End of Semester Reflection

This classroom introduction to Language and Literacy has been, at times, eye-widening. I say widening and not opening because my eyes were already open to the world of low literacy in America. I work daily with students in and out of New York City's schools who are struggling to make progress on their literacy goals. I know what their earnestness, embarassment, fear and frustration looks like. However, I have not done extensive reading on the subject of literacy and found much of our more methodological readings fascinating.

Other People's Words by Victoria Purcell-Gates was a pleasure to read and extraordinarily relevent to the bulk of our class discussions. Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch Jr. also sticks out in my mind as notable and was relevant to our discussion in as much for its controversy as for its pedagogy. Despite inevitible criticisms, I found usefull kernals of knowledge in every piece of writing that we read for class. I was particularly enrapt with the early readings on print history and the evolution of alphabetic literacies. So, of course I loved our trip to the Rare Books Library at Colombia University. 

I was practically shaking with excitement while leaving Colombia's campus, thrilled to have had the chance to examine one impressively old book after another and frankly, to have enjoyed access to the grand wealth of elitism at work. I would have enjoyed more class field trips like this one and there certainly seems to be room in the semester for at least two outings. Like we discussed in class last week, perhaps future classes will visit Henry Street Settlement House. It seems like an appropriate and strikingly dichotomous pairing with the Columbia trip. I am sure L&L students of the future would gain much from the experience. 

The writing assignments, although they could have been more strategically timed and spread over the course of the semester, were helpful distillation exercises and I feel stronger in my knowledge having written them. I appreciate that we had freedom in how we approached our paper topics and were encouraged to reveal our individual persepectives and personal writing styles. Blogging was particularly condusive for me to cultivate my writerly agency. And although it is a new skill – I started my first blog in this class – I feel certain that I will blog again in both my personal and professional life. 

Overall, I enjoyed this introduction to language and literacy; my feet are wet, my eyes are wider and I look forward to delving deeper. If I've learned one this about literacy from this class its that there is much we still do not know. However the need is so great that we must continue to work and build upon the work of those scholars who have come before us. Now, I feel more prepared to add my voice to the ongoing and extremely important conversation on literacy.