Post 10: Reflection

I don’t think anyone had a real idea of what literacy studies were before we started this class. I remember thinking, well, it fits into my schedule, but how are we going to talk about reading and writing for a whole semester? Whatever the teacher has a good ratemyprofessor score. Even though I am not going to be a teacher per se, I am really glad I took this course. Now I not only can I sound really smart quoting Brandt, Street, Szwed, and other authors we’ve read, but a lot of what I’ve learned has forced me to take a step back and reexamine the way I view and judge other people based on their literacy practices.

I really can’t believe how closely identity is tied to literacy. What you read, what you write, what you post on what platform, in essence, what you do every day, really affects how other people see you. Through social media, you have complete control of how you want others to see you (online anyways). Szwed forced me to take a step back and look at my own judgments I make about other people’s literacy. I have always been so offended when people have looked down on my “weird” sic-fi fantasy novels, or my obsession with comparing items endlessly to find exactly what I want while online shopping, or the accounts I follow on Instagram, but suddenly I realized I was doing the same thing to other people!

I also really like the idea Street quoted from Dewey: you can’t use what you learn in school in the real world, and you can’t use what you learn in the real world in school. The education system is not geared towards the multimodal learning recent generations have created for themselves.