Brandt Article

       This chapter from the book Literacy in American Lives by Deborah Brandt focused on the accounts of Raymond Branch and Dora Lopez and their very different experiences dealing with literacy. Brandt, is an English professor here and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She focuses primarily on literacy throughout the 20th and 21st centuries and the social and economic effects on it. She has taught a variety of classes during her thirty plus years working here. Along with her award winning book from where this article comes from, she has also written many essays and articles about the same topic.

      Brandt primarily uses personal interviews and narratives as her main source for her studies, which I think is fitting for her type of research because the idea of literacy especially now in the 21st century is so varied and personal. In this article, Lopez and Branch of whom she writes about illustrates two different facets of literacy in America. Branch came from a white middle class family from Silicon Valley. His family was very helpful in supplying him with all the materials needed for his intrinsically motivated hobby of playing with computers and coding growing up.  Lopez came from a Mexican-American family from Texas, whose family's socio-economic status was below that of the Branch family. Still, her family, like the Branches supported her interest in becoming fluent in Spanish, which was also intrinsically motivated. In this chapter, Brandt calls on these two narratives' similarities and differences and their connection to literacy. Both people became literate in their specific area of interest, both were influenced to become literate through their environments, and both ended up using their form of literacy as a skill throughout their life. Yet, while Raymond Branch was able to become a well-off programmer through his literacy in computers, Dora Lopez used her form of literacy for a much lower-paying job as part of a janitorial staff.

      I think Brandt's use of these two narratives for her argument was necessary to get her point across, which is that literacy is impacted greatly by both social and economic influences. Brandt's chapter has very little loose ends and leaves barely any room to question her ideas because she covers almost all the bases. If I had an issue with the way she was stereotyping "A" or "B" she was quick to elaborate or explain reasoning behind her more drastic approaches to the situation.

      The biggest issue I had with this reading is that the two stories being compared and contrasted were two very different types of "literacies". One is of computer software and one if of learning a different language. I believe that all types of literacies will have some overlapping in similarities. All different types have the ability to effect all aspects of daily life. In the case of these two narratives, they had some similarities that had nothing to do with their literacy such as where they grew up, how involved their parents were, and their motivation for learning. These coincidences helped aid the idea that literacy has the possibility to have a great and positive impact on people's lives, but it is not always the case, which I think Brandt wanted to emphasize. I realize that these two stories were being compared because they showed Americans of different race and class contradicting access to various forms of literacy. In another, more perfect world that Brandt imagines, Lopez would have become literate in computer coding because the devices were accessible to her. Still, I cannot help but to be a little peeved by how much learning coding and learning Spanish are different, yet are able to umbrella from the term literacy. I think it is okay to say that these two people's paths ended up in much different places, because of how vastly different their areas of expertise are. Both Branch and Lopez learned their skill for their own benefit, and no one else, so who is really to say that this is unfair? Branch had a specific interest in computers that was very original for his time, while Lopez enjoyed learning Spanish because it helped her better connect to her family and heritage. Both reasons are acceptable.

      With that being said, what she had to say along with the two stories was interesting and approached the situation of literacy in a different light than before. I think since her book's publishing in 2001, the world of literacy is more accessible thanks to the popularity of the internet. Even I have tried to learned coding online for free, and if I really wanted to, I would be able to learn another language, or even 6 new languages for that matter for free online.