Sponsors of Liberty by Deborah Brandt

1. Describe one literacy event from your past that has impacted your identity as a writer today.

2. Analyze this literacy moment using Brandt's.

3. Support your analysis by connecting examples and quotes from the chapter to your
description.

[[Read from 181 (17 of 22)]]

“Where one’s sponsors are multiple or even at odds, they can make writing maddening. Where they are
absent, they make writing unlikely,” (Brandt, 1998, p. 184).

“What I have tried to suggest is that as we assist and study individuals in pursuit of literacy, we also
recognize how literacy is in pursuit of them. When this process stirs ambivalence, on their part or on
ours, we need to be understanding,” (Brandt, 1998, p. 184).

I used to enjoy writing stories for myself, until the 2 nd or 3rd grade of Elementary school, when my
teacher wanted us to share our stories, which I didn’t want to do. I’m sure my teacher had good
intentions, but at that time I didn’t see it as helpful when she asked me to bring my story to her so she
could “see how well I was doing,” and when I brought it up to her, she started reading it out to the class,
which I did not want, causing me to be thoroughly embarrassed. I don’t know how, but I managed to
twist it into a way that made me not want to write anymore stories, which then resulted in most of my
writing to be school essays. In Deborah Brandt’s article “Sponsors of Literacy,” Brandt writes “But the
ideological pressure of sponsors affects many private aspects of writing processes as well as public
aspects of finished texts,” (Brandt, 1998, p. 184) under the “Teaching and the Dynamics of Sponsorship”
section of the article. Brandt is telling the reader that the sponsors, or the people who are influencing
literacy, have a big impact on a reader’s mind in how they may perceive some forms of literacy or
creation of literacy by sharing their ideas or their own writing. This can be tied into my story, where my
teacher was the literary sponsor, who had done the evil deed of tricking me into my story being told to
the rest of the class, which had put an amount of pressure on me that I was influenced by my teacher’s
actions that caused me to be embarrassed that I stopped wanting to write my own stories. I still had to
partake in literary events through classes after that with writing essays, which came from a big change.
Brandt writes in her article, “… so ruthlessly demanding of change is what fills contemporary literacy
learning and teaching with their most paradoxical choices and outcomes,” (Brandt, 1998, p. 184). As this
says, writing can experience drastic changes from different demands, which means that teachers will
have to completely change how a student writes, which can cause different outcomes from students.
Some might want to write in a very different way than what the teacher requires, while others will
follow it, resulting in a variety of different outcomes. Like in my story, I had to go through change, where
even if I didn’t want to write anything, I was still required to write something, which turned out to be
the essays I needed to write for school.