After reading Deborah Brandt’s “Sponsors of Literacy,” I realized that I was a literary sponsor. I have a nephew who turned 2 in October of 2017. I have been reading books with him for a while now and always try to incorporate learning into our play times.
We play with playdough and I teach him shapes. We color, and I draw pictures of something starting with a certain letter to show it to him while repeating the sound of the letter. We watch a movie and it is either a special movie that teaches Spanish or the audio is in Spanish. I recently checked out a book from the library that teaches kids the colors in Spanish. I have read it to him 1.5 times.
However, there are tons of other books that I want to read to him with specific purposes in mind. In fact, I just spent about an hour looking up books that I want to either read to/with him or for him to eventually read himself. They are meant for kids and they range widely in topic.
There are books about The Underground Railroad, The Civil Rights Movement, segregation, The Holocaust, refugees, Mexican-American activists, female activists, important women in history, important African-Americans in history, and even books simply about kindness.
If you cannot sense a trend then I’ll tell you: They are meant to show how people have been mistreated or seen as less and then evidence proving that those same people are just as amazing as everyone else.
I want him to mold him to someone who is empathetic and kind. I want to teach him about certain aspects of history that is often glossed over or sugarcoated. I want to show examples of fantastic people of different genders, races, and religions.
However, I worry about how I might be recruiting or suppressing him. We talked in class about how sponsors can be good, bad, and every other shade in between. Sponsors of literacy gain an advantage in some way. I am hoping to gain a nephew that I can be proud of, yet I still worry about potential consequences.
