Introduction

In their research on the use of literacy narratives in teacher-training courses, Caroline Clark and Carmen Medina argue that the benefit of their pedagogical approach was the way it forced students outside their own assumptions about literacy by confronting them with conflicting definitions and practices of literacy found in literacy narratives like Sapphire’s Push and Luiz Rodriguez’s Always Running. They argue that confronting students with conflicting experiences of literacy helps decenter their own literacy assumptions and encourages teachers in training to view their own literacy experiences in a wider social context (64). The work of Clark and Medina suggests a productive way to use technological literacy narratives in the writing classroom. Using each other’s literacy narratives and narratives from other contributors to the DALN, students can begin to see how their own experiences parallel and contrast with those of others—especially from their own generation—which begins the move from a personal, one-dimensional, local view of technological literacy to an increasingly social, global, nuanced view of it. This move should not be one that universalizes individuals’ experiences to stand in for entire social groups, but rather one that follows Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton’s mandate to draw out the larger social, economic, cultural, and political factors which cut across literacy narratives and help put individual experiences in their wider context.

Using literacy narratives in the classroom in this way engages in the reading approach David Bloome describes in his foreword to this collection as asserting that “people matter, what they say matters, and particularity matters” in his foreword to this collection. Such a method of reading literacy narratives, Bloome argues, is characterized by

us[ing] the particularities of people’s lives and their expressions (the particularities of their narratives and how they tell them) to better understand what it means to be human (including the diversity of what it means to be human) and to better understand ourselves within the particularities of our own lives.

The connection Bloome draws between the particularities of narrators’ individual experiences with literacy and wider human experience is central to the approach to classroom use of literacy narratives I advocate here. While Bloome urges scholars to use such an individual and particular engage with literacy narratives in order to theorize about literacy in its social context, I advocate extending this approach with students. Using a sample group of student literacy narratives, this exhibit models a literacy narrative pedagogy that encourages students to focus on the details of individual literacy experiences across their own and others’ narratives. I examine how such particulars position narrators culturally, socially, and historically according to existing and emerging identifications in terms of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and other categories.