Sponsors of literacy

Introduction

Brandt used “sponsor” to denote a relationship where the sponsor has much to gain, often in an economic sense. Here we uncouple sponsor from the purely economic and use it to suggest not so much patronage as once used in supporting artists or sponsorship as used in advertising's commercials hut rather in terms of benefactors or supporters who give little thought to the recompense or benefits that they may receive in return.

Discussion

These sponsors included family members, teachers, workplace, newspaper, unions, libraries, religious organizations, government programs, liberation movements, correctional systems, rehabilitation practices, the judiciary, and other agents as they bore at particular times and places on the lives of these two men. The interests of these agents at their particular moments of contact affected what the two men learned, how, from whom, and for what. Sponsor; deliver the material and ideological possibilities for literacy learning, often as a by-product of the struggles for economic or political ascendancy in which they are involved.

Sponsors subsidize (or don't) the development of people's literate resources as a way to recruit or coerce those resources to their cause; they also can reject or discard the literate resources of people that no longer serve their interest. Often prolific in assets, sponsors may have their resources diverted to projects of self-interest or self-development by literacy learners under their aegis. Conservative in nature hut often ruthlessly demanding of change, sports ors carry within their material and ideological orbits multiple aspects of literacy's past and present, receding and emerging traditions that accumulate as part of a history of contact and competition. Even within single institutions, the uses and networks of literacy crisscross through many domains, potentially exposing people to multiple sources of sponsoring powers secular, religious, bureaucratic, legal, commercial technological It is these characteristics of the sponsors ...