Shannon Downey English 1103, Fall 2011 Professor Jan Rieman October 4, 2011 Reading, Reflecting and Thinking:

Responses to Class Readings-Elements of Literacy Ch. 4 1. I did this reading at 8 PM on Saturday night; October 1st. I was laying in my bed with my heating pad on my sore back. It sure was relaxing! 2. I just read this piece. 3. I learned about some things I'd never even heard of before in this piece: Critical pedagogy and critical consciousness. Critical consciousness is being aware of bad social/political structures and making positive changes. 4. Here are a few questions I had regarding this piece: How does social capital come from cultural capital? How does social capital turn into economic capital? I'd like to explore these ideas more. 5. Personally, I can relate to this section a lot because I completely agree. A lot of my sponsors paper was about social ranking/success being based on literacy. I think it's very necessary to be literate in order to move up in today's world. Also, I thought it was interesting that they included an excerpt from the Soprano's. Popular culture is definitely something we can all relate to. 6. I would like to discuss this quote: "The heart of education is literacy". Is this true? Can we not learn from watching others or talking about things? What couldn't we do if we weren't literate? Would those things only be practices that were put into effect based on the assumption that all students were literate? (Standardized testing, etc.) Could there be a system of education where students would learn well without being alphabetically literate?