The literacy narrative assignment calls you to investigate your past literate experiences, share stories about moments and situations that shaped your trajectory as a reader and writer, and make an overall point. Throughout your life, many experiences have helped you develop as a reader and writer. Parents, teachers, mentors, and institutions are among the entities that have likely helped you develop your literacy. These sponsors (as Deborah Brandt) would call them, are agents that enable and procure literacy opportunities but also stand to gain something from the sponsorship situation.
Begin by considering your history as a reader and writer. Mine your memory for important moments and situations that helped you develop your sense of value regarding reading and writing. Think about who helped you to develop your sense of value regarding reading and writing. Think carefully about key experiences that impacted your perception of writing and reading.
Brainstorming
Start the brainstorming process by answering all of the questions below:
What is your earliest memory of reading and writing?
How did you learn to read and write?
How did you come to identify certain values with reading and writing?
What kinds of reading have you done in your past and what kinds of reading do you do now?
Which teachers do you remember from your past who had a particular impact on your reading and writing?
What is your current attitude towards reading and writing?
Were there any aspects of reading or writing that frustrated you as you grew up?
How have institutions impacted your reading and writing?
How much have you enjoyed particular kinds of reading and writing that you did in your past? Why?
Has there ever been a sense of reward or punishment associated with reading or writing from your past?
What from your past has made you the kind of reader and writer you are today?
What moments from your past do you remember as particularly empowering or dis-empowering?
Organizing
After you have answered these questions, you should make a literacy profile. You might arrange your literacy experiences according to empowering experiences and dis-empowering ones. You should organize your profile in any way that makes sense to you. Below is an example of my literacy profile:
Professor Longhany's Literacy Profile
Early Listening Experiences: My earliest recognition of literacy was
listening to my grandmother tell fairytale stories. My parents told these
stories too, but I remember my grandmother telling us about the Three Little
Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk, and The Woman with a Wig and a Wag who stole a
bunch of money from a witch among others. These stories all carried themes
about working hard, persevering, and upholding certain values.
Early Readers: My parents had a rich clustering of
story books for us to read as well. We had the Dr. Seuss collection, books of
poems by Shell Silverstein, a series of biographical picture books about famous
Americans, and cards from Wild
Kingdom that depicted
different animals and plants from around the world. We read these story books
with my mother before going to bed. I remember reading The Lorax and again I
was being exposed to books that carried these little lessons- this one being
that it is important to take care of the environment.
Learning Disabilities: When I got to second grade, I
was diagnosed with a learning disability called ADHD. My teacher was about 85
years old with the temperament of a drill sergeant. I remember being led into a
doctor’s office where nodes were attached to my head. The final prognosis: I
was to be put on Ritalin. My father refused to let me go on Ritalin and I was
sent back to school. Surprisingly my grades turned around when I got to third
grade. The class was much more engaging and fun. I started to get A’s and B’s
again.
My mother gave me interesting things to read: In
fifth grade my mother gave me a book called Bo
Knows Bo, the autobiography of Bo Jackson. Since I was athletic and enjoyed
sports, Bo Knows Bo was great. In the first twenty pages, Bo wrote about losing
his virginity at age seven. I really enjoyed showing my friends the racy
sections where Bo talked about his sex life. In 7th grade my mother
came through with another book titled The
Hot Zone. This thriller is about an Ebola outbreak in a small African
nation. This book really sparked my interest and there were times where I was
sneaking some reading while in class.
Sports Literacies:
My mother pushed my academics, but my father pushed me to develop sports
literacies. I learned a lot about how to be a good teammate and set personal
goals aside for the betterment of the team. I’ll never forget the little league
game where I pitched a one-hit shutout. Our only run scored was by our first
baseman who hit a homerun. He gave me his homerun ball after the game and said
if it hadn’t been for my pitching performance that day, we would not have won
the game. I learned about perseverance, teamwork, giving credit to others, and
how to both lose and win gracefully.
Video Game Literacy: After having me, my mother had
my brother eighteen months later. Taking care of us both became quite a task,
so my mother got me a video game system called Atari. Since Atari, I have come
to own many other systems including Sega Genesis, Nintendo, Sony PlayStation,
Nintendo Wii, and so on. One genre of video games really stuck with me- it was
role playing strategy games. These games involve an epic story where a hero
character (the one I controlled) set out on an adventure. I remember playing
various role playing games, but there was always the character setting out on
an adventure that brought me back to the game. Inadvertently I started to
develop a taste for these adventures, and along with the early stories that my
grandmother told me, these stories that emerged out of my game console were
also filled with lessons to be learned. One offshoot of this was learning about
failure. Every time I failed at the video game, I learned better ways to try it
another time. No failure in the world of gaming was enough to cripple me, and I
almost always found a way to finish the game.
Decline of traditional print literacies: Once I got
into early high-school I fell out of favor with writing and reading for a bit
of time. I read the sports page of the newspaper nearly every day, but I began
to be less interested in reading and writing. The downward spiral of
traditional print literacies continued into 12th grade where I had
an instructor who had us watch movies for the duration of our senior year of
English. We watched many films, but I didn’t really learn any writing skills
that would help me write in college.
The community college English teacher grabbed my butt:
I earned a C in my first college level English course and was still
disappointed in my abilities as a writer and reader. This freshmen level
English teacher wore Kansas Jayhawks shirts to class every day. She regularly
tore into my papers, and this was justified because I had just spend one year
of an English class my senior year of high school watching movies.
________________________________________________________
Finding a Main Point or Theme
After completing your profile, you should start to see some sense of direction or some themes emerging with your profile. You must decide upon what it is that you will talk about out of all the possibilities from your past. As you consider what you want to write about, you should consider an overall 'main theme' or an overall 'so what' point that will guide your narrative. Your main theme, also known as your central finding, should guide and control the overall direction of the essay. For example, you might have discovered that you were steered away from certain kinds of literacy, but this motivated you to pursue those types of literacy even more fervently. Or, you may notice an insight emerge that helps explain why you read and write as you do today.
This main point or main finding should be supported by evidence from your past experiences. For example, if I pull some common themes from my narrative, a few ideas emerge:
1. The impact of the adventure story has carried throughout my literacy development
2. My motivation fluctuated at different points of time based on relationships I had with sponsors
I might make a claim that relationships are paramount for sponsorships to succeed and for literacy to flourish.
What makes the literacy narrative good?
1. Tells a story about past literacy experiences
2. Makes connections between your literate past and where you are now as a reader and writer
3. Delivers an overall point
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