Synopsis and Reflection unit 1
Synopsis and Reflection each Unit 1 ENC 6712 Prashant Patel February 3, 2021
I. Synopsis
Deborah Brandt writes of significant economic and social change that has caused the notion and dynamics of literacy to change. In her book “literacy in American lives” Deborah Brandt designs and conducts a qualitative analysis that seeks to examine how citizens that live and work in the upper Midwest and the southern parts of the United States contextualized the reflections and memories of learning how to read and write. As a consequence of her focus qualitative analysis, the place of primacy on her ability to interview subjects and extract information, Deborah Brandt formulates our unique conceptual framework that takes into account how the internal design of the literary culture differentiates the experiences of Midwestern working-class whites, from poor blacks, Southerners.
I will argue in this analysis Deborah Brandt’s observations of how the social and economic fabric that is propelling a change towards how society perceives and constructs definitions of literacy, on earth paradoxical forces that allow the author to say something unique about how literacy has changed. In this essay, I will link different concepts together to paint a complicated picture of how Deborah Brandt thinks about different shifts that are occurring within literacy education today. Finally, I will connect certain themes from this essay to my own experiences in the area of reading and writing.
The first conceptual distinction that Deborah Brandt discusses, is the influence of the Midwestern conservative agrarian cultural dynamic that defined the initial stages of literacy for the region. The conservative lifestyle that imbued Midwestern society at the beginning of the 20th century and in subsequent decades influenced the way of individual gained avenues towards different forms of “Literacy Learning” (6). in the words of Deborah Brandt literacy learning is “specific occasions when people take on new understandings or new capacities” (6). The concept of literacy learning can be connected to the overall outlook of the author towards Midwestern literary culture of the beginning of the 20th century since it identified and emphasized how the agrarian environment influenced what topics were written about, what were the particular audiences that were targeted by this type of writing and the skill that was required. What is important to emphasize is that literacy learning is developed and formed by how individuals perceive and conceptualize their own literary experiences and how they relate that to other individuals.
Deborah Brandt’s perception of southern literary culture focuses on elements and factors about the concept of Literacy Opportunity. Literacy opportunity can be placed within a literary context as being “people relationships to social and economic structures that condition chances for learning and development” (7). This is significanti0n that Deborah Brandt is talking about both formal and informal organizations, that allows a person to form connections and a context for Reading.one formal institution that created opportunities in the south was the Black Church. According to Brant (the role of the black church as a bedrock of education and culture enhancement) (111). this quote is significant for the reason that black churches served as a place for communal gatherings that emphasize reading and interpreting the text instead (112). These actions were important in creating an ideology within the black contuses that sought to separate black literary practices from the predominant white culture. within the black southern culture was indeed paradoxical and people used churches as a venue to come together during the age of segregation. In that church, congregants were prohibited from meeting one another in a sense the function of literacy in this context of literacy had the opposite effect in that it brought people together rather than segregate them.
Another example of the paradoxical structure that existed in southern literacy is the role of the individual neighborhood. Housing laws in the south at this time required blacks not to reside in the same neighborhood. However, regardless of this situation teachers and students lived near each other (123). This created an informal network of literacy that facilitated the teachers to act as sponsors and they were able to break down barriers that affected their student’s ability to gain literary resources.
II. Reflection & Analysis
As I reflect on what I’ve just written and connected to my own literacy experience. I will argue that my experience is similar to how Deborah Brandt perceives Midwestern literary culture. In connecting the concepts and ideas that are associated with her analysis, I will construct my argument out of my experiences in special education and being a disabled man. As I said earlier, for the first seven years of my formal education I attended a specialized school that educated people with varying disabilities.
To get placed in the correct educational atmosphere, before my acceptance into the correct class setting, I had to take a formal test for reading comprehension. At this time in my intellectual development, I couldn’t think quickly and imagine Key facts from the text. Therefore, we can say the school acted as a Negative Sponsor. This term is meant to imply that often within formalize education sponsorship can be a hindrance in that person who it is supposed to be sponsoring. Going further negative sponsorship is further exacerbated by institutions such as schools using traditional methods and standardized tests in order to assess the reading capabilities of nontraditional students.
The outcome of this negative experience resulted in me engendering a consciousness of Independent Sponsorship. Independent sponsorship is a concept that I developed, in which I designed and created my independent reading and writing curriculum. I use the resources are available to me in my community. Such as my local bookstore. Television also allowed me to create my literary environment in that I’m a fan of C-SPAN book TV. This channel permits a free and flowing discussion of both fictional books and nonfictional books.
Another example of the paradoxical structure that existed in southern literacy is the role of the individual neighborhood. Housing laws in the south at this time required blacks not to reside in the same neighborhood. However, regardless of this situation teachers and students lived near each other (123). This created an informal network of literacy that facilitated the teachers to act as sponsors and they were able to break down barriers that affected their student’s ability to gain literary resources.
II. Analysis/Application
Postmodernism is a conceptual and theoretical paradigm that constructs meanings of objects and individuals from a position that values different perspectives which are designed to highlight how the individual or person operates and behaves without direction from hierarchical institutions. Postmodernism is essentially a perspective that takes into account how Epistemological Truth, is shaped and formed by how a person perceives and defines their place within a structure. Epistemological truth is the search for how the world can be understood in terms of the way society either structures words or systems that are meant to keep a minority group in an inferior status. On the other hand, the search for philosophical truth can also be contextualized as an investigation for a transcendent truth that explains how literacy can shape a philosophy that takes into account all things in the universe.
The central focus of my synthesis will be an analysis and demonstration of the ways that certain chapters that are part of the main text for this unit highlight a tension between these two concepts of epistemology. This tension can be understood through a discussion and of how the authors of the compendium frame their arguments around the literacy concept of sponsorship. The first chapter in which this tension can be identified is in the chapter that is titled: Testimony As A Sponsor Of Literacy: Bernice Robinson And The South Carolina Sea Island Citizenship Program’s Literacy Activism. The central argument in this chapter is that Bernice Robinson behaves in such a way as a sponsor that permits the testimony of her students to come forth and serve as an overarching truth in the way that the students as individuals construct their literary experiences.
From this resource have you engendered a cornucopia of books, ranging from history two fiction. Notwithstanding, my Access range of resources I am also aware the people and other citizens cannot overcome structural barriers that prevent them from expanding the scope of their literacy engagement. One way to overcome this barrier is to link writing and reading together so that a person has a chance to reflect on what they just read and write it down; this will allow them to absorb the information better. However, I can only connect my experiences of writing and reading in terms of how Deborah brant frames standard English instruction through my formal education experiences. Therefore, I have no professional experience to make any association in terms of the free market.
Despite this fact, I can connect some of my personal experience with literacy with the concept of Stratification. the idea of stratification within the context of my personal experience being a first-generation American. For example, my parent’s use of standard English in terms of writing and speaking has been formalized through the British standard of education that emphasizes speech and pronunciation. This requires me to integrate concepts from formalizing speech in my writing and reading in terms of producing and output. This is an example of stratification since I am getting further away and distant from how English was originally taught to my parents.
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