Ethan Mantek

Professor Agosta
UWRT 1101-005
23 January 2017

1. Brandts first paragraph narrates the changes of a workplace, a place of learning, at a specific time and
in a specific type of work.
1. By losing a type of job, we are also losing a type of literacy.
2. People from similar beginnings can have vastly different literacy skills.
3. Brandt wrote this to feel important. I really do not like how it is written and I found myself
disagreeing with parts.

2. Of these changes in economies, Brandt notes on p. 1, para. 2, As ordinary citizens have been
compelled into these economies, their reading and writing skills have grown sharply more central to the
everyday trade of information and goods as well as to the pursuit of education, employment, civil rights,
and status.
1. The term economies makes me think of all the various world markets big and small.
Economies can show the financial stabilities of nations.
2. Brandt thinks there is individual literacy and economic literacy. She fears we are too focused
on the economic literacy rather than individual. People are only focusing on literacies that help gain jobs.
3. We are a capitalistic nation which means you could fail out there before you even realize it if
you arent economically literate. You need to know where good prices are, how to spot scams, how to act
to get a job, and much more. People need to get literate in whatever gets them money.

3. On p. 2, para. 2., Brandt offers her approach to understanding how individual development has ties to
an economic development. The approach is through what I call sponsors of literacy. Sponsorsare any
agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, or model, as well as recruit,
regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy and gain advantage by it in some way.
1. Ive mainly heard about sponsors when it comes to sports. Individual players and entire teams
get sponsored. What makes someone a sponsor is them helping someone/a group to get more literate in
their respective activity and in gain something in return.
2. A sponsor gives you money and/or equipment if you do something such as wear their apparel,
star in a commercial, or naming a stadium after them.
3. I dont agree with how she implies that you cant do anything without the help of someone
who has previously done it.
4. Based on Brandts further discussion of sponsorship from pp. 3-5, who does she believes holds more
power in the relationship (sponsor/sponsored)? Why? How does this power dynamic shape literacy
development? Use at least 2 quotes and/or references to the text to support your answers.

She believes the sponsored hold more power. They also represent the causes into which people's
literacy usually gets recruited. (pg. 3). This quote is her stating that the majority of people get recruited
into their respective development by a sponsor. In whatever form, sponsors deliver the ideological
freight that must be borne for access to what they have. (pg. 4). The quote is basically saying that to get
what you need from the sponsor you first must accept their ideological freight. Most of the time the
sponsored needs the sponsor a whole lot more than vice versa. This allows sponsors to get away with
some not so fair deals.

5. At the middle of page 6, Brandt begins a section about Sponsorship and Access. In this section,
Brandt looks closely at access to sponsors, materials, and opportunities for learning. She notes that
literacy development is very complicated, and we cant look to one thing (location, socioeconomic status,
culture, family background) as the reasoning behind different literacy developments. To complicate our
ideas, Brandt offers us two stories of people who are the same age and live in the same town: Raymond
Branch and Dora Lopez. In her telling of their literacy experiences, she aims to show the rich layers
of opportunity, access, sponsors, motivations, needs, culture, support, and interests that inevitably
shape literacy learning. Read through page 9, and keep notes for Raymond and Dora, tracking anything
that you feel shaped their literacy experiences.
Raymond Dora
A European American. A Mexican American.
Son of a professor father and a real estate Her father found work as a shipping and receiving
executive mother. clerk at the university and her mother worked
His first-grade classroom in 1975 was hooked up part-time in a bookstore.
to a mainframe computer at Stanford University. The Mexican-American population in the
Received first computer at 12 and a modem at 13. university town was barely one per cent.
Spent summers roaming computer stores. Taught herself Spanish.
Sought out books by South American and
Mexican authors.
She worked for a cleaning company and as a
translator.