Week 9- Literacy in American Lives

As I have blogged about before, I assist people from a wide variety of backgrounds, and some people I help have extremely limited literacy or are completely illiterate. Often, when I have told friends or family I helped someone who couldn’t read or write, they are quite surprised, and express dismay that there are “still people” who don’t have these basic skills. To me, this is not surprising, because I see what these people are up against on a daily basis. What I liked about the book is that it shows how larger issues impact our level of literacy. Factors like economics, segregation and racism, sexism and geography all play a role in our relationships to reading and writing. Actually, I think this book really speaks to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. As human beings, we must have some basic needs met before we can get in to other areas. If someone is hungry, cold or frightened, their capacity for learning to read or write is greatly diminished.
The most interesting aspect of the book was the concept of literacy “sponsors”. Growing up middle-class in Madison with two college-educated parents, I guess my literacy sponsors were first my mom and dad, who read to me a lot and also read themselves. My schools were also literacy sponsors, as they emphasized the importance of reading and writing and I had to practice it quite often. I liked learning about other types of sponsorship, such as the church’s role in the chapter “The Power of it” about African Americans and literacy. That made me think about other ways literacy came in to my life. The only TV I really watched growing up was “Sesame Street”, “Mr. Rogers” and “Reading Rainbow” (what’s up Lavar!), and these programs emphasized reading and writing quite a lot.
Overall, I wasn’t quite as enthralled with Literacy in American lives as I thought I would be. I was never drawn in to it the way I was with “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and the way I am with “The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown”. I really liked the idea of showing how bigger issues affect our relationships with reading and writing, but, somewhat ironically, Brandt’s writing never really pulled me in too much.
As current and future librarians, I hope we can keep in mind the different starting points everyone has. We don’t all start out equal, nor do we become equal down the line. When we are building collections and designing library programs, I hope we can remember that everyone has different skill levels and interests, and that we can continually push ourselves to have libraries be a good literacy sponsor in the lives of our community members.