CCR 691:Brandt (2001) *Literacy in American Lives*

Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Some claims/assumptions:

· Literacy is part of the machine: it is part of material systems and is assigned a societal value

· Literacy is a tool for denial of opportunity; it is exploited for profit;

· Social privilege is associated with literacy

· Literacy is a resource like wealth, education, or trade-skill (5)

· Three themes

o “Literacy learning principally will refer to occasions when people take on new understandings or capacities; as we will see, literacy learning is not confined to school settings or formal study” (6-7).

o “Literacy development refers to the accumulating project of literacy learning across a lifetime, the interrelated effects and potentials of learning over time. It is closely connected to the life span and to the historical events that affect literacy as a collective good” (7).

o “Literacy opportunity refers to people’s relationships to social and economic structures that condition chances for learning and development. Realistically, these three dimensions are not easy to separate and, as literacy is lived, seem to be three sides of one coin” (7).

· “Together, these studies strongly imply that literacy among the U.S. citizenry has been underestimated by standardized tests and other narrow, usually school-based measurements that miss the meanings and forms of literacy in everyday life” (7).

Method

· Interviewed 80 folks born 1895-1985 about their literacy practices, all from Wisconsin

· Volunteers recruited through social networking and public locations (nursing homes, etc.)

· Looked at how literacy evolved for generations (especially throughout their lives as children, students, workers, parents, citizens)

· Research question: “How has literacy learning changed over the last century and how have rising expectations for literacy been experienced as part of felt life?” (4).

· Considers economical and historical influences of family, region, nation (politics, war, etc.)

· “collection of open-ended autobiographical monologues, structured and less structured interviews, and biographical surveys” (10).

· Cohort analysis over their life span

· Used interview script (appendix A)

· Addresses reading and writing, but more focus is on writing

· Transcriptions were edited for slip-ups, false starts, pauses, umms (13-14)

· Analytical framework: sponsors of literacy: “older relatives, teachers, religious leaders, supervisors, military officers, librarians, friends, editors, influential authors” (19). Seems to be missing other textual aritifacts.

· There is a LACK of theory and disciplinary framing

Some assumptions about methodology:

· Literacy should be viewed in context (looking at an individual’s unique experience)

· People refashion their memories (12)

· Editing for standard English aims at equality

Chapter 1: “Literacy, Opportunity, and Economic Change”

· Case studies of two women, showing how the rise, fall, and change of literacy is closely related to the rise, fall, and change of economics in their region. Surprisingly, it is the woman from the older generation who received more opportunity since economical advancements were available in her region at the time. Similarly, both had to negotiate “conservative effects of gender” (41).

Chapter 2: “Literacy and Illiteracy in Documentary”

· Case studies of two men, looking at how literacy standards change over time and depending on sites of literacy. For instance, one man’s skills for speech and debate are “eclipsed” when written language becomes the more privileged medium.

Chapter 3: “Accumulating Literacy: How Four Generations of One American Family Learned to Write”

· Case studies of four generations writing in one family (the Mays), showing that some literacy practices are passed from one generation to the next, while other practices are influenced by historical and technological change (The Depression, WWII, associations of literacy as elitism, industrialization, move from village to city to suburbia). See additional notes saved on this chapter.

Chapter 4: “The Power of It: Sponsors of Literacy in African American Lives”

· Case studies of African Americans who experienced literacy while being excluded from education and economic opportunity, thus literacy advanced without economic sponsorship. It appears that one major sponsor was AA churches.

Chapter 5: “The Sacred and the Profane: Reading versus Writing in Popular Memory”

· Considers how cultural context plays in when individuals learn to read vs. when individuals learn to write. Focuses on how “writing is a more ambivalently encouraged enterprise and is fraught, more than reading, with secrecy, punishment, and surveillance” (24).

Chapter 6: “The Means of Production: Literacy and Stratification at the Twenty-First Century”

· Considers how literacy and social inequity are at play by comparing literacy experiences of two individuals with different socio-economic backgrounds: one white male of privileged class and one Latina female.