I think that many of us struggle with the concept of enjoying reading and writing because often in elementary school, reading and writing was used as almost a punishment. For me anyways, I never enjoyed reading for homework because often I had homework that I thought at the time was pointless. It also has to do with the content of what you’re reading. For example, in Kara Poe Alexander’s article called “Successes, Victims, and Prodigies: “Master” and “Little” Cultural Narratives in the Literacy Narrative Genre” she discusses what kinds of reading materials they were reading in school. She examined cultural narratives that students performed in literacy narratives and her results showed that students incorporate the literacy-equals-success master narrative the most and yet they also include little narratives such as hero, victim, and child prodigy. She believes that these findings could improve the decision on reading choices. I feel that these findings could improve what teachers assign to their students. If we focus on these findings, maybe we might value it more and have a closer relationship to reading and writing.

 

Alexander contrasts master and little narratives in her article. It is important to analyze student literacy narratives because it can show how to engage students in literacy narratives and make it a positive experience. There are several stories about different experiences from people. Most of the time, people had stories about different experiences relating to how they were exposed to certain things that made it so either they had a positive or negative experience. For example, there was a student that “entered school in the third grade” (Alexander 619) and they “noticed that I was ahead of most of the other children, and it was very easy to impress my teacher with my knowledge” (Alexander 619), which just proves that because this child had a positive experience before, they had an even better time in their new school. If children are exposed to positives experiences when they are younger, it will make it so that they will use these positive experiences and further. These master and little cultural narratives should be explored more so that children are exposed to them sooner.

 

Every narrative has a goal behind it. A cultural narrative that stood out to me was the one about success. Cultural narratives that are about success always seem to strike me because a good success story is always a positive one. Brandt’s ideas around sponsorship is interesting because throughout a person’s life, we recognize certain people in our lives as either influential people or not influential. Sponsorship in literacy are people or things that influence one’s thoughts on literacy. If there are sponsorships that are pushing you to read and write certain things, these are examples of literacy sponsorship.