Rhetorical Responsiveness: Responding to Literacy Narratives as Teachers of Composition - by Cynthia L. Selfe and the DALN Consortium
Megan Ahern's
Literacy Narrative
The first literacy narrative in this exhibit, "Where is the Love?" was contributed to the DALN by Megan Ahern on 15 January 2010. The metadata that Megan attached to her DALN narrative tells readers only that she is a "White" twenty-year-old "Female," and that she chose to post her DALN narrative under a Creative Commons "Attribution" license. Her video, however, reveals some additional details: Megan is an animated young woman with a Midwestern accent and a tie-dyed tee shirt who faces the camera and speaks forthrightly about her own literacy practices and values.
Megan begins her narrative by noting that her self-recorded video is "Take 4" of her literacy project and announces that she wants to talk about "how I used to view writing compared to the way I view it now because I see a huge difference."
Megan holds up for the camera "a couple of good books that I wrote when I was in first grade," recalling her "memories of just loving writing" and noting with a smile that "it obviously makes a difference when you draw your own awesome illustrations in the book."
As her video proceeds, Megan shows the books she wrote as a six-year-old about "leprechauns, spring, and...Shellasaurus." Her first grade teacher, Megan remembers, announced to the class that students were going to "write books" that the teacher would have laminated and bound: as Megan remembers it, just like “real books that you get in the library." She recalls her excitement about the possibility of becoming a writer, "Because writers were my heroes. They got to use their imaginations every single day of the year."
Megan Ahern's narrative in the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN):
Uncaptioned (.m4v)
Captioned (.mov)
Timecode Transcript (.txt)