Literacies across sponsorscapes: mobilising notions of literacy sponsorship

Abstract

Building from the concept ‘sponsors of literacy', the authors revisit three empirical studies to argue for mobilising notions of sponsorship beyond fixed conceptions of individual sponsors and literacy to lifewide perspectives that take into account sponsoring relations across the broader learning lives of youth. The authors take up the theoretical heuristic ‘sponsorscapes' as a lens for attending to the dynamically networked, reciprocal and human‐material dimensions of literacy practices. With cases drawn from across settings and research foci, including middle school students in a classroom setting, high school‐aged youth across contexts and a participant‐researcher's interactions with a college student, the authors argue that attending to sponsorscapes can contribute critical insight into the emergent, diverse and valued literacies and sponsorship thriving across lifewide learning pathways, while recognising learners' agentive roles in investing, resisting and sponsoring literacies.

Videogames and (language) education

“…Our analysis reveals that, while their informal digital practices, including gaming, are indexes, to a great extent, of a rather homogenous youthful world, their digital practices 'sponsored' (Brandt, 1998;Smith et al, 2020) by schools are quite different, contributing to the construction of unequal orders of literacy. Interestingly, such differences seem to reproduce and expand the inequalities already known by the literature related to print literacies (e.g.…”

Nurturing the Literacy Lives of Boys of Color During COVID-19

“…Brandt wrote: “Sponsors…are any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way” (p. 166). Brandt (1998), and subsequent researchers interested in sponsorship, concluded that autobiographical accounts, as told through interviews, describe influential experiences in which literacy learning happened (Lawrence, 2015; Smith et al, 2020; Wargo & De Costa, 2017). By advancing understanding of the literacy sponsorship that occurs through human actors in the home, this inquiry is intended to contribute to the discourse about family–child dynamics in literacy learning in the early adolescent years.…”

“…For home and school partnerships, this implies the need for educators to shift their tone with families so conversations no longer center on the discipline and remediation of Black and Brown boys, but rather, on the incredible power of families to nurture and advocate for their sons' literacies. For teaching and learning, this implies the need to understand the multiple positions and relationships students navigate inside their families, and concurrent to their English classes (Smith et al, 2020). When literacy educators acknowledge that Black and Latinx boys crave closeness and have authentic feelings such as loneliness, they might challenge themselves to think about their roles in supporting boys of color, in defending them from assaults on their motivation, individual practices, and family involvement.…”

Using Skype to research literacy practices: providing opportunities for participants with mental health conditions to share their experiences

“…The engagement of literacy researchers with diverse participants, including participants with long-term health conditions, is crucial for us to be able to explore the wide range of experiences with literacy both in education and in wider contexts. The importance of literacy research engaging with diverse participants has been highlighted in recent work by Satchwell (2019) with young people with disabilities, Smith et al (2020) with diverse youth and Heydon et al (2020) with elders.…”