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Before starting my timeline, I want to share my definition of literacy. I understand literacy in two parts. The first is the ability to comprehend a text, with a text being anything that can be read. This is the form that most of my early experiences with literacy took. The second part of literacy is trickier to define but just as important. To me, this second part is making connections between texts, recognizing patterns, and asking questions based off what you have noticed.

Blue stickies are positive experiences with literacy, and red are negative.

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I was probably around 4 or 5 the first time that I read to myself. I stayed up late in bed reading a book called Owl Babies that my parents had read to me many times before.

Pretty much through early middle school, my mom would read out loud to my younger sister and me. My mom loves books and saw reading stories as necessary for being imaginative. Thanks to her, I also have an appreciation for reading.

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Unquestionably, Harry Potter was the defining literary experience of my childhood. Since the books got darker, longer, and more complicated as the series progressed, my reading comprehension got stronger as I made my way through the books.

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Around seventh grade, teachers started to emphasize the connecting the dots portion of literacy. My middle school English teacher did a particularly good job with this. She had helpful organizational tools for brainstorming essays, and I remember her class being the first place where I learned about symbolism.

As my understanding of literacy broadened, so did the areas in which I was literate. Around this time, I started to take bass guitar lessons and joined a choir. I began to become literate in reading music and recognizing patterns within music.

I also began to read the news for the first time. I now began to see how various events I'd heard about as a kid, like 9/11 and the Iraq War, were playing out in real time, another form of connect-the-dots literacy.

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My mom has been a historian at Stanford for pretty close to my whole life. In retrospect, watching her thought process has been influential in piquing my history interest and in teaching me how to think about history. I also am realizing that despite knowing my mom since day one, I still have very little sense of what she does on a daily basis besides read books. I should figure that out to help my students with the imitate a professional aspect of disciplinary literacy.

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As a high schooler, I made the decision to drop down a math lane and started to internalize the idea that I was bad at math. I realize now that what I understood as "bad" was effectively a lack of literacy in the subject.

My experience learning English in high school was less good than middle school. I liked most of the books we read, but the approach to writing felt stifling. My teachers taught essay writing as a formulaic exercise where you would plug your quotes and evidence into a five-paragraph essay formula. While I understand the logic behind this approach and sympathize with my teachers - they each had about 100 students to teach - there was very little room for creativity, and I think my critical literacy suffered as a result.

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I studied abroad in Bolivia during the fall semester of my junior year of college. I studied Spanish throughout middle and high school but knew I would only get really good by using it every day. By the end of my time in Bolivia, I was able to buy airline tickets, communicate on a deep level with my host family, and write a 25 page paper, all in Spanish. Immersing myself in another language further expanded my understanding of literacy. When you’re learning a new language, you have to find new ways of communicating, even if it’s just pointing your fingers. Literacy goes beyond writing and words and includes any sort of medium that helps you communicate.

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Around the time I went abroad, I discovered the power of journaling. I love writing in my journal as a way of preserving an accurate recollection of what I did and how I felt at a specific point in my life. I later discovered that it can have enormous therapeutic benefits if there’s something on your mind that you’re not yet sure how to talk about. I would consider this to be a private form of literacy.

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Last year, I made an album for which I wrote all the music and played piano, bass, guitar, and sang. It’s my proudest accomplishment full stop, and it’s also my best literacy work. The process of writing music is so steeped in literacy. On the most basic level, you have to be literate both in music and a language. You then have to make choices, deciding which ideas are artistically appropriate and which are not. And songwriting is all about making connections - connecting the music to the words, your music to songs that you admire, connecting emotions to evocative musical elements, etc. Writing a melody, crafting a chord progression, coming up with lyrics - they all involve literacy at multiple levels.

To my surprise, completing my album helped me unlearn what I had been taught about essay writing in high school English. My high school English teachers taught me that essays should fit themselves to a form, but that logic is backwards. My album helped me see that form is always in service to the content.

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One of the main reasons I’m interested in teaching history is to increase media literacy to combat fake news. It’s so easy to be misinformed today, but I see history education as an antidote. The process of learning history involves uncovering and citing evidence to make an argument. Once you are familiar with this thought process, you are less likely to believe whatever you read on the internet.

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I have long had a love of maps, and they are another reason I hope to teach history. I find maps fascinating because they convey information in very effective ways and often get us to see our surroundings in a new light (in other words, they’re another form of literacy!). They are also easily manipulated. Similarly to media literacy, I hope to illuminate for my students some of the ways in which maps can be altered to present false conclusions.

The same goes for stats - super valuable form of literacy, super easy to manipulate. For me personally, discovering stats has taught me that I actually am good at math and that math can have practical applications for the social sciences.

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History and Literacy: Connecting Past to Present

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History and Literacy: Connecting Past to Present

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Finally, I want to teach history to help students see the connections between the past and the present. As I discovered when I first started to read the news, there is a lot about the world around us that we just accept as the way things have always been and always will be. That is often not the case, and when we begin to see that, we start to have agency. But we cannot get that agency without first making the connections. My ultimate goal for my students is that they come to question their surroundings, noticing patterns in their observations and asking how things came to be that way and why. That to me is literacy in its most complex form, and that is what I want my students to be able to do.

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A couple of important, literacy-related things I've learned during my first month at BTEP:

Body as text is a form of literacy, and I’ve discovered that it's a useful practice for uncovering information.

In general, I’ve done lots of thinking at BTEP around race and class, all of which has given me a better sense of my own identity. I want to share that with my students so that they know who I am. It will make me a better teacher if my students know who I am. Maybe this is social-emotional literacy?

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We talked about how literacy can sometimes be across multiple languages. What struck me was that with many bilingual students, they actually might see their literacy as a crutch rather than an asset. In my reading for 7/28, several bilingual students talked about how they saw their use of Spanglish as limiting their English comprehension, even though they almost never needed to switch into Spanish to articulate themselves.

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So the question became why do these students see themselves as lacking in English when they clearly are not? I think the answer lay in how they'd been socialized to view English, namely that English is "correct" and switching into Spanish is wrong. This dynamic seems like a perfect starting point for the sort of critical conversations that Freire talks about, asking students why they hold that assumption about English as right and Spanish as wrong. I'm guessing that many students hadn't really thought about why they feel the way they do. My guess is that once it was out in the open, students would start to realize that they weren't using Spanish as a crutch and that the transgressive feelings of pride some students felt in Spanglish were shared by most of the group.