Literacy and Me-Sarah Gibbons

Whew, one week down and on to the first blog post of the semester! I get the feeling this class is going to really force us to think about things in a new context and I can’t wait for that! I am an English Studies Major with a Minor in Sustainability (graduating in December, YAY!) and I grew up in a very, very rural town in Northern California called Alturas. I tried the city life after high school when I moved to Sac and then eventually found my way to Redding which has proven to be a good mix of both worlds for me. I am getting married in May and cannot wait for the planning to be over and the celebration to begin!

I tend to be very driven and through this class I have begun to really question why I do certain things and how I could have formed these traits. I had never really been asked to think about my literacy practices and now that I am they are both interesting and a little scary. It is amazing to think that so many of my own traits and practices have been learned from my peers and relatives and that I am also affecting them in such a profound manner. For example, books have always been an important part of my life and as I began looking at the reasoning behind this fact I realized that my dad and his love of reading heavily affected my own opinion of books because of the close relationship we have. On the other hand, my sister and my mother were closer when my sister was very young and she did not like to read. My mother never really read by choice but treated reading for pleasure as more of a nuisance, as did my sister until she and I grew close later on in life. My love of reading and constant talk of books eventually coaxed my sister into seeing the value of the practice and she in turn convinced our mother to try reading for personal pleasure. The four of us are all voracious readers now and we all enjoy talking about the different books we have discovered.

Szwed’s argument that literacy can be affected by nostalgia, experience, and context really resonated with me because of this past experience with my own family. Each individual is impacted heavily in their thinking, knowledge, drive, and understanding by those who surround them and when an individual’s literacy is really considered it encompasses and affects all of these characteristics within each person. Literacy is embedded within our daily lives and affects nearly everything we do as well as the things that those around us do/think. Kind of a crazy thought!