RES 5535: Race, Class, and Gender in Literacy Research (summer 2009)

I’ll admit that when I first started reading chapter three that I found myself being offended. As a Christian, I was taken aback at Hicks’ seemingly flippant, ungrateful attitude about her rearing in a Christian home. I knew, though, if I was going to be able to get through the rest of the book and actually learn anything that I would have to widen my perspective on that which I took defensive issue and back away from my quick judgment of Hicks. I decided that Hicks was simply trying to illustrate for us the dramatic level of immersion that one can experience in their own culture, therefore being rendered almost handicapped at being able to function in any situation diverging from it at all. This recognition helped me to quickly consider how foreign my classroom must have been at times to so many of my students born of cultures dramatically different from my own.

Moving on into these chapters, I began to reflect much deeper into my own experience with literacy and how my class, gender, and race have framed this very personal picture. This reflection takes us right back where we started when Dr. Jackson asked us to first introduce ourselves and our literacy experience and expression of it.

I believe that my parents raised me with a taking-it-for-granted kind of view on literacy: I grew up white, female, and middle-class in the South. From their actions and attitudes about reading and schoolwork, I’d say that they took it for granted that I’d marry middle to upper class and not have to worry with making much money because I would depend on my husband for that just as my mom did. This is not in the least an ungrateful statement but my reality. My parents placed very little importance on my education other that the concrete expectation that I would graduate high school and head straight on to a four-year university. For some, that might sound like a high expectation, but strangely enough, I never felt like school was deemed important at our house. I don’t ever remember a time when mom or dad asked me if I had homework, and they didn’t make a point to come to school functions. My dad does have a master’s degree in education, but it seems that it was earned as a means to make more money, not for the sake of the knowledge. But, then again, that’s a judgment call on my part.

So, tying all this into the reading, it seems that when there’s shaky ground in the security of home—as in the home lives of Laurie, Hicks, hooks, and Frame—the student reverts to various forms of literacy as an escape. My home life, on the contrast, was so EXTREMELY secure that I can’t even begin to describe it in “normal” terms; it was almost imperfectly perfect. Now, as an adult, I’m learning that it was not perfect and my parents are not perfect as I always thought they were. So, I never really looked for any sort of escape in books or anything as a kid. Any time after school was really expected to be spent with family in our home, but I never saw this as a dreadful expectation; it was one that was just taken for granted. Looking back, I can see how it would have seemed self-indulgent in our home to be sitting around with your nose in a book ignoring the family members around you; there was always the underlying expectation to be making a contribution to the family unit even if it was just in conversation.

Erin Farrington