Week 5 Reading Response

I would just like to preface this blog post with an apology. I accidentally read Deborah Brandt’s Literacy in American Lives instead of Brandt’s The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy. I will post an updated reading response after completing the correct reading. However, I feel that Brandt’s text Literacy in American Lives also speaks to topics we have discussed in this course. Specifically, chapter 3 of the text discussed intergenerational literacy transfer through a case study of four generations of the May family in Wisconsin. Brandt explains that though younger generations of the family have increased access to “inherited higher and higher piles of literacy resources” (104), the value of these resources “was becoming shorter and shorter lived.” For example, the youngest generation Jack’s open-admission technical college business degree—largely accessible to him through his parents’ and grandparents’ literacy development—means less in this currently economic market than it would have meant to the generations preceding him. This devaluing of literacy skills in a flooded market—sometimes misinterpreted as crisis of decreasing literacy—echoes the economic and literacy situations of Slavic families discussed by Cathy Prendergast in Buying into English. The connection between these two texts via the application of the economic concept of supply and demand reminded my how methodologically productive viewing literacies as economies can be. I am curious to what extent and in what ways intergenerational literacy transfers impact our lives as readers and writers and our student’s lives as readers and writers. As access to literacy tools and skills increase, what literacy tools and skills become the most highly valued in an increasingly globalized hyper-capitalist market. Who controls this valuation, and how is it controlled? How closely connected are literacy and inheritance? How do these questions shape the way we choose to teach and conduct research?