How would growing literacy skills help us build a better world?
One of the sweetest memories of my childhood is going to my grandparents’ house after school, walking through the entryway and into the living room, and seeing my grandfather spin around in his swivel rocking chair, snap shut the book he is reading, and stand up to wrap me in a hug. Very truly, many of my favorite memories involve my grandfather reading – the morning newspaper at the kitchen table, or any of his hundreds of books, with feet propped and ankles crossed, on the kitchen table.
Reading was his joy and a blessing for me to observe, because in reflection, I understand that by reading my grandfather gained access to a world of ideas, information, and knowledge that systems of privilege had previously denied him. He did not graduate high school, instead choosing to move out and escape his family structure that would have otherwise kept him locked in a cycle of abuse and poverty. Books became his ladder of upward mobility and the resources that helped him build a beautiful life and nurture within me a light of love that keeps telling me that with imagination anything is possible.
Interestingly, I only had this realization about my grandfather after working with one of my students and assisting on their literary analysis essay of the short story, “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie, who writes about how he learned to love reading as a child on an Indian reservation in the pacific northwest. He describes growing up in a house stacked and filled with books, because his father was a reader who “bought books by the pound.” By reading, Alexie rejected cultural norms of being submissive and pitied: “We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid … to fail in the non-Indian world.” By reading, Alexie was “trying to save my life.” In Alexie’s house, and in my grandfather’s mind, reading was an act of defiance, an active rejection of a culture defined by deficits and lowered expectations.
Why are reading and writing valuable skills? I discuss this with my students, because one of the first steps in building literacy skills is determining how they will help us tackle challenges, and my students explain to me that reading and writing are valuable because they help grow vocabulary or simply get good grades. And that is all true. I also hope we can inspire a sense of wonder and activation toward something bigger. Because by reading, we become proximate to worlds that might otherwise be withheld from us, and by writing we integrate and transfer that knowledge into a world we can readily create.
