What have you learned from the presentations? What are some of the take away ideas for you from other groups’ workshops?

Through these presentations I have learned that old can become new and that innovation is what makes the world go round. I saw from the old time fairy tales to the outdated deck of cards, there is always a way to transform what we’ve already created to fit with today’s fast moving pace. From my own personal group we dealt with the literacy’s with in Hip Hop. One of the parts of our presentation was playing a video of a group of middle school students who used rap&hip hop for their school project. This showed how outdated ways of thinking and learning can be morphed into new ways of thinking and learning. Just like the workshop where we had to create an already existing toy, however the materials we were given weren’t exactly perfect so we had to think on our feet and make changes. I learned what didn’t work and basically had to fail before I got the chance try again and adapt. What I took away from this all is that we should also be looking at literacy’s in the same way as these workshops. We as students and teachers should be constantly thinking of new ways to understand what were learning & how were learning for not only for personal benefit but for all learners.

So far from my article readings I have learned that music is its own literacy in itself and that these artists are actually writing thought out poetry but you don’t realize between the cursing and hard beats. In one article I read I learned that the rhythm and beats are actually a format that almost all artist follow. You have your chorus, your bridge, your tempo, and etc. For example the YouTube video that allowed the same four notes to be played for numerous songs. So that would definitely be a cool video to show. Also we watched these rap battles of historical people (actors) and as they were rapping you were actually learning. I haven’t read into it too much but I read music speaks to the brain differently than reading or listening to someone talk so hopefully ill be able to go more in depth and explain that.

Personally and academically I have positively taken a lot from the readings so far but to be completely honest they have also confused me about the very idea of literacy. I used to think it was only about reading and writing pertaining to school but little did I realize we read and write throughout our daily lives. Literacy then was no longer reading and writing to me, literacy was a way of communication.

So since the world has so many ways of communication, there would be no way to depict and decide which literacy was correct and no way to give authority to who should decide what is literate and illiterate. In one of the first articles we read by Szwed called The Ethnography of Literacy I read, “But the fact that no society has yet reached this state should give us pause” and this really stuck with me because it made me realize that not one literacy alone is perfect.

And not one literacy is perfect because literacy is created and born through us humans, who unfortunately also aren’t perfect because we are all so different. This then made me think of the article by Deborah Brandt called Sponsors of Literacy, where she wrote about the people in our lives who have influenced our literacy. She said, “This analysis of sponsorship forces us to consider not merely how one social group’s literacy practices may differ from another’s, but how every-body’s literacy practices are operating in differential economies, which supply different access routes, different degrees of sponsoring power, and different scales of monetary worth to the practices in use.” And so since we all come from such a wide range of different upbringings, everyone’s literacy is going to be different and the way they apply it in their daily lives will be different.

So now literacy isn’t just the way we communicate it’s also a social aspect. It’s the words, body language, & writing we eat, breathe and sleep. As stated by Brandt , “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”, because literacy isn’t just words in front of our faces, it is the way of living and staying relevant with today’s society. For example how we use twitter which was pointed out by Jesse Stommel who wrote, The Twitter Essay. Stommel said, “One of the primary goals of abbreviations in text- or Twitter-speak is to condense an utterance to fit the 160 character limit of a text-message or the 140 character limit of a Twitter post (or Tweet). So we as scholars are purposely abbreviating, hash tagging, and are grammatically incorrect for a social app when we and our friends know our literacy is better than that.

 

Okay I can just go on forever but I think you get the point that although I have learned so much and am now greatly open minded towards how to approach literacy I am also extremely confused in what exactly it is and how id explain it to someone else.

“This tip from an experienced Twitter user changed my experience as a reader and writer of Twitter. With this new tool in hand, I was inspired to tweet again.” This quote really stood out to me because Keri Franklin refers to what she has learned about twitter as a “tool”. It helps explain that literacy is a tool we use to communicate and with they many different types of ways people can communicate comes with many different types of literacy. So being able to read and write on twitter with all the slang and jargon is just having another tool of literacy. For example sports lingo and restaurant order taking are forms of other literacy tools we gain with out even realizing it we have just added another literacy to our tool box. I love this grey area with in literacy and how you cant just point out that someone is literate or illiterate because there are too many different types of literacy’s.

“So to conclude her literacy wasn’t the best and still isn’t but she raised eight successful children who went on to raise successful grandchildren and great grandchildren. And so just because she doesn’t have a polished literacy, that doesn’t mean she was ever illiterate.”

About these words from my narrative I just wanted to show that being illiterate is not the same as having bad literacy and that literacy all pertains to where you apply it and what is asked of you to do with it.