Fake Characters: Real Suffering

In this paper, I was asked to describe positive or negative literacy sponsors I have encountered in my life

Livestreaming Vico: Imagination and the Ecology of Literacy in Online Gaming

The following research thesis seeks to understand the connection between Giambattista Vico’s conception of imagination and literacy in online spaces. This research delves into how users of the video game based live streaming platform Twitch.tv utilize imagination in written communication primarily through pictographs commonly referred to as emotes, and how broadcasters and moderators on the platform act as literacy sponsors for these unique language practices on the platform

For-Profit Colleges as Literacy Sponsors: A Turn to Students' Voices

For-profit colleges and universities (FPCUs) have become increasingly popular in the US recently, with first-time undergraduate student enrollment at these institutions more than tripling from 1990 to 2009 (Deming, Goldin, & Katz, 2012). Existing news reports and research often present FPCUs as either institutions that prey upon low-income students (US Senate, Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, 2012; Field, 2011), or alternatively as potentially revolutionary reformations of non-profit institutions (Schilling, 2014; Gumport, 2000). In this dissertation, I offer an alternative perspective of FPCUs centered on student learning about writing—after all FPCUs are still institutions of higher learning. I ask the question: what kind of literacy sponsorship do FPCUs provide student writers? I use literacy theorist Brandt’s definition of literacy sponsors as “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy-and gain advantage by it in some way” (p. 166) to analyze large publicly traded for-profit colleges’ writing courses and students’ reports of their literacy practices in these courses. I combine students’ reports with recent news media descriptions of literacy at FPCUs to provide a fuller view of literacy sponsorship at these unique universities. This mixed methods study then incorporates 1) qualitative data from three sets of interviews conducted over a nine month time period with 14 currently enrolled adult female students at two of the largest publicly traded for-profit universities in the US recently enrolled in writing course as well as 2) corpus linguistic analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA) of a self-created corpus of 99 news articles about student writers and literacy at FPCUs published in the US between 1994 and 2016. At the same time, I maintain within the purview of this study the privatized context of FPCUs—as unique for-profit, corporate higher education institutions that must meet shareholder’s needs, but also open access institutions that have expanded the possibility of attending college to a more diverse student body. I find that although news media reports describe students as ignorant, illiterate victims of aggressive recruiting tactics at FPCUs or even criminals complicit in federal financial aid fraud, my participants’ reports contradict these findings; by contrast, even before attending a for-profit college they had extensive experience with a variety of literacy practices, and many are enthusiastic about writing. Nevertheless, I also find that large publicly traded for-profit colleges provide a narrow model of literacy in writing courses focused on conventions and disciplining students’ grammatical or citation errors. Even further, writing is often an asocial activity for students at FPCUs, particularly within online writing courses, which means students do not gain a sense of writing as a rhetorical, social activity or understand audience awareness, and literacy activities are generally completed by students “on their own.” Perhaps most disturbingly, I conclude that this privatized literacy sponsorship model shifts both the risks of high college costs and the responsibility for benefiting from writing courses onto students themselves—resulting in a system where the few rare well-prepared, focused students flourish, but the majority flounder.PHDEnglish & EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145802/1/bmtucker_1.pd

ECOLOGIES OF SPONSORSHIP: WHAT FITBIT USERS CAN TEACH US ABOUT DIGITAL LITERACY

As digital technologies have expanded, so have the literacy sponsors that support and shape how those technologies are used. This project focuses on one of these growing sites of sponsorship surrounding a specific health-tracking technology: wearable Fitbit devices. While much of the work on literacy sponsorship has focused on institutional sponsors as agents, I argue that the picture becomes more complicated and interesting when we place our focus on how users—often considered the sponsored—can become agents in a system that may have marginalized, excluded, or used them. Using a combination of qualitative methods, this dissertation highlights how various literacy sponsors create possibilities and constraints, how communities of users support and resist these frameworks, and how users can become digital literacy sponsors. This research maps the ecologies of sponsorship that Fitbit users engage in as both consumers and producers. The concept of “ecologies of sponsorship” is a unique contribution of this project, which expands traditional frameworks for understanding the stakeholders in literacy development to account for digital, networked environments. In addition to typical tracking practices, this research found that significant groups of users “hack” the technology to help them work toward subversive goals. Some users reject the stated purposes of health-tracking technology, instead manipulating their data to create an illusion of health. Some of these users have shared their alternative goals and tactics in online communities, which allows them to become sponsors of metistic digital literacies. Rather than transforming Fitbit technology and ideologies of health through explicit hostility or force, this research explores how users developed metistic practices to subvert health-tracking systems from within. Though this research focuses on the development of digital literacies in extra-curricular spaces, there are important implications for writing classrooms that aim to help students develop digital literacies. This research raises questions about how our classroom practices might shift if we add metistic literacies to frameworks that already support functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies. And by considering classroom-based teaching in the context of larger ecologies of sponsorship, this research highlights a need for new pedagogical practices that account for the distributed nature of technological expertise

When Memories Make a Difference: Multimodal Literacy Narratives for Preservice ELA Methods Students

This article examines multimodal literacy narrative projects designed by students in a methods of teaching course for secondary preservice English Language Arts teachers. For the multimodal project, preservice teachers infused written, audio, and visual text using a variety of creative mediums. Through combined theoretical frames, the researcher explores semiotics and preservice teachers’ use of multiliteracies as they shift their conceptions of what it means to compose. Finally, this article explores how the act of reflection through the literacy narrative influences preservice teachers’ notions of teaching composition through a variety of mediums

Literacy Sponsorship and Official Paratexts: Promoting Character Literacy through the For the Strength of Youth Booklets (1965-2011)

Literacy sponsors continue to play a dynamic and integral role in acquiring and learning literacy knowledge and skills (fluency) within discourse communities. This thesis examines how a religious literacy sponsor, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, utilizes the For the Strength of Youth (FSOY) publications and official paratexts to actively promote religious literacy and character development in the lives of adolescents. This thesis focuses specifically on the 2011 edition of the FSOY to explore the impact that recent advancements in digital technology have had on the evolution of the main-body text and official paratexts. A textual and paratextual analysis serves to illustrate how the Church promotes literacy acquisition and learning within the religious discourse community

THE ROLE OF PARENTS AND TEACHERS AS LITERACY SPONSOR FOR CHILDREN WITH DYSLEXIA DISSORDER IN TAARE ZAMEEN PAR MOVIE

The role of parents and teachers is less to be considered in developing children’s literacy skills such reading and writing. As literacy sponsors, both parents and teachers hold a critical role for the children, especially those with special needs such dyslexic ones, in acquiring literacy skills and knowledge. This study focuses on the role of parents and teachers as literacy sponsor portrayed in Taare Zameen Par movie and how the application of multimodal literacy is depicted through the story of a dyslexic boy, Ihsaan. This study uses descriptive qualitative method to analyse and describe the data. The main data of this study are dialogues and screenshots taken from the movie. Furthermore, the data will be analysed using Brandt’s literacy and sponsorship theories to support the argumentation and interpretation in the analysis process. The result shows that the role of parents and teachers has a great impact toward the literacy development of dyslexic children like Ishaan. Likewise, multimodal literacy could give a better outcome for the children with dyslexia disorder

Emissaries of Literacy: Refugee Studies and Transnational Composition

Emissaries of Literacy: Refugee Studies and Transnational Composition uses qualitative research in refugee communities and textual analysis of stories written by and about refugees to argue that the experiences of resettled refugees, as well as the experiences of the volunteers, aid workers, tutors, and teachers who work with them, do not fit neatly within composition\u27s current paradigms for studying literacy in global contexts. Refugee identity and experience shows a complex link between literacy and citizenship which is complicated by the economic and geographic histories of linguistic imperialism. Refugee perspectives, and more precisely the challenges they pose, can help composition scholars and teachers rethink our established modes of inquiry

Down from the Mountain and into the Mill: Literacy Sponsorship and Southern Appalachian Women in the New South

This project uses a materialist feminist lens to examine corporate-sponsored literacy campaigns in “model” cotton mills in North and South Carolina between 1880 and 1920. Building on work in literacy studies by Shirley Brice Heath and Elspeth Stuckey, as well as scholarship on literacy sponsorship by Deborah Brandt and Kim Donehower, my study contextualizes literacy sponsorship in mill villages of the New South as part of “welfare work” programs implemented to introduce rural white workers to industrial labor and town life. Using original archival research in conversation with primary and secondary resources, I follow the (re)construction of deficit in relation to Southern Appalachian white women, who frequently moved with their families to work in the Carolina mills. As public and private texts written by mill administrators and welfare workers picked up on these constructions, I suggest they ideologically positioned the mill industry as providing resources, including access to new literacies, to alleviate rural white poverty in the post-Reconstruction South, creating economic, social, and cultural capital. In addition to studying the motivations behind this distribution of literacy, my work also begins to examine how mill women and their families used the literacies they acquired in these spaces as both tools for complying with mill regulations and to create spaces to exert agency through the cultivation of community outside the structures of the industry. As a result of this inquiry, I argue that studying specific moments in the history of literacy sponsorship creates a deeper understanding of how the regulation of literacy learning offers increased opportunities and, as Elspeth Stuckey states, can reproduce the violence of socio-economic class stratification. While accessing the experiences of literacy learners in this context is difficult, insights from studying literacy sponsors during the formation of the southern mill industry highlights how literacies are formally made accessible to particular groups of people during particular moments in history to circulate forms of capital within larger economic systems