This third writing assignment is an opportunity to explore your own literacy history via auto-ethnography or self-storytelling or self-writing. We’ve been reading Patrick Chamoiseau’s School Days, in which he gives us one model on how to write (quite playfully, quite brilliantly) his own story about how he was “educated” (into Frenchness) as a small Black child in Martinique during the 1950s. We’ve also watched Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley and the way it traces a fictional coming-of-age story of a Martinican child, set in the 1930s. Finally, we’re about to step into Maryse Condé’s Tales from the Heart, her writing about growing up as a Black girl and young woman in the French overseas department of Guadeloupe. These are all examples of writers telling literacy stories or educational narratives, mostly their own.
In exploring your own literacy narrative, or how you came to learn to become literate, you can approach any sense(s) of the word literacy: literal reading ability of words, or media literacy, or computer/technology literacy, or racial literacy, or some related idea about how you were taught or how you learned how to read in the world or to read the world. This kind of writing might have a point, but it doesn’t have to: in a real sense, the storytelling is the point.
In writing this assignment, think about what José in Sugar Cane Alley and Chamoiseau in School Days and Condé in Tales from the Heart explore: the learning lessons, to be sure, but also their struggles against them. Your writing might tackle different forms of resistance or rebellion that you remember experiencing or enacting as a child.
This type of personal essay writing or “creative nonfiction”—considered “the fourth genre” after fiction, poetry, and drama—is more about the art of telling compelling stories than about making an argument or presenting a thesis. So for this paper, focus on telling your literacy narrative(s) and educational histories, and through them explore the complicated process of learning. This might mean talking with parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, or other family members who remember you as a child.
(so im thinking something how I’m currently a freshman in college but I moved to USA four
years ago and how I had to learn slang and just how to speaking formal english at school
but slang with my friends so I won’t feel left out so just write something about that)
