having students learn by doing and losing the fear of making mistakes that our education system so frequently reinforce. My other issue with Maker culture is that it’s difficult to find non-technological maker movements. I love to make things and put random things together and see what happens, but I don’t have that big a love of science and technology and unfortunately that seems to be a big part of maker culture. I had a hard time finding articles about making with everyday materials or just not tech based materials. But this brought up an interesting question in our group discussion: does what you make have to functional? And if it’s not does that just make it art? I’m not sure if we’ve found the answer to this yet but I want to keep exploring this idea.

Through all the readings in the class, the two things that have really stood out for me are sponsorship and privilege. When I think of a social view of literacy, I think of all the people who have shaped how and why I read and write, my sponsors. From my parents to my teachers, I’ve had a lot of encouragement over the year to keep me motivated to pursue literary practices. However, sponsors are not always positive. Sponsors are influencers, whether that’s a positive or a negative influence. Socio-economic position can have an effect on how people interact with literacy in their lives. In Brandt’s piece, she discusses how there are “unequal conditions of literacy sponsorship that lie behind differential outcomes in academic performance.” Growing up in a middle class household, with two very educated parents, I had access to so many different books, my house is full of them. I had never really thought of this as privilege until recently, when I realized what this access has done for me in my life and how it is different from other people’s experiences. But I think that literacy practices are influenced by your sponsors stake in your achievements, despite what your socio-economic status may be. In my literacy narrative, I talked to my mom about her sponsors and their influence on her own literacy practices. Her parents encouraged her to read and write, and she in turn encouraged me. But her parents were parents were both raised very poor and literacy wasn’t something super valued in their homes. However with my mom and my aunt, my grandparents wanted them to succeed, and even though they didn’t have very much money, they took my mom and aunt to the library all the time. In the Brandt piece there was a case study about a girl who despite wanting to find books to read and wanted to do well in school, neither of her parents were really that encouraging because literacy wasn’t necessary in their lives. I find the ideas of access and sponsorship as relating to privilege really interesting and I hope to keep exploring these ideas in class and continue to develop my ideas of literacy.

I think that sponsorship with digital literacy is different than how it is with print-based literacies. For me anyways, I find that I learn new digital literacies based on what my friends tell me they are using or by something I’ve seen somewhere else online. At this point I’m so far into the digital world that I can’t remember how I learned about any of them or who introduced them to me, but I know that there was a learning curve for all the forms digital literacies I use. With print-based literacies, I’m more verbally encouraged by people like parents and teachers to read or write something, while online I find that I’m more self influenced by seeing what other people post and how that inspires me to use that platform. For example, on Twitter, I’m influenced by my friends on what I tweet based on what I know other people post and want to see. Like Franklin, it took me a while to figure out the conventions of my audience to figure out what people wanted to see in their feeds. I think this in a way is actually similar to print-literacies because you have to know the audience you’re writing to, to know what and how to write.

For me, my most recent example of a literate practice for me is probably video games. My ex boyfriend was really into video games and we played them together a lot and it was really hard for me at first because it was not something I had grown up doing. In the first-person based games I had the hardest time just figuring out how to look and walk at the same time. It was challenging learning this new literacy because my ex didn’t really understand why it was so difficult for me so he couldn’t really help me, but I did eventually learn to look and walk at the same time!