It’s always interesting to look back on a semester and try to summarize what exactly I learned and retained from a course. We’ve gone over so much material, and we’ve had so many interesting and valuable discussions in this class. With a title like Intro to Literacy Studies, I didn’t know what to expect from the class, but I can say with quite a bit of certainty that I was not expecting to have enjoyed it this much. I’m not really sure how I can sum up in a blog post just how much we managed to cover in the past several months, but I suppose I can try.

I was trying to explain to someone recently what this class was about, and I think that the most important thing I got from it was broadening my view on what literacy means and is. I have been privileged in terms of reading and books and educational environments. I have gone to very good schools that would be impossible to pay for for many people, because of my background or because of my parents. I have a family full of college-educated people, and at holidays, we sometimes talk about Shakespeare. As a result from all this, I had a narrow and possible slightly pretentious idea of what really counted in terms of literature and what was considered valuable reading. I remember the reading and the discussion on literacy sponsors, and it really made me realize that I have had so many amazing sponsors, from my mom to my grandmother to my teachers. I was read to as a kid, I was encouraged to read often, and my sisters and I always got books for Christmas. Because of the way I was raised, I never really understood how someone could be unenthusiastic about reading, or how they could not like it at all. When we got to the discussion about literacy sponsors, it struck me more so than ever that not everyone had that kind of encouragement. It also struck me that my idea of what made literacy valuable was not nearly broad enough. Why are comic books or graphic novels considered less worthy to write essays on? Or why are audio book not considered just as good as traditional reading? After this class, I’m far more aware of how arbitrary the way we place value is sometimes. Just like there are different types of talents and intelligences, there are different types of literacy.

Another reading and another aspect of the semester that has stuck with me was our reading on the different types of literacy, like Literacy as Accessory or Literacy as Defiance. The way literature and literacy is important to someone’s identity is very interesting. People can use literacy to define themselves in all kinds of different ways. From wearing shirts with book covers to picking specific quotes to add to our social media pages, literacy as identity is a significant aspect of this generation. I think this relates quite a bit to the two presentations at the end of the semester about social media and identity. The first one, through making Pintrest boards to describe ourselves, it really shows how identity and literacy coincide. Every choice we make on social media is very specific to how we want the world to see us, and each social media site is a different side of our identities. I found it fascinating to see what people wanted to include in their boards, and how sometimes it seemed to differ from the way they acted in person or it seemed to highlight their more widely accepted interests. The way we pick what we want to include in our online profiles and personas really shows how literacy and identity have changed. And then there was the second presentation, which showed a completely different side to how social media and identity coincide. It was less about how we viewed ourselves and how we wanted to portray ourselves, and more about the way we use social media to pass judgement on others. Just like we pick and choose what we want to show others, we pick and choose what we want to see in others. One of the overwhelming answers in the survey was that whatever people post, it depends on the person whether we find it annoying. We use social media to judge and mock people we don’t like, or we use it to keep in touch with and admire people we do like. To be honest, before this course, I had never given social media a whole lot of thought. I have a facebook, a twitter, an instagram, and a tumblr, but it had never occurred to be how they relate to literacy and identity.

In the second half of the semester, I got to do maybe one of the best things I’ve ever had to do for a class. I got to re-explore children’s literacy. Through Writing Superheroes and Fairytales as Literacy, I spent quite a bit of time this semester feeling nostalgic and thinking about what literacy means to kids. After graduating to high school and taking difficult classes and stressing about finals, it’s not often that I think about what it was like to be a little kid and what sorts of games and books made me excited, and what first got me interested in being an English Literature major in the first place. Writing Superheroes was so funny, and it reminded me so much of the kinds of games I used to play with my friends when I was that age. Reading the stories that the little kids wrote was so much fun. The stories were really funny, full of confusing plots and spelling errors, but it surprised me how much these kids seemed to think about social issues and gender and race. Literacy and media are some of the first ways kids are told how the world is or how it’s supposed to be, and it really struck me how much the kids in the book were affected by these issues. In addition, Cinderella Ate My Daughter and Kissing the Witch really made me think more about how fairytales tell children (especially girls) what the world is supposed to look like and what they are supposed to want. Gender roles and the categories of good and evil are major themes in fairytales, and it makes me wonder how much they are affecting little girls now and how much they affected me when I was growing up.

This class is required for my major, so I would have had to take it anyway, but I’m still so glad I did. I feel like I learned a lot in this class, and I also just really enjoyed being in it. I don’t know if I want to be a teacher. I haven’t figured that out yet. But I know that if I do become a teacher, remembering this class will be incredibly helpful in how I would want to teach.

The presentations were all so amazing and thought-provoking. I enjoyed giving the fairytale presentation, and then learning from the other groups during their presentations.

The rap as literacy one definitely threw me far, far out of my comfort zone. I’ve never exactly tried to write a rap before, and while it is a sort of poetry, it’s very different than the kinds I’m used to. I found the scientific aspects of that presentation very interesting. I had never really thought about that before. It was all very new, and I don’t think it’s something I would have learned about if not for this class. I’m glad I did.

I also found the identity one where they had us make Pintrest very fun and interesting. I had never used Pintrest before (and though I made an account for the purposes of the activity, I still don’t) but it really got me thinking about how we present ourselves in online personas. It never really struck me how central social media can be to a person’s identity in this day and age. It is easy to dismiss social media, but our generation and kids younger than us are growing up with the expectation that they will at least have a Facebook. What people choose to post or not post on social media makes a difference, and I guess I had never really given it much thought before.

I grew up on fairytales. When I was really little, it was books about fairies that my mom would read to me, or various Disney movies. I was always surrounded by the stories of princes and princesses, magic and dragons, happy endings. I must have watched these movies a thousand times and never got sick of them.  As I got older, I also became interested in the origins of these stories, and just how different they were from the watered down, much shinier Disney versions. Then I became interested in writing my own versions of these fairytales, replacing parts I didn’t approve of with things that fit my value system. For my entire life, and I imagine it is like this for many people, fairytales have been very important to me.

Seeing as I was a small child when I first started loving fairytales, I didn’t quite understand how these stories were shaping my values and the way I viewed the world. Now, looking back, I think about just how much fairytales affect children, boys and girls alike. I wonder how different I might have been if I didn’t grow up on The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. I, like everyone, love a good happy ending. It’s wonderful to watch a character make it out okay in the end, live their dreams, marry the prince. But just what are we teaching young girls (and also young boys) about what a happy ending looks like, and what the ideal life is? Or what a princess is supposed to look like? Fairytales teach kids all kinds of things about how they are supposed to view the world and it’s not all bad and it’s not all good.

Naturally, because of my long-standing enthusiasm for fairytales, I was thrilled when the other girls at my table, rather than joining one of the groups that already existed, wanted to make up a new one about fairytales. I ordered Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein and Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue, and they just arrived today. We’re planning on looking into these books, as well as each selecting one popular fairytale and one that has faded away to discuss the literacy of fairytales and the way they shape the way kids (and maybe also adults) view the world.

Writing Superheroes made me feel like a kid again, and only partially because I got to run around in a cloak as a direct result of that. It’s hard to remember what playing pretend was like without seeing kids playing pretend. Adults (though I hesitate to call myself that) forget what it’s like to be a kid, and as a result, it makes it difficult to interact with kids in a productive way. How are we supposed to teach children if we don’t understand them anymore? Kids have their own specific set of literacy rules and social rules, and I think this book did a good job showing what they are. It’s easy to try and dismiss kids and say that they don’t understand the way the world works and we don’t need to indulge their fantasies.

But the truth is, it’s not that kids don’t understand how the adult world works. It’s more that adults don’t understand how the kid world works.

I wasn’t sure what to expect in this class. Normally, before the semester starts, I check the BlackBoard pages of all my classes to see what I should expect for the next few months. This class- along with one other class- had nothing on the page. I knew that this class was required for English Lit majors, so I would have to take it eventually. With a name like Intro to Literacy Studies, I had no idea what to expect. I didn’t really know what “Literacy Studies” entailed, and to be honest, I’m still unsure. When I thought of literacy, I thought of books and school and writing and Shakespeare. After our readings and our time spent in class, I no longer know quite what I think. I never thought much about literacy sponsors or different types of literacy before. All I know is that literacy is far broader than I originally thought.

From going to school and taking so many English classes, I just assumed that academic literacy was the only type that we would ever talk about in a classroom setting. I had never really even thought of street signs and magazines and blogs as a type of literacy. I always thought they were valuable in their own ways, but I never attached the word “literacy” to them. It’s kind of comforting to know that things that I enjoy doing, while they are not considered valuable in many classes, are not worthless. Twitter and Instagram and other social media never seemed like literacy to me, partially because I have heard so many older generations speaking negatively about all social media and digital technology. It is refreshing to heard things like that TED talk and listening to people in older generations saying positive things about teenagers. I’m so accustomed to having people bash and dismiss my generation.

Literacy sponsors are also something I had not considered very much before. I guess this could be because that when you are privileged in something, tat thing becomes less of an issue in your life. I was very lucky in terms of literacy sponsors. My entire extended family is full of very well-educated and very encouraging people, and I went to a high school that had a lot of teachers who were very kind and willing to see other forms of literacy. I never really thought about how one’s literacy sponsors could stifle or limit someone’s literacy, or how sponsors who opposed each other could be difficult. It was very interesting to hear in class and in discussion the different types of sponsors people had.

I don’t really know what literacy is. I don’t even really know what it isn’t. I know that any limits put on it are arbitrary, and people ranking the worth of various types of literacy is arbitrary. People can be computer literate, baking literate, book literate, and so on. So far, I’ve learned that there is no way to dismiss any type of literacy as worse or praise any type of literacy as better.