Our Wa 5 Final Reflective Project Can Take Multiple Forms

Our Wa 5 Final Reflective Project Can Take Multiple Forms But Your G

Develop a reflective writing project that looks back over your writing throughout the semester and makes a claim about how you understand literacy now. Incorporate your earlier writings from the semester and produce new writing. Address these questions: Has your understanding of literacy changed during the semester? If so, how specifically? If not, how do you understand literacy now that is similar to when you began? What do you think about literacy in relation to identities such as gender, race, class, or linguistic background? Be detailed and explain your thinking process. What articles impacted you and why? Which moments in the class challenged, interested, or deepened your understanding of literacy? Describe these moments in detail. The best projects weave these points into a narrative that includes quotations and paraphrases from your previous and new writings, rather than following a strict Q&A or success story format. Demonstrate your evolving understanding and ongoing questions about literacy. Be specific and illustrative, including examples from various forms and genres of literacy such as tweets, images, visuals, comics, or articles. Creativity is encouraged to showcase different literacy forms.

Paper For Above instruction

Throughout this semester, my understanding of literacy has undergone significant transformation, shaped by personal experiences, academic insights, and critical reflections on identity and power. Initially, I viewed literacy primarily as the ability to read and write in a conventional sense—mastery of standard language skills that enable communication and access to information. However, as the semester progressed, my perspective expanded to encompass a broader and more nuanced understanding of literacy’s role in shaping individual identities, social relations, and cultural narratives.

A pivotal moment that illuminated this expanded understanding was reading Sherman Alexie’s “Superman and Me,” which underscored how literacy functions as both a form of personal empowerment and cultural assertion. Alexie’s narrative about self-educating on the Spokane Indian Reservation challenged me to consider how literacy intersects with cultural identity and historical marginalization. His metaphor of Paragraphs—describing how he perceives his family and community—resonated deeply, revealing how literacy can serve as a means of constructing community narratives and resisting stereotypes. Alexie’s story demonstrated that literacy extends beyond the classroom into community spaces, personal histories, and cultural practices.

Reflecting on my own journey, I recognize that my early experiences with my grandfather significantly influenced my evolving understanding of literacy. Unlike conventional academic literacy, these memories centered around informal, oral, and contextual language learning. My grandfather would teach me words and phrases, embedding them within stories from our heritage. This form of literacy—grounded in oral traditions and everyday language—highlighted how literacy can be a living, dynamic practice deeply intertwined with cultural identity. These moments challenged me to see literacy as multifaceted, not solely confined to written texts but encompassing spoken language, gestures, and even visual symbols.

Throughout this process, I also explored concepts of code-meshing and the idea that literacy is not monolithic but multiple and fluid across different social and linguistic contexts. The chapter on language and code-meshing reinforced that my own linguistic practices—blending dialects or switching between languages—are valid forms of literacy. This understanding aligns with my experience on the reservation, where storytelling, singing powwow songs, and informal conversations constitute essential literacy practices that carry meaning and cultural power.

Articles such as Eric Darnell Pritchard’s work further expanded my insights into how literacy differs across social spaces and identities. Pritchard’s emphasis on community-based publishing and writing practices demonstrated that literacy is also a collective act rooted in social and material conditions. His discussion of how working-class writers navigate access to publishing and education made me reflect on my own positionality and the barriers faced by marginalized communities. It became clear to me that literacy is a site of both oppression and resistance, depending on who has access to resources and how they leverage them.

In class, moments that challenged my assumptions included discussions on the materiality of texts and the transnational dimensions of literacy. For instance, reading Velasquez’s “Dreams and Nightmares,” written bilingually and circulated across borders, exemplified how literacy extends beyond national languages and into cultural survival. This chapter showcased how immigrant stories and multilingual texts challenge monolingual perspectives and emphasize that literacy practices are vital for navigating complex identities and histories.

Engaging with visual and digital forms of literacy, such as analyzing tweets, comics, or social media posts, further broadened my conception of what literacy entails today. A tweet can serve as a condensed, powerful form of storytelling—combining language, images, and cultural codes in ways that traditional texts do not. These emerging genres exemplify how literacy practices evolve with technology and social change, allowing for more inclusive, accessible, and diverse forms of expression.

Throughout my reflection, I have realized that literacy is an ongoing, dynamic process that is deeply connected to identity and context. It is not merely a set of skills but a way of enacting power, agency, and community. I continue to think about how literacy practices differ across social groups and how they can be harnessed to promote cultural resilience and social justice. My fascination with literacy’s multifaceted nature inspires me to explore further how marginalized communities reclaim and redefine literacy on their own terms.

References

• Alexie, Sherman. (1998). Superman and Me. In The Toughest Indian In the World. Grove Press.
• Pritchard, Eric Darnell. (2019). Pro(se)letariets. In Filling the Gap: Literacy and Social Justice. Routledge.
• Young, Vershawn Ashanti, et al. (2010). Code-meshing as a Transformative Approach to Multilingual and Multicultural Publics. College Composition and Communication.
• Velasquez, Liliana. (2019). Dreams and Nightmares. University of Texas Press.
• Gee, James Paul. (2000). Discourse and Sociolinguistics. In Literacy and Identity. Routledge.
• Street, Brian V. (1984). Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press.
• Collins, Patricia Hill. (2000). Black Feminist Thought. Routledge.
• McGee, Moira. (2010). Digital Literacy Practices. Journal of Literacy Research.
• Canagarajah, A. Suresh. (2013). Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. Routledge.
• Delgado, Richard. (2012). Foreword to Critical Race Theory. Routledge.