literacy narrative essay

literacy narrative essay

Exploring the Power of Literacy: A Narrative Essay

1. Introduction to Literacy and Its Impact

A Narrative of Power, Sparked by a Baby’s Cry. From the first cry of “mama,” the die was cast. Her DNA strands had been shaped and assembled into a mission with a clear vision. Her first baby’s cry awakened me. It fascinated me. The sound wrapped around me and motivated me to crawl in its direction. I was only five months old at the time, but my desire for literacy had already begun. My older brother, Larry, was reading the newspaper to my parents. He worked diligently to describe the photograph illustrating the story. The picture’s connection to words and sounds was so powerful that even without knowing any alphabet, I had fallen in love with the concept of reading. I knew it would be a long time before I could actually read by myself, but the pull of curiosity, the tenacity of fate, and the power of literacy were all intertwined within me. My four siblings and I have different tastes, and we pursue distinct agendas. From our earliest days, we understood the power and force of literacy and consequently chose different types of written material to contemplate and examine.

Empowerment. That term resonates with unlimited layers of strength and energy. From the moment a child is born, the feelings and the power of empowerment are in complete, pure bloom. As carbon makes graphite and pressure makes diamonds, children, like all who seek the power of literacy, have a genetic disposition to harness the magic of written communication. I believe in the force of literacy and that belief is individual and powerful. Literacy is the key that unlocks life. Each letter and sentence can hold a new path or a newly discovered door. The reverberation of signals sent from the brain through eyes allowing the body to sidestep and process into ethereal worlds sparked by words is explosive and divine. Literacy is life. To be without it is to be without air. The journey one begins late is a journey worth taking. The human spirit, the force behind the conqueror, seeks its missing link, and never forgets that with it, new doors will begin to be opened.

2. Personal Journey with Literacy

For many years, I taught college reading, literature and writing skills to students, including many who were not yet readers, and among whom I counted myself. What follows is a reflective essay describing my journey, as a non-reader in high school, to my present confidence as the reader and teacher of reading skills. I will also report my current learning with the Power of Reading programs in elementary schools and the difference between “reading” and reading.

For most of my life, I have believed in and experienced the joy and power of literacy in helping me to understand and change the world. My mother and teachers early taught me to read, certainly. I was surrounded by books from childhood and drew great comfort from them. I learned how a love of a good action-adventure novel helped me through adolescence, reading by flashlight under my bedcovers after being sent to bed. For me, a college education has always meant reading and books and seeing new and exciting things.

3. Literacy in a Global Context

In a rapidly shrinking global community, an understanding of room and shape are insufficient, two-dimensional ends toward which literacy learning is so often predominantly focused. Students must learn about flat, twelfth, and cube to survive economically and psychologically in an increasingly complex and dangerous world. In this era of globalization, solitary comprehension—no matter how rich—restricts learners to essential categories that exclude those aspects of continuous classroom interaction that promote learning from the inside out. Stepping beyond geographic boundaries fosters destinies that connect, indeed, situate each of us as part of a greater, cohesive, and shared whole. Through shared narratives across the curriculum, students can all participate in, claim a personal connection to, and reflect on their place in the interdependent community. Therefore, realizing how seemingly singular experiences inform, transform, and contribute to a robust identity is, as the literary critic, Northrop Frye (1982), observes, the task of every educator.

Literacy is an essential tool for personal development and social empowerment. In a global context, literacy leads to greater equality and sustainable economic and social progress. Research has revealed that increased literacy leads to improved access to healthcare, as well as higher-paying jobs. On the national level, literacy is a strong predictor of economic development and political stability. Because of the relatively low cost of promoting literacy relative to other public programs, literacy is a particularly cost-effective means to improve the human condition. The result of this fact is the continued support of literacy education across diverse political beliefs, ideologies, and religions. With all of the different roles that individuals fulfill and the diverse groups that they belong to, it is important to consider literacy learning and teaching in a broader, global context. In this chapter, we explore how the different domains of learning and teaching can be internationalized, transcending local concerns to the broader goal of global literacy education.

4. The Future of Literacy: Challenges and Opportunities

To take advantage of this opportunity will require that we finally settle for the goals of education and literacy. We can argue about whether vocational education should be general or specific, theoretical or practical, demand-driven or employer-driven. But vocational education cannot be matters outside the purview of general education. If we want our students (including vocational students) to be articulate, imaginative, and responsible citizens, we had better find ways of incorporating the generations of knowledge and talents in vocational education into our academic curriculum, rather than the other way around. Sartre is famous for contending that existentialist philosophers engage in salons, while others must change apart. Much of bourgeois education today reflects this view of art, culture, and the educated person. Our educational mission must be a redefinition of intellectual expression that coincides with the interests and talents of our diverse and changing student body. Our challenge is to make political the transcendent goals we have been talking about and to find a theory of education that recognizes family education, work education, and street education, as well as academic education, as articulations of a single theme.

In this essay, I have introduced what amounts to a new conception of the nature of literacy and explained how this idea frees me to move beyond controversies of method and concentrate instead on substantive issues of schooling, curriculum, and educational reform. I have tried to show how this approach resolves some problems having to do with theory and interpretation that arise when literacy is viewed as schooling, academic excellence, linguistic competence, cultural competence, or vocational competence. And I have shown how the analysis of an actual text or genre can serve both as an end in itself and as a window onto the world. These conclusions underwrite a conception of the literate person as an architect of meaning, not a prisoner of language, and enable me to consider some general consequences of this. In taking this stance, however, I have created certain problems of my own. These problems inhere in the progressive differentiation of literate society and the constant danger that certain varieties of literacy will become more the enlargement of our humanistic conceptions of literacy than an extension of our educational opportunities to fulfill them.

5. Conclusion: Reflecting on the Transformative Power of Literacy

I have also written in an earlier paper of the many other adolescent lives I feel I failed during my first year of teaching and of the contradictory wisdom of these two teacherly perspectives. Literacy’s transformative or emancipatory power is a complex idea for those of us in secondary English to reach comfortably and confidently. The energy source of transformative literacy is also controversial, sending individual teachers and larger communities of teachers hurtling toward totally different pieces of educational territory. And the power and potential of literacy sits squarely within the heated, terrifying, extraordinary, life-and-death, never-a-dull-moment years of adolescence. With which shield could we possibly equip ourselves as we enter a terrain so threatening?

I have traveled a long way and learned so much in my first year as a middle school writing teacher. I have a passionate belief in John Dewey’s thought that democracy is born anew with each new generation. I have a profound fear of the terrible ways in which my country’s schools fail so many of our adolescents. I have witnessed the impact of excellent whole language teaching. I have seen the tenacity of those who, given the opportunity, overcome incalculable odds and learn to read and write. Most importantly, I have seen five specific extremely at-risk adolescents who blossomed in my classroom.