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Deborah L. Brandt (born 1951) is professor emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Brandt earned her B.A. from Rutgers University in 1974 and her Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington in 1983, after which she worked for the University of Wisconsin-Madison until she retired in 2010. Although she has published more than two dozen articles and book chapters, she is known for Literacy in American Lives, for which she won three awards: the Modern Language Association's Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize (2002), the Grawemeyer Award (2003), and the Conference on College Composition and Communication's Outstanding Book Award (2003). Her text Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts (Southern Illinois UP, 1990) won the 1992 David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research from the National Council of Teachers of English.

Brandt was awarded two fellowships, one with the American Council of Learned Societies in 1986 and another with the National Research Council in 1998, for which she was a Visiting Scholar at the United States Department of Education. Brant is the 2017 winner of the Conference for College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Exemplar Award.

Brandt's research focuses on the social contexts of mass literacy and literacy learning; and on large-scale, structural forces that shape individuals' access to literacy.

In Literacy in American Lives Brandt "explains how generations of Americans have made sense of and coped with increased pressure to improve their ability to read and write." By analyzing the literacy histories of hundreds of Americans from all walks of life, Brandt documents the effects that the changing economic, political, and sociocultural conditions in American society have had on literacy acquisition and usage, from the 1900s to the present day. In this text, she puts forward the notion of " Sponsors of Literacy,"; she writes: "Sponsors, as I have come to think of them, are any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, or model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy -- and gain advantage by it in some way." Through the concept of sponsorship, Brandt argues for attention to the socioeconomic and contextual forces that grant access to literate resources to some and deny it to others.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation says that "the impact of her work has been felt well beyond the borders of the University of Wisconsin campus."

Brandt worked as a Research Associate at the National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement (1996-2002), a consultant for the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (2005-07), and with the National Writing Project. Her ongoing efforts in support of social justice and educational opportunity in the Madison, Wisconsin community have been recognized by the NAACP's W.E.B. DuBois Advocate Award (2001) and two nominations by the Madison Urban League for the city's Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award for her work with Madison middle-school students.

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Deborah L. Brandt (born 1951) is professor emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Brandt earned her B.A. from Rutgers University in 1974 and her Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington in 1983, after which she worked for the University of Wisconsin-Madison until she retired in 2010.

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passage that grabbed me -Jesohaia Carrillo

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passage that grabbed me -Jesohaia Carrillo

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"This analysis of sponsorship forces us to consider not merely how one social group's literacy practices may differ from another's, but how everybody's literacy practices are operating in differential economies,"

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The competition to
harness literacy, to manage, measure, teach, and exploit it, has intensified
throughout the century. It is vital to pay attention to this development because it largely sets the terms for individuals' encounters with literacy.
This competition shapes the incentives and barriers (including uneven distributions of opportunity) that greet literacy learners in any particular
time and place. It is this competition that has made access to the right
kinds of literacy sponsors so crucial for political and economic well being.

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"... literacy sponsors affect literacy learning in two powerful ways. They help to organize and administer stratified systems of opportunity and access, and they raise the literacy stakes in struggles for competitive advantage. Sponsors enable and hinder literacy activity, often forcing the formation of new literacy requirements while decertifying older ones." (pg. 178-179)

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"Sponsors, as we ordinarily think of them, are powerful figures who bank­roll events or smooth the way forinitiates. Usually richer, more knowl­edgeable, and more entrenched than the sponsored, sponsors nevertheless enter a reciprocal relationship with those they underwrite."- Ashley Bowers

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"Sponsors, as we ordinarily think of them, are powerful figures who bank­roll events or smooth the way forinitiates. Usually richer, more knowl­edgeable, and more entrenched than the sponsored, sponsors nevertheless enter a reciprocal relationship with those they underwrite."- Ashley Bowers

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She has a PhD, and focuses on literacy learning, mass literacy, so she focuses on kind of the social aspect of literacy

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It's important to know who the author of any writing is, because that affects the content. As we learned earlier in the week, those who write tend to be those who were successful, so it's important to take into context where the author came from and what advantages they had.

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"Literacy like land is valued, commodity in this economy , a key resource in gaining profit and edge."

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" Literacy looms as one of the great engines of profit and competitive advantage in the 20th century: a lubricant for consumer desire; a means for integrating corporate markets; a foundation for the deployment of weapons and other technology; a raw material in the mass production of information." (paragraph 3)

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“Sponsors, as we ordinarily think of them, are powerful figures who bankroll events or smooth the way for initiates.”
So sponsors help individual learners by representing them. They provide money and other resources and will usually get more money in return.

Brianna Brown

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Sponsorship can be defined as any agent (local or distant), concrete or abstract, that enables and supports as well as regulates and suppresses literacy to gain an advantage. In other words it can be someone or something spinning a biased narrative for personal gain or personal belief.

-Dechen Vassallo

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An example of a literary sponsor in the article by Deborah Brand is when she shares the story of Raymond Branch on page 170. He became a successful freelance writer of software because at twelve years old he was gifted a computer from his parents at Christmas. Raymond gained this literacy from the sponsorship from his parents.

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Deborah Brandt has a higher education and has dedicated a lot of time to literacy as seen through multiple awards. She has taken a societal aspect to studying literacy and people's relationship with improving their own understanding. Being aware of an authors background is important because their history affects their point of view. Knowing about their life can help add context.

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Brandt states, "This essay does not presume to overcome the analytical failure completely. But it does offer a conceptual approach that begins to connect literacy as an individual development to literacy as an economic development, at least as the two have played out over the last ninety years or so." (paragraph 5) She is guiding the reader away from this being an opinion piece.

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Caleb Williamson:
One quote that got my attention was, "Through the sponsorship of Baptist and Methodist ministries, African Americans in slavery taught each other to understand the Bible in subversively liberatory ways"(168). This quote is saying what great affect the sponsorships had on the Baptist Methodist ministries. The sponsors allowed the people in slavery to understand the bible, which is a very important thing. This shows just how impactful these sponsorships can be and how they can really change lives.

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"Sponsors, as I have come to think of them, 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."

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Deborah Brandt was a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She wrote numerous articles and books for her focus of social contexts of mass literacy and literacy learning. This does matter because it allows the audience to have more faith in the author they are learning from.

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Sponsors of literacy is:" a conceptual approach that begins to connect literacy as an individual development to literacy as an economic development at least as the two have played out over the last ninety years or so." Sponsors from DB's approach are "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." This is an interesting approach, one I had never really considered, but of course it is true. The printing example is a good one--how the Industrial Revolution separated printers became low paid workers without access to the intellectual environment they had once been part of.  

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Sponsors of literacy is:" a conceptual approach that begins to connect literacy as an individual development to literacy as an economic development at least as the two have played out over the last ninety years or so." Sponsors from DB's approach are "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." This is an interesting approach, one I had never really considered, but of course it is true. The printing example is a good one--how the Industrial Revolution separated printers became low paid workers without access to the intellectual environment they had once been part of.  

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Brandt states that all literacy learning requires permission, or assistance, and that's what literacy sponsors are. Sponsors can either support and teach literacy, as well as suppress and withhold it.