Dialectical Journal: Brandt

Author/Title:

Deborah Brandt: "Sponsors of Literacy"

Summary:

Using extensive examples from the research she gathered through personal interviews, Brandt discusses her concept of "literacy sponsors."

Reflection	Quote
Brandt makes a strong argument about the economic lines that are connected to literacy—she makes obvious what for many of us is hidden behind layers social capital.	“[…] these skills [literacy] existed fragilely, contingent within an economic moment
*”any agent, local of distant, concrete of abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way” (335). *”Sponsors set the terms for access to literacy and wield powerful incentives for compliance and loyalty” (334). *”Sponsors are a tangible reminder that literacy learning throughout historyhas always required permission, sanction, assistance, coercion, or, at minimum, contact with existing trade routes” (334). *”Sponsors are delivery systems for the economies of literacy, the means by which these forces present themselves to—and through—individual learners” (334). *”[Sponsors] also represent the causes into which people’s literacy usually gets recruited” (334).	“Sponsors of literacy”
Entering into the territory of ritualistic behavior.	“Obligations toward one’s sponsors run deep, affecting what, why, and how people write and read” (335).
In this sense, literacy, on many levels, becomes the dividing line between the “landed nobles” and the “working peasants.” I think Brandt actually does a very sophisticated job of showing this in her example of Raymond Branch and Dora Lopez.	“Literacy, like land, is a valued commodity in this economy, a key resource in gaining profit and edge” (336).
1.       “How, despite ostensible democracy in educational changes, stratification of opportunity continues to organize access and reward in literacy learning” (336). 2.       “How sponsors contribute to what is called “the literacy crisis,” that is, the perceived gap between rising standards for achievement and people’s abitlity to meet them” (336). 3.       “How encounters with literacy sponsors, especially as they are configured at the end of the 20th century, can be sites for the innovative rerouting of resources into projects of self-development and social change” (336).	Brandt’s analysis addresses 3 key issues
Like any good capitalistic enterprise, competition creates—in this case, it is creating new forms of literacy that hope to capture the market.	“[…] forms of literacy are created out of competitions between institutions” (339).