Notes on Deborah Brandt’s essay “Sponsors of Literacy.”

Pre-reading 

Brandt begins with a brief history of literacy and its connection to economic and technological forces; she defines “sponsors” briefly and says something about her methodology.  Then she elaborates on “sponsors” before making her three main points:

Access significantly affects literacy, which affects socio-economic status: literacy sponsors “organize and administer stratified systems of opportunity and access”  (567). 

Changes in literacy, through both technology and style, present a sense of destabilized yet advancing literacy. Sponsors of literacy “raise the literacy stakes in struggles for competitive advantage”  (567).

Appropriation of literacy skills is a kind of informal stealing/borrowing of the intellectual (if not financial) rewards of literacy. 

Brandt uses 5 stories to illustrate the three ways in which literacy sponsorship shapes lives in unpredictable and uneven ways.  For your “Sponsor of Literacy” assignment,  I am asking you to investigate one person’s story of literacy, paying particular attention to his or her sponsorships.  You might speculate on the future literacy needs of this person, but not necessary. 

Summary notes

"Paradoxically, even as the steam-powered penny press made print more accessible (by making publishing more profitable), it brought an end to a particular form of literacy sponsorship and a drop in literate potential"  (555).  [a McLuhan reversal described! This observation suggests (maybe?) that web publishing—despite fears of illiteracy—will increase certain kinds of literacy ?]

“Sponsors, as I have come to think of them, are any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way.” (556)

Sponsorship and access

Raymond Branch—white, middle-upper class, educated, material conditions of literacy available to him.

            Dora Lopez, Mexican-American, poor, marginally educated, materials of bi-literacy hard to come by.

Sponsorship and the rise in literacy standards

            Dwayne Lowery was sponsored in his transition from manual labor to information worker, but throughout his career he faced the pressures of constant change and re-tooling.

Sponsors and Appropriation in Literacy Learning

            Examples of two women who “stole” the literacy practices of their bosses in order to secure some measure of success in their lives in very different and unpredictable ways.