Blonde Indian Analysis

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Literacy has many definitions, although schools or school teachers expect us to know only one type of literacy. Which is the type they teach in most American schools, no matter what background a person may have, they expect the same literacy from all individuals. E. Hayes in “Blonde Indian” expresses about how she felt and what she had gone through as a younger girl in the school she had attended. She was judged and ridiculed for being different, and not like the other students. Brandt (1998) in “Sponsors of Literacy” conveys how everyone has their own literacy sponsor. She explains a literacy sponsor can be, “any agent, local or distant, concrete, or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model as well as recruit, regulate, suppress or withhold …show more content…
Knoblauch (1990) describes four different types of literacy in the article “Literacy and the politics of education”, which are Critical, cultural, functional, and personal growth literacy. The school that Hayes had attended, expected a literacy that she understood but it wasn’t the type of literacy she had grown up with. Her grandma taught her many things from her cultural background, like I said before, language, songs, and stories. She had taught her other cultural literacy’s such as food, and cultural practices and although Hayes struggled making friends because of this she was proud of her cultural background and she stayed true to who she …show more content…
The more sponsors you have the more literate you are able to become. She interviewed two different people with very different backgrounds and different sponsors of literacy. One is a Mexican-American who grew up with a low income family, where finding sponsors was not as easy accessible than the other subject who was from a wealthy European American family. Although they both were born the same year, and grew up in the same area, and then attend the same university, It took a lot more work for the Mexican-American to get there because of her lack of sponsors, where as the European American could easily find educated sponsors because of his well educated family background. The standard for literacy is rising, which is getting harder for people who don’t have the access of sponsors to meet that