WA 1 - Your Literacy History

Writing Assignment 1 (5%) “This essay calls upon you to reconstruct key moments in your literacy history by identifying the agents sponsoring this literacy and narrating the way literacy has ‘pursued’ you in a variety of concepts (consider literacies those around you expect you to have).

According to Brandt, ‘[s]ponsors…are any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way’ (166, emphasis mine).

How does this definition match up with your understanding of what a sponsor does? How might a sponsor ‘gain advantage’ from sponsoring someone else? What ideas, conversations, and past experiences does Brandt’s exploration of ‘sponsorship’ call up in you? What can you learn by accepting this definition? What can we learn by resisting this definition of sponsorship?

Be sure to more than merely describe your experiences with literacy and literacy education. Instead, analyze your findings using—among other things—the relevant arguments from Brandt’s ‘Sponsors of Literacy.’ Take some time to unpack Brandt’s key arguments and your position in relation to them; then, consider how they are (or are not) true of your own experiences with literacy acquisition” (LC 39). This paper should be in the MLA format and 3-4 pages in length.