Back to Brandt and Blogging

Oh, but I DID miss blogging these past few months. Found my blog again today like an old shoe that had gotten shoved back in the closet. Cute shoe I'm looking forward to trying on again. Checked my friends' blogs, too, who've been better at keeping up with their online lives than I have. Hello, again, friends!

And speaking of returning to good things, I was pleased to see Deborah Brandt turn up in our reading for this week. I think she's brilliant. This article, "Sponsors of Literacy" (1998), introduces the concepts that she expanded on in her amazing book of historical literacy research, Literacy in American Lives. I love how her historical perspective, using the lens of sponsorship, gives insight in to the greater economic context of profit-making and competition in which literacy learning takes place. Viewing literacy as a socially-situated practice, I am becoming more and more conscious and curious about the larger forces beyond school walls that support and constrain our literacy. Remember Caughlan & Beach's (2007) piece about the role of neoconservative and neoliberal discourses shaping the standards in Wisconsin? Talk about sponsorship! Like Brandt, they seemed to be peeling back the layers to find the social and economic forces that shape and constrain our literacies.

Given our interest in writing in this course, I returned to Brandt's book to a chapter on writing called "The Sacred and the Profane" that gives insight in to how writing in particular has been sponsored historically. Writing has not enjoyed the broad sponsorship of reading, writing has been less explicitly taught and valued. She notes that writing does not fit as well in to the traditional "sacred" roles of student/teacher in reading instruction. More associated with commercialism and trouble in the history of American education, writing is now becoming a key force in the information economy. This economic shifts thus creates the issue of how writing (a tool that is productive, interpretive, creative, and has been used historically for rebellion and development of critical consciousness) can or will be sanctified or controlled, as literacy has always been:

"Misappropriation" is always possible at the scene of literacy transmission, a reason for the tight ideological control that usually surrounds reading and writing instruction" (179).

How will the powers that be control our writing?

"Perhaps the question today is how to instill a dutiful writing while constricting the other, latent powers of writing. How will the "profane" skill of writing be sanctified and controlled? It should be an interesting era." (Brandt, 2001, p. 148).

I absolutely agree. As writing becomes a tool of the masses in this new era of online writing and information technology, who are the new sponsors? With the sort of democratic, easily accessible, international opportunity to have conversations so freely, how will the powers that be find ways to control or sanction writing (protecting the dutiful while preventing the profane or rebellious)? I love the notion of writing as the sort of black sheep, the rebellious and productive twin of reading, who is harder to constrain, who will keep us guessing.

For more on the historical sponsorship of writing in the United States, see"Writing for a living" (Brandt, 2005).