Reckerd, Fall 2013 Literacy Memoir Assignment Due Dates: Complete draft due for peer workshop: 9/16

Revised Draft due for teacher response: 9/18 This class focuses on writing as both a practice and a subject of inquiry. We know from research that writing is never just writing. In order to be successful, socially and ethically conscious writers, we need to think about a variety of factors that surround and make up our work as writers, including: the social situation, the likely readers, the genres and media within which we are writing, how our writing will circulate and the intended and unintended consequences of the writing. Sophisticated writers consider these factors, whether consciously or unconsciously. As linguist James Paul Gee argues, writing work is cultural work: To discuss and debateeven to think aboutreality we have to attach words to it. These words are, as we have seen, always connected to negotiable, changeable, and sometimes contested stories, histories, knowledge, beliefs, and values encapsulated into cultural models (theories) about the world. Nobody looks at the world other than through lenses supplied by language or some other symbol system. (29) So, in this class we will be inquiring into literacy (reading and writing), which is also a way of inquiring into cultures. As we conduct this joint inquiry, we will be reading and discussing scholarship about literacy, and we will be conducting and sharing our own research. For the first formal assignment of this class, you will use your own experiences with reading and writing as the subject of your research. You will do this through writing a literacy memoir. You should select elements of the important literacy events from your own life and reflect on their significance. The term literacy events was coined by linguistics professor Shirley Brice Heath and is defined as any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of participants interactions and their interpretive processes (371). These events might be significant because of what they have meant to you and your own literate development, or they might be significant because they help to illustrate something important about literacy. While you are writing this assignment, we will read Sponsors of Literacy by Brandt Learning to Read, by Malcolm X, and Protean Shapes in Literacy Events; Ever-Shifting Oral and Literate Traditions, by Heath, all of which explore this idea of how literacy and culture are intertwined. These essays and our discussions about them should help you think about your own literacy development in new ways. This memoir gives you the opportunity to explore and reflect on your history as a reader and writer. Additionally, it asks you to connect your history as a reader and writer to the values and social structures of the cultures and communities that surround you. Your own literate history is the starting point, but in your essay, you should focus on how your experiences as a reader and writer reflect the cultures within which they have occurred. Julie Lindquist and David Seitz say this about memoirs: In a memoir, you are both a participant writing about yourself as a character in the event(s) and an observer today reflecting on your actions, beliefs, and values from that time or moment. Writing about yourself as a character from a past perspective demands that you try to capture how you thought, felt, and reacted at that time. As an observer of yourself as a character, you are a more distanced commentator and interpreter of a past selfs actions and perspective. A memoir strives for a balance of the two perspectives of historic character and reflective observer. (237) The reflective observer aspect of this requires that you be analytical about the cultural elements that have shaped your development. So, what is the point of this assignment? You will lean on your own personal experiences and become the reflective observer to formulate your literacy memoir. Be analytical about the cultural elements that have shaped your development. You are writing to investigate and to contribute to a discussion about literacy. Every time you have writtenfrom school essays to textingyou have done so within a social, cultural and historical

context: this has shaped why and how you do what you do. (If you are looking for thesis material, this bullet point may be a good place to look.) Who is your audience for this piece? Our class. Your writing is intended to contribute to the ongoing discussion we are having about literacy. (Taking your group discussions to a more formal and professional language.) How many pages am I aiming for? (Theres just no way around this one in a college class!) Please shoot for 4-5 double-spaced pages of polished work. I also hope you have been working on gathering your thoughts for this assignment through the in-class group work and writings that we have done. If at all possible, however, dont start the first page with the fifth page in mind. That will overwhelm you. It overwhelms the best of us. Just start writing. I guarantee you; you will write more than you think you will if you just take one sentence, one paragraph, one idea, one page at a time. Do I need to cite? Yes. You need to incorporate the readings into the building of your literacy history. What did you have in common or not in common with the readings? What did you learn from them? Compare and contrast. I have attached this link for you, if you need more assistance on MLA style citations: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/06/. I am not telling you how many quotes you must use. This is your history to tell, so you know best what you need to incorporate. As you begin, you will find that it will help you to refer to the readings, so you will quote or paraphrase more than you think you will. Your work should reflectin some ways conveythe conversations and concepts of the class. The best work will contribute to the conversation that we are having. It will reference some of the terms, and the specific readings we are doing in class. What about grammar? This is a composition class, so the focus will be less on those careless mistakes that we all make when drafting documents, (that we usually know better than to make anyway.) This is more formal writing than your in-class responses, so I do expect proper and professional English. I will not; however, take points off for putting the comma in the wrong place. If I do notice a pattern of grammar issues in your work, I may give helpful tips, or refer you to the Writing Center for a refresher. Take risks! Say something that matters.

Strategies to get started: Try moving from the specific to the general Try brainstorming important reading and writing events in your life then think and write through the ones that seem most interesting. Your memoir might be arranged around the description and analysis of several of these events. Alternatively, try thinking more in terms of particular factors that you feel might have been important to your literate development: journaling; particular books; particular challenges or growth experiences at school, work, in church or other non-school organizations, etc. Consider key ideas, such as how dialectical/vocabulary/grammar/pronunciation differences function in American culture, and then relate them to your own experiences. If you are one that thrives on structure, perhaps your paper goes something like this: Intro, what is literacy? Then spend time talking about your formative years, first experiences with reading/writing, important books, then specific literacy events. Who are your literacy sponsors? As you go, you can compare your experience to experiences portrayed in some of the readings. How did the culture you grew up in, schools you went to, church you went to, and school clubs etc., influence your literacy? Conclude your paper in some manner. (Not required at all that you follow this plan. Trying to provide helpful starting places.) What I will be looking for: Is your essay interesting? Have you developed something that is original and oriented toward an audience? Does your essay come out of complicated thinking about literacyis it clearly informed by the conversations and readings from the class? Does it move beyond familiar personal narrative? Does it use experiences to develop scholarly insights? Does it use some of the vocabulary from our readings and discussions in class?
Works Cited Gee, James Paul. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. New York: Routladge, 2008. Heath, Shirley Brice. Protean Shapes in Literacy Events. Writing about Writing. Eds. Wardle and Downs. Boston: Bedford, 2011. 369-93. Lindquist, Julie and David Seitz. The Elements of Literacy. New York: Longman, 2008