Brandt defines a sponsor of literacy as things that "enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy - and gain advantage by it in some way." I had never thought of a "sponsor" being something that would work against what is being sponsored. Sounds like a sponsor is something with authoritative influence in a certain area.
The example that I thought was most interesting was Dora Lopez, who had a ridiculously limited access to things in Spanish. Driving 70 miles for newspapers? I guess that's what happens when you live in the Midwest. It had never occurred to me that things are probably pretty hard if you don't know English in this country. We don't officially have a national language, but, practically, it's English.
I guess my sponsors of literacy would be my parents, the NYS public school system, and the local library. I got read to before bed, read a lot of the young adult section of the library, and obviously had to read and write all kinds of stuff in school (okay, that's a lie, I wrote the same academic, five paragraph, boring-as-boiled-chicken essay that everyone else did). I guess school also suppressed some literacy there, because I wish I had been given the chance to write something I was really invested in and that I, frankly, liked.
Another way, and perhaps the most important, that my parents have been literacy sponsors, is that they haven't given me an ounce of trouble about going off into the big bad world as a Writing Major with an English Minor. I'm not exactly the most sought-after type of employee, but they haven't tried to push me towards anything more financially profitable.
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