As an academic, issues of access to literacy have been very important to me. Much of my recent research has been over students' abilities to successfully navigate the different rhetorical situations of online social network writing and more formal in-school writing. I've found (as have several other researchers), that despite the anecdotal complaints of teachers and parents that student writing ability is being destroyed by online writing, that students are remarkably adept at changing their writing style to reflect the rhetorical needs of the situation. One of the questions that remains open, however, is to what extent access plays a role in this ability. Most of our research has involved students at four year universities, or high-performing, college-bound high school students. Because this demographic is, to be frank, rather homogenous, most of the subjects of our research have had ready access to technology in the home, and thus have substantial practice writing in digital formats gained outside of school. Because of this, we don't really know whether or not people with less access are less able to negotiate these different rhetorical situations. This is an important research gap because we know that access to the basic tools of literacy is very important to a student's ultimate literate ability. In order to demonstrate this here, I will recount a literacy narrative of my own (an assignment I give students) in order to show how important access to books, and literacy sponsorship were to my own development.
In our house, we always had books. I can remember having collections of Little Golden Books, a staple of childhood when I was growing up. We were also once given an entire box of hand-me-down books that had belonged to my aunt but that my empty-nester grandmother was cleaning out of her house. We held these dear, and many of these books remained in our house throughout our childhood, and in fact, many are now in my parents' attic. But, to me, these books were old and outdated. Beyond this, my two sisters and I shared them, so, in a sense, they belonged to everyone and to no one.
Then, one Christmas, my Opa (which we called my grandfather. He's from Maine, but my grandmother was German, so we used the German Oma and Opa for them) gave me two books. One was a paperback Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. I remember being especially pleased that he had given me something which had been meant for college students (it was called Collegiate after all) and I took this to mean that my Opa believed me to be especially intelligent. The other book was a thin, hard back picture book about the space race between the US and the USSR. The book went back and forth between the innovations of both space programs, and ended with a picture of an American Astronaut and Soviet Cosmonaut shaking hands on a space station limb.
I was incredibly proud of these books. These were the first books that I had ever had that were exclusively mine. I didn't have to share them with my sisters, and on top of this, they were brand new. Ownership seems to have been very important to me. The fact that these books were mine made them very prized possessions. I attribute is gift with the beginning of my love of books. In fact, even now, I check very few books out of the library, because ownership of the book still feels important to me. I often explain to people that the book itself is the trophy for having read the book. My bookshelves are trophy cases. There was also, as there are in many literacy narratives, an emotional component to this story.
At the risk of performing amateur psychology, I would point out here that I was raised by my mother and my step-father. My Opa, who was the grandfather I spent the most time with, was technically my step-grandfather. Because of this, I suspect that beyond the wonderful newness of the books I was given, I may have also loved the books because they were, to me, symbols of acceptance. I was being given books by a man who famously loved books (he had a room in his house that was gradually filling floor to ceiling with books of his own). So his gift of books seemed to say "you're one of us." In this way, my sense of ownership extended beyond the books to ownership of a family, and gave me a sense of identity. I am a book lover, just like my Opa.
My own literacy narrative, if my experience is acceptably representative, suggests a couple of things about literacy. One of which is not surprising at all: that sponsorship is vitally important to literacy. My relationship with a book loving grandfather was the catalyst for my own love of reading and writing. The less explored feature of my narrative is the extent to which the materiality of literacy may be important. My own story suggests that having access to materials that I personally owned and controlled was an important aspect of my early literacy. This understanding has important implications with regard to the issues of access and the literacy divide, especially in the digital era when the most powerful learning tools are not books, but computers--a relatively expensive investment. To what extent will personally owning and controlling books, computers, iPods, and e-readers put some students in a position to outperform students with less access to these technologies?
