Brandt Reading Response

Before You Read

U.S. culture has encouraged reading by advertising books everywhere. My community has encouraged reading because we used to have a bookmobile. A good reason to be good at these things is to be successful and go to college. Adults and authoritative leaders come up with these reasons.

Summary

In Brandt's article "Sponsors of Literacy" she explains sponsorship in literature. She explains that everyone that learns literature has sponsors. These sponsors teach people how to be literate. She gives examples from the past and how it is now in the present. She tells us the positives and negatives of these sponsorships for the present learner.

Synthesis

Brandt's "Sponsors of Literacy" relates to Allen and Porter. Allen talks about how readers "copy" the authors they are reading; this is how they learn to write. This relates to Brandt's idea of sponsorship. Porter talks about discourse communities. He explains that people in certain discourse communities know what they know because the belong and learn things from that community. This relates to the sponsors because everyone has different ones. 

Thoughts

I relate to this article because I have sponsors that taught me how to read, write, etc. I agree that almost everyone has different sponsors. These sponsors could be anyone from their parents to the authors they read. I also agree that sponsorship has changed over time. I think sponsorship is good because people learn in their comfort zone, but it is bad because people can be taught different things.

MM

This article is relevant to all of the rules. It helped me understand how literacy came about and how people still learn it today.

Dialectical Notebook

Response	Quotation
She is saying being literate is needed in the 20th century. You have the upper hand if you are literate.	“Literacy looms as one of the great engines of profit and competitive advantage in the 20th century” (333).
She is saying that the different sponsors a different person has explains the relations of the world.	“The concepts of sponsors helps to explain, then, a range of human relationships and ideological pressures that turn up at the scenes of literacy learning” (335).
Your relationships between both learning and opportunity overlap.	“A focus on sponsorship can force a more explicit and substantive link between literacy learning and systems of opportunity and access” (336).
Different places/people will teach you different forms of literacy.	“This section examines more closely how forms of literacy are created out of competitions between institutions” (339).
The bad things about sponsors is that they only want to teach and enforce new types of literacy and requirements and not the ones from the past.	“Sponsors enable and hinder literacy activity, often forcing the formation of new literacy requirements while decertifying older ones” (344).