![SASC - Student Academic Success Center - UNE [logo]](https://files.uneportfolio.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2022/02/SASCLogoSquare_Smaller-3-e1644936452801.jpeg)
- What are literacy narratives (beyond: an assignment often given in writing classes)?
- For what reasons do people write them (beyond: they’ve been assigned to)?
- For what reasons might people read them?
- What are literacy narratives evidence of?
- What kinds of things can we learn about by treating sets of literacy narratives as data or evidence?
- How do literacy narratives work to achieve their writer’s purposes or satisfy their imperatives?
- How do they work to serve their reader’s needs or interests?
Questions from 1/25
1.Why does the story matter?
2.What does it do to help another person?
3.What kind of characters are found?
4.How do they interact with one another?
5.Do authors through in fiction to their literacy narratives to get across a better message?
6.What/Why makes home/school experiences so different?
7.Does reading at home as a child make a person enjoy reading later in life?
8.How does a person interpert stories about mean teachers?
9.If one student spreads the word that a specific teacher is mean, how do other students get impacted entering that class for the first time? Is it a distraction?
10.Why are most of these stories bad?
Why does this event affect you so much?
How would you use this to impact others?
How does thinking or blaming someone make you feel in telling your story?
How does one’s literacy narrative effect their families?
How great was the influence of reading and writing?
How could this influence could someone that didn’t have a similar backstory?
How would the character that affected you affect someone else?
Where would the idea of reading or writing come from without having a character for influence?
How does the character change through their efforts of building strengths or tearing them down through literacy?
How could exaggeration of the literacy narratives change the real story?
As I read through your questions, Tevin, you seem to be interested in the effects of literacy struggles on people beyond the student/child – including their families and teachers. I find that pretty interesting. What does it do to a family when a child is deemed to have literacy problems? How might the “diagnosis” affect the child’s and family’s relationship to school? What can be done in such situations?
Pursue those questions in the literacy narratives, but also in Gee and Delpit.
1. Why are most of these literacy narratives bad?
2. Why do schools insist on the certain reading and writings they design?
3. What were the bigger influences that took a role in writing your literacy narrative.
4. Can we change this for kids in the future?
5. Does reading at home play a role in preparing for literacy?
6. Is it really anyones fault?
7. Why are most of the narratives a struggle?
8. Can a fear of reading and writing be overcame?
9. Is it only one thing that triggers us to dislike reading or writing or both?
10. Do we only dwell on that one thing that triggered us?
Hi Caroline,
You’ve asked some really good questions here. They seem to cluster around wanting to figure out what went wrong for so many writers and what might be done about it. I think that’s a solid topic to pursue. What parts of Gee or Delpit might be useful to you as you think about these questions?
1. Is there a certain connection between all these literacy narratives?
2. Was this story about positive or negative feedback?
3. How did reading this benefit the reader?
4. What were some of the bigger influences that took a role in the literacy narratives?
5. Why were these influences important?
6. How did this impact the writer, was it long term or short term?
7. When reading these literacy narratives, what should the reader pull away from the readings?
8. Did writing these literacy narratives help the writers in anyway?
9. What could the writer change if they were the victim?
10. What could the writer share if they made an accomplishment?
Jake, these questions are solid. One of the things it looks like you’re interested in is how literacy victims might gain some power or agency to take control of their own literacy needs. I think that’s definitely worth pursuing. What parts of Gee or Delpit might be useful in thinking about these questions?
1. How should we interpret stories?
2. How involved should a teacher be?
3. What makes a teacher a bad teacher?
4. Who’s fault is it for ruining peoples reading/writing experiences?
5. Is it anyones fault for not wanting to read?
6. Is there any real way to find your love of reading.
7. Is there a wrong way of writing ?
8. Does school experiences decide our outlook on life?
9. How can everyones look on school be so different when everyone has to do the same thing?
10. Why do people categorize teachers?
Hi Emily, you’re questions seem really focussed on understanding the complex and difficult relationship between school teachers and reading/writing students. I think that has real potential to be interesting. Gee tells us that the only way to acquire a Discourse is through guided practice with a fluent member of the Discourse. These stories often tell us that the recipient of the guidance may not always appreciate it. I wonder if you could begin to categorize the reasons why students might not appreciate or accept the guidance the teacher offers: both from the point of view of the students and the teachers.
I really really like question #5. It seems like a lot of the questions people are asking keeps looking at the teacher only. And not giving a thought that some people just really don’t want to read. Not everything should need to be analyzed and brought down to one person or reason why they just don’t enjoy reading. This bad teacher, this great teacher. It feels like a lot of the responsibility gets pushed towards other people rather than the true narrator so I feel like this question brings it back to the true person telling the story. All of your questions are looking at the people who are in them, which is great.
1. Do people that dislike reading dislike it for very similar reasons?
2. Did most authors overcome they’re dislike for reading and writing?
3. How big of an affect does the attitude of the teacher have on someone’s attitude towards reading?
4. Are the reasons why some people started to like reading similar?
5. Why do people generally dislike reading when they’re younger, but start to like it as they get older?
6. Are most literacy narratives about struggling with reading and writing?
7. How big of a factor was home life on kids that disliked reading?
8. Do teachers that students think are bad teachers think they’re bad teachers?
9. How does the tone effect the narrative?
10. Is there a common connection between all of the stories?
Hi Brandon, from your questions, it looks as if you’re interested in the impact of teaching on children’s literacy attitudes, and how people might recover from the impact of their school-based literacy experiences. I think it would be interesting to pursue these questions. You might ask why schools think they *need* to teach the particular kinds of reading in the ways they do. I wonder if Gee could help start a line of questioning that might begin to help you answer some of these questions. Particularly the parts about the benefits of acquiring a dominant Discourse.
I was wondering the same thing, just because as a child some one doesn’t like to read doesn’t mean that maybe once they are older that they might have another experience with reading/writing that changes their distaste for reading into a love for reading. Do you think that if someone has a bad experience at home with reading or writing that they will have the same views at school?
1. Why do reading and writing experiences at home tend to differ from ones at school?
2. Why do some reading and writing experiences tend to have such a lasting effect on people why others don’t?
3. Why do the negative experiences tend to have a lager impact then the positive ones?
4. Do peoples views on reading and writing come from more then just past experiences?
5. Is there any way to make reading and writing a more positive experience for everyone?
6. How should we look at and interpret the similarities and differences of the stories?
7. What makes and experience bad or good to a person?
8. Does age have anything to do with how we perceive reading and writing?
9. How should we apply and compare our own literacy narratives to others?
10. Is their any type of bias at play in the archive itself?
Ian, these are excellent questions. You seem to be thinking about these stories in two directions: 1) what accounts for the differences among these stories, such that negative experiences seem more long-lasting and consequential, and 2) what can be done [in school?] to reduce the number and impact of these experiences?
I think question 10 is an important one. What might be the source of bias in the archive? If the archive is not representative of general literacy experiences, how might we still use it to learn something true about the set of literacy experiences it does represent?
For question 1 about how reading/writing experiences at home differing to the ones at school. I would say that in school there’s this embarrassment or shame factor that comes with the experiences in school. From a sum of victim stories, the problem arises from embarrassment or shame at school from either peers or the teacher. My question is how can we possibly limit this social embarrassment/ shame factor in schools to make every experience a positive experience?
For question 2 I think you should take a closer look into the stories and see what other events might have influenced the writers opinions. Then you can start to pull apart why the stories affected some people in a way that it stayed with them and why it just gave others a story to write about. Question 3 I think can be answered by the emotion that the writer uses in telling the story. I would look for how they shape the negative parts and if there seems to be any getting over it. Emotion is huge in a lot of the questions you ask. Question 5 I believe would have to do with how the persons story ends. You cannot make someone with a bad experience and a closed mind enjoy reading and writing. They have to be willing to push the negative out of the way and be open to falling back into the flow of enjoying the process.
1. What did the stories accomplish?
2. Why is the archive significant?
3. Besides reading/writing, what are common threads between the stories?
4. How should we look at this collection?
5. Where would potential bias come from?
6. Who are we being influenced by?
7. How do the stories compare?
8. How unbiased were the authors?
9. What does it mean to be made the villain/to be hated?
10. What did their stories reveal about who they are now?
Hi Cali, as I read these questions, I see an idea forming. You seem to be wondering about influences that shape the literacy narrative writers perception of their literacy experiences. Words like “bias” and “influence” suggest that different people might interpret these experiences different ways and that as an analyst, we might not accept at face value the writer’s own interpretation of their literacy narrative. What might be the origins of these biases and influences on writers’ interpretations, if not organically in their actual literacy experiences?
I agree with professor Drown in that it looks like you are interested in the influences they had that shape their perspective. Oddly enough I asked some similar questions with the same thoought in mind. I think if you look back at question 6 you could build other questions. For example once you find the answer you could compare the influences. It seems like a lot of the stories have to do with school and teachers or at home. Why would these be the places we most foundly remeber and give credit to our process.
I like how you seem to be asking a lot of questions about the archive itself. I like questions 4 because it is confusing to get all of this data and not know how to look at it. I also like question 8 I had a similar one in mine about what bias we might be facing when reading these papers. I think that is important to know when looking through the data.
Ian writes: “it’s confusing to get all this data and not know how to look at it.” That’s an important point. To what degree does what we learned about Discourse from Gee and Delpit provide a beginning way to look at all this data? Not to say that they have the right answers, but maybe their ideas can help us ask questions that lead us to look in a more focused way at the data we’re finding in these literacy narratives.
For question 8 about “How unbiased were the authors?” I would think that a grand majority of the authors are all biased in some way. Whether it’s due to the fact of mean teachers, or whomever that just never helped out. My question is why in biased stories (say victim stories) is there this hatred when it problem could be the author’s own fault?
I think it might be useful to try to categorize some of these biases. Can they be clustered into a smaller set that might reveal some wide-spread cultural belief about the way literacy is “supposed” to work vs. the way it’s implemented in schools?
1.) How should researchers account for the writer’s emotional filler in their retelling of events?
2.) What creates the essential reading/writing environment to encourage literacy?
3.) How should we interpret the lazy/uncommitted?
4.) Where do writers of literacy narratives place blame?
5.) How accurately do the stories seem real? In the sense of over exaggerating or not.
6.) To what degree do we sense another side to the story?
7.)Does hating writing guarantee hating writing forever?
8.) How can we confirm a detest in reading if it was just not a genre of interest?
9.) How can we know it was the writer literacy narrative fault and not the teacher that failed them?
10.) Why wouldn’t writer’s of literacy narratives be more open about their problems with reading/writing to solve their issues early than struggle with them down the road?
1. What makes a teacher a bad teacher?
2. Are the stories about bad teachers 100% true?
3. How do we determine a victim of a literacy narrative?
4. Does hating reading at an early age guarantee you hate reading forever?
5. What does a teacher do to make someone hate reading?
6. How does the environment in which you read effect your feelings about reading?
7. How should the stories be perceived?
8. Does the genre of the story effect the favorability of reading?
9. What are the themes of the literacy narratives?
10. Are all of the “failed” stories looked at as failures now?
Hi Chris, from your questions it looks to me like you’re interested in the set of stories about the origins and long-term consequences of hating reading. This question also seems to be tied into the way schools promote and teach literacy. I’m interested in your question 6, about the potential effect of “environment” on people’s feelings about reading. I’d like to hear more about what you mean by that, and any speculations you have about the relationship between reading “environment” and feelings about reading.
I really like how your questions can be seen from a different perspective. You’re completely right, are these stories true or are they being completely exaggerated? I feel like some readers don’t think about these things when they’re reading but with these questions in mind while reading it makes changes the perspective and the thoughts of the reader. Even for the writer reading their own work, it could still make them think.
I was wondering the same as you, in your question number two, “Are the stories abut bad teachers 100% true?”. Could it just be the way some one learns that doesn’t match up well with the teacher? Your question number ten reminded me of when Cuddy talked about how she got into an accident and wouldn’t be able to finish school, but then she did.
I really like your first two questions. The first one because it seemed to me almost every story had that bad teacher in it. It was hard for me to define a bad teacher too because it seem almost everyone had a different reason why the teacher was bad. Your question i thought was thought provoking because their is no way to tell if the stories are 100% true, so how can we account for that when reading them.
1. Does the time (age wise) have anything to do with the emotions or thoughts?
2. How did this change the view or perspectives?
3. How many of the stories are victims?
4. How many of the stories are the writers heros?
5. To what degree are the higher influneces helping?
6. To what degree are they hurting?
7. Why is it that almost every teacher seems to be a jerk?
8. How many of the stories are about reading? How many about writing?
9. How in depth should the reader look into the emotional ties?
10. How can we evaluate the ties at the different ages in the stories?
Hi Michaela, from these questions, it looks to me like you’re interested in the ways teachers and other adults (“higher influences”) shape children’s literacy and the way that children perceive that influence.
I’m not sure what you mean by questions 1 and 10, but I think you’re trying to figure out whether the patterns we’re seeing in Rising Cairn vary by age, whether elementary school literacy narratives are different from high school experiences say. That’s a good question.
It’s interesting how you mention time. Influences and emotion could change with time and I think some readers don’t really see the connection between the two. Also mentioning the degrees to their influences or their pain is very good because some people may show pain but you don’t know just how much pain they are feeling. Without a doubt, these questions are very small but have impactful meaning. There are times where people will mention they are hurting but you don’t know to what degree, which is good that you mentioned.
For question #7 I think there should also be a question as to why they are being jerks? do you think that the individual had something to do with the teacher being a jerk? (maybe the student was always acting up but he/she didn’t talk about that side of the story. Just something to think about)
Some of the hero stories that I read were “The Series I started”, “Sophomore Year From Hell”, “Memories of Poppy”.
I think another question you could ask to go alongside #4 would be. What makes a hero a hero? does the writer have someone who helps them push through the hard times and eventually become their hero?
By pointing out the power of the word “jerk” in the question, Chelsey is reminding me that sometimes we need to figure out what words (like *jerk*) really mean. Words are the tip of the iceberg of meaning, we pack a lot of expression and meaning in to loaded words like jerk. So maybe try to reveal some of the ideas or feelings that are embedded in *jerk*.
I believe when asking if age is an influence on the writers emotions or thoughts, it has to do with the experience they’ve had with writing. What has the writer been through that helped shape these literacy narratives, what key influences either helped or criticize the writer? The first question really stands out to me because you read all these different narratives and its a variety of experience, different ages. Some in high school, some in middle school, some just learning to read. I think the overall picture though, you can tell how one feels about reading and writing by its outcome, whether its negative or positive. Usually the better readers and writers tend to write about a positive time they experienced because they’ve had less problems or challenges in reading and writing. And the lesser experienced readers and writers write about negative impacts because they don’t have as much accomplishment. So I really do believe age and experience have a huge role to play when writing these literacy narratives and their outcomes can tell you how a writer feels about reading and writing.
I really like how you look at the fact of “higher influences” being the ones that really make or break these literacy narratives. Do you think that not only higher influences but those and age have a correlation with the authors image of the teacher? Do you think that Gee is feels that these “masters” help people with their secondary discourses?
Nice connection to Gee, Meg. Is it possible that if a “master” is too far advanced from the novice that difference might be a source of the conflict? Or, alternatively, if the “master” is too close in fluency to the novice (like a rookie high school teacher) that that too might be a source of the conflict?
This also prompts other questions. Is there a way in which having a “master” just a few steps ahead of you, as well as really fluent master, is beneficial to the novice?
Age in this case has a lot to do with experience. Someone with less experience writing will have different emotions and thoughts than someone who is more experienced. I think the overall answers to a couple questions about victims, heroes and jerks can be summed up together. Understand that each teacher is different. Some teachers don’t come off on the right foot with that one kid in class because it is such a change from what the student is used to. Teachers expect students to adapt to their style and it is even more expected as we get older. That can be a lot of pressure on some students, taking them out of their comfort zone.
1. What qualities does a “great” writing/reading teacher have?
2. What is the overall themes the narratives have?
3. Do the narratives share the same struggles? what are they?
4. What do the authors do to push through the obstacles that they face?
5. Is there a relationship between how much effort the authors put in (while in their class) that reflects how their literacy experiences came to be?
6. Did another person influence the literacy experiences?
7. Are the literacy narratives positive or negative?
8. Can a negative experience with reading and writing effect you later on in life?
9. How are the narratives alike?
10. What influences a good/bad literacy experience?
Hi Chelsey, from these questions it looks like you’re starting to be interested in exactly how people can overcome early literacy experiences that cause self-image problems for children, as well as the long-term consequences of these early experiences for people. That’s a project worth pursuing answers to in Rising Cairn. As you go back to the narratives, look for nuances to the questions, and the beginnings of answers to them.
I really like how you bring up influences…twice. I mentioned that in one of my questions too and think that it’s an important aspect of the literacy narratives. You’re first question about what qualities make a teacher great, I thought that that was intriguing. I liked the idea of focusing on the people who were a big influence towards everyone’s literacy. Your questions all seem to focus around relationships that people have, which is great. People in the end are all connected to hundreds of other people and those people influence them in any number of ways. Teachers for the most part are responsible for introducing their literacy to a great number of students yet some teachers fail while others succeed.
Hi chelsey, a lot of these questions really made me think about experience I have had with reading and writing. One of my favorite questions you asked was “what influences a good/bad literacy experience?” I wonder about that too. But then again literacy experience you have had could be good to you but bad to me. I think it all depends on who you are and what exactly you are working on. I think a negative experience with reading and writing effect us in the long run because theres a lot of effort that goes into literacy narratives especially when talking about your self. That being said, when people are getting out of there comfort zone to describe a part of their life, that itself can make the literacy narrative good to bad.
Caroline, I think your last line or two says something like: the act of writing about a bad literacy experience can itself be good in some way. Is that accurate? If so, can you say more about what you mean?
I think by reading your questions you are looking to dig deeper into who has the greatest affect on the bad or negative outcomes that many of these storeis are about. I think question 5 is an important one. In order to answer this one or to dig deeper into and pull more I think you should look at the emotions that seem to be coming from the story. I think it is important to pay attention to the surroundings of the stories as well. If there was a bad or poorly timed event that happened before or in the same time as the story it could greatly influence the way the writer felt.
1. How does the speaker overcome the challenges they face?
2. What defines a good or bad teacher in these narratives?
3. What are the overall themes of the narratives?
4. How does the tone differ in the narratives?
5. Is every literacy narrative about struggles?
6. How do these literacy narratives help us as readers?
7. Do these stories all have a certain connection?
8. Does everyone hate reading?
9. Does certain childhood experiences change the way that one view literacy?
10. Does ones view of reading and writing effect how they see other peoples literacy narratives?
That last question is a particularly good one for us all to keep in mind as we analyze these literacy narratives, Meg. Many of us have told complicated stories about our literacy that suggest pretty strong feelings. As an analyst, it will be important to be aware of how our own literacy experiences influences our interpretations of others’ literacy experiences.
Your question 5 about “struggle” suggests that the “struggle” tag may not by itself be robust enough to describe the different types of struggle people might face acquiring literacy (or a Discourse). Maybe we need to be thinking about subtags (like, struggle: structural barrier, or struggle: missed nuance) or adding other tags to the ones the stories already have.