Matt Poundstone

May 14, 2013

Literacy Studies- Reflection

 

Gordon Stewart, Academic Dean and Professor of English and Writing at the University of Virginia, my travel writing professor, instructed me that every experience you choose to write about should be headlined by one word that defines the sensation you felt when you experienced it.

 

Kairos: the opportune time and/or place, the right or appropriate time to say or do the right or appropriate thing.

 

That same professor I wrote of in my preface to this reflection also once told me “Teaching is an art, Matthew—the ability to pass an inherent passion onto others is a great responsibility, and it’s a disservice to our society to not cultivate that passion of teaching and learning, both internally and externally.” Though I was flattered with such a man recognizing a gift like that in me, I couldn’t uphold the exigency of his statement.  I never wanted to be a teacher; education is not what I went to college to study; I am someone who could not handle the responsibility of that particular profession. My unique passion for learning could not fit the curtailing realm of a classroom. I walked into Kim Jaxon’s Literacy Studies class (which was replete with English Education majors) with that same demeanor that I described—confident (borderline pompous) that my writing and reading acumen would more than suffice in being successful in this class. I wanted to imprint such acumen upon this course, which I felt was designed for future educators, in the hope of maintaining upholding the demand of Professor Stewart through them. With every new blog and article I felt I was structuring the decorum of my writing to fit that of a present or aspiring educator. I maintained this rhetorical facade throughout the assigned readings and reflections until Deborah Brandt, and her article of “Sponsors of Literacy”, stripped it from me.

To quickly summarize Brandt’s article for prosaic purposes, its discourse presents the combination of literacies that make people unique in their education and their supplementation of it. To a person like myself–someone who believed idiosyncrasy is an invariable forerunner in learning–I felt an initial connection to this article; it was a vindication of my paradox within scholastics; I had passion in the curriculum but apathy in the structure. To quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety…” It had to have been at this opportune time and place in my life to be asked this question by Brandt: “How are we to understand the vicissitudes of individual literacy development in relationship to the large-scale economic forces that set the routes and determine the worldly worth of that literacy?” Every feeling that I wore as a suit of armor: passion, arrogance, contradiction, was ebbed out and diluted to their forerunner: apprehension. I was– and am– apprehensive that my passion of literacy will be unfounded in the future; and to compensate, I made my literacy an island, diminishing all the other sponsors that have gone into the cultivation of it (family, friends, teachers, mentors, supervisors, editors, influential authors, etc.). From then on my writing was not only stripped of all conceit and decorum, but bore a subtle ode to the sponsors of my literacy.

 

John Donne wrote, “No one man [or woman] is an island… one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators.” My perspective has been shifted and molded with every new sponsor who chooses to invest in me. They translate the antecedent chapter of my literacy into another, and in this nascent paradigm I have been able to perceive my education as path; one that is paved by interaction and sponsorship. That, in itself, is “Kairos”, the epigraph of this reflection and the epitaph of my apprehension.

 

Throughout this semester we have discussed the vast amount of literacy facets: books, television shows, movies, social media; but what about video games?

 

The sound of the vibrating plastic controller in my sweating palms fills the dark room that is illuminated by the high definition television brought into my room after my parents fell asleep. I couldn’t tell you what time it is; the tint of orange light seeping through my closed shutters reveals that it is close to dawn. First period AP European History is looming over me like the diminishing health meter in the top corner of the screen. Nothing else matters as I sprint through sixteenth century Rome, killing Templars, and decoding ancient puzzles, all while maintaining cohesion to the deep story line. I will finish this game tonight.

 

Most readers would view that anecdote as a lazy high school student neglecting both his studies and sleep through frivolous gaming, but what would one think if that plastic controller in his hand was a history text, and that illuminating light was that of a lamp on the bedside table? That high school student did not know where the Piazza Navona was or what the hell a Templar was, until he purchased a copy of Assassins Creed. Who is to say the vast and detailed setting of the video game couldn’t generate coherence to monotone lecture of ancient architecture in his AP history class? That nine-hour video game bender could be the

 

Paul Gee, in his article “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy” discusses video games as a catalyst of literacy. Gee argues that video games with the amount of time and attention they generate through their use of semiotics can be better tools of literacy than reading a book. The fact that one interacts in a video game makes the content much more obtainable. Gee uses the comparison between playing a game of basketball and reading a text on basketball, and states that the latter is inferior in that there is nothing new being obtained in the invariable text. It is the interaction that sets video games apart from other sponsors of literacy.

 

 

 

 

 

I want to bring up my concerns with this concept of “autonomous literacy”

 

Autonomous literacy states that there should be a standardized criteria and practice of literacy and that it should be imposed upon countries viewed as illiterate so as to improve the well-being of that country’s standard of living. This standardized literacy is that of our own American, “superior” literacy.

 

Brian Street, in his article “Whats “new” in Literary Practices” states that  “Introducing literacy to poor, “illiterate” people, villages, urban youth etc. will have the effect of enhancing their cognitive skills, improving their economic prospects, making them better citizens, regardless of the social and economic conditions that accounted for their “illiteracy” in the first place” (77). To disregard social conditions, whether in gauging literacy or illiteracy, is to disregard its most fundamental and powerful component. A child obtaining literary practices does so within the society that harbors them, not from some foreign entity claiming superiority. An American student would find little to relate to in Ghanaian poet, Nii Parkes’ writings of life in a tribe just as a Ghanaian student would find little to relate to within an Ayn Rand novel of industry and capitalism. This model, though it seems great on paper, eliminates the idea of literacy being something formed within a culture and and thereby eliminates the vast amount of literary catalysts found within that culture such as sponsors and cultural needs and biases.

 

Literacy is broad and comprehensive. It is not to be rendered nor diluted into any one “true” form. Its development and growth should be as personal and esoteric as that of your own growth in your own culture. Yes, there are prominent cases of illiteracy outside of our own country, as to which may curtail that foreign society’s growth, but who are we to claim our literacy as the nostrum of this standardized infirmity? Is the possibility of eliminating society’s problems worth the certainty of eliminating its idiosyncratic nature?

 

 

 

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”

-Socrates

 I wish I could say that the genesis of my awareness of literacy began at an early age with constant reading that was encouraged by my parents, but it did not. Reading never really interested in me and writing was equally unenticing. I am easily distracted. It takes a bright light to keep me awake, so to speak. But it is because I am aware of this characteristic that I have formed a fervent search to remain captivated- in everything. I find that search in the words and wisdom of the people who are both willing and wanting to give them. Brandt calls these people “sponsors”, but that is a title that I feel is insufficient, for it degrades the gravity of the affect they have upon their “sponsored.” These people expand your mind, altering your thoughts- thoughts that go into the decisions that will inevitably define you. This process is not in comparison to the relation between a company and their logo upon a Little Leaguer’s baseball jersey but rather the spark that creates a conflagration.

 For me, these have always been teachers and they have been both cognizant and innovative in the ideological burden they place upon me. I have not felt this burden through the impersonal level of a massive lecture hall or through an automated computer recording, but through a personal one.

The relation between the people that Brandt calls “sponsors” and those that they underwrite to is a symbiotic one. We must recognize that our wanting of it, our need to examine and be captivated with the unexamined, has formed our literacy.

Therefore, as future teachers we must realize that our most important asset must be our ability to be approachable and munificent with our wisdom and ideals so we can be the forerunners or “sponors” of literacy in others.

Brandt’s article on literacy is as comprehensive as the idea itself. There were many themes and concepts one could pull from it, and what I got is that everyone has their own interpretations and methods of what we read and write, and they are formed as most things in life are: by the people who took the time to do so. Thus our literacy is malleable and must remain as such as we go through life, encountering more and more aspiring sponsors.

 

 

 

Hello, my name is Matt Poundstone and I am in my third year of Chico State. It took me two years to declare an English Literature major, but I did and I am sure it was the right choice.

I am the kind of person that strives to kind a deeper meaning in almost everything- something that would make a good story; and any kind of quote, gnome, character, or theme I find within a literary piece only augments that ability of finding depth and inquiry in the mundane and average aspects found in the routine of life. Last semester, I traveled to sixteen different countries on the program Semester at Sea, a study abroad program where I and five hundred other college students lived and learned upon a cruise vessel traveling to various ports in various countries. It was on this voyage that I discovered the idea of “orature”, the oral analogue of literature.

With being exposed to so many different kinds of cultures, customs, and people, I was able to be a part of some incredible experiences that I of course wrote about. But what I really found the most joy in is being able to tell these stories to different groups of people: friends, classmates, professors, etc. I loved being able to capture the entire room’s attention with my stories. My writing professor on the ship told me I have a gift of using my words and telling stories. The advice she gave me that affected me the most is that I should always write as I speak, because they should be one in the same.

Scwed, in his article “The Ethnography of Literacy” states, “literacy goes beyond the basic assumption of being able to read and write”(422). I think that what Scwed is trying to say is that literature is broad and comprehensive and it is because of that that society, and its failure to delineate a tangible domain and origin of literature, must compensate by rendering it to realms of reading and writing only. What I got from this article is that literature has many domains to which its both acquired and practiced; it is everything.  What I acquired from this is article was a new paradigm of literary merit, one that does not render my voice as simply “story-telling”, but one that amplifies it and gives me clarity as to what it is: orature.