If your project is truly “engaging the conversation” about literacy acquisition, it must be speaking to Gee/Brandt/Alexander in at least one of these three ways: affirm, add, challenge. And you probably want to be doing at least two of these things. What do your peers think you might do here, based on the evidence you’ve provided in the draft? Is there other evidence in the narratives that you’ve left out of the draft so far? Be specific about what your narratives reveal and what you think your might say about literacy acquisition through that data?
After reading my draft my peers and I discussed the stage of my draft where I would be affirming, adding, or challenging Gee and Brandt’s ideas. My peers suggested that I connect the literacy narrative stories with the ideas that Gee and Brandt present in their works. There is no other evidence in the literacy narratives that I have not used in the drafts so far however there is more effective ways to integrate the evidence in my draft. The narratives I chose to write about was Hannah Metta’s literacy narrative which incorporated Gee’s idea of apprenticeship and Brandt’s idea of sponsorship. Troy’s literacy narrative similarly to Hannah’s used the ideas of apprenticeship and sponsorship as main points in his literacy narrative. In the last literacy narrative written by Alexis Ouellette about the “Little Match Girl” she uses Gee’s concept of “mushfake”. I think in all three literacy narratives I will try and use the scholarly texts along with my opinion on the scholarly texts to try and clarify the stories being told in the literacy narratives.
Source introductions. Do your peers think you have enough “introduction” of G/B/A in the draft? Do you have too much? And what about your naming of the literacy narratives? Alexander offers little stories of her examples; Brandt offers richer descriptions so the reader has enough information to understand her analysis. In a short project, one should not repeat the details from the narratives, but the reader probably needs some description/context. What work do you have in this area?
I think my peers did a very good job of introducing the work of Gee, Brandt, and Alexander into their papers with and with some slight adjustments they can pull the full potential out of their quotes. I think I need to do a better job of less summary and more textual support in my paper to push my thoughts to the forefront. I think with using both the Barclay’s and TRIAC method to paragraph structure I can improve my paragraphs and get the most out of my analysis of the scholarly texts.
Evidence. We must have actual passages from both our scholarly sources and our literacy narratives. The scholarly sources help signal the conversation you’re engaging; the narratives are your support for the ways you’re engaging the conversation. It is entirely reasonable to need to find and consider additional narratives, to need to dig more deeply into those one is using, and even to read parts of Brandt or Alexander that are relevant to one’s project but were not originally assigned to the entire class! What do you need to do in this area?
I think I have a good variety of scholarly texts to allow me to talk about and analysis a plethora of information from both Gee and Brandt’s work. I think they both engage the text in different ways with both similarities in apprenticeship and sponsorship and differences in mushfake. There is a possibility in finding additional evidence in my literacy narratives that I think I should take the time to more deeply examine before my final draft.
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