Brandt: "Sponsors of Discourse"

In Deborah Brandt's essay "Sponsors of Literacy", there is a great deal of analyzing literacy and how it compares to socio-economic status and other economic factors. I especially was drawn to her two examples of Raymond Branch and Dora Lopez, who grew up in the same city and went to the same college, but ended up with two very different views and ideas of literacy. Branch's "sponsor" included his parents and their abilities to provide the best of the best for him, unlike Lopez's parents, who provided adequate, but not nearly as prosperous tools for her to expand her knowledge. Here, Brandt explains that differences occur not only due to how "one social group's literacy practices may differ from another's, but how every body's literacy practices are operating in different economies, which supply different access routes, different degrees of sponsoring power, and different scales of monetary worth to the practices in use" (Brandt 561). I thought this was particularly important not just for the lives of Raymond Branch and Dora Lopez, but for thousands of others who are growing up in different areas of a city or state, and how one's education and literacy will differ from someone else who had greater opportunities at their school and from their parents.