Kayla:
Kayla dealt with losing a passion. She is a clear example of the “victim” literacy narrative. As Alexander states A victim ” has dealt with a negative literacy experience in or out of school; discusses how someone took the fun out of reading and writing”(615). Kayla use to love reading as a kid. But her experience with Mr. Stritch completely ruined that for her and she never found that spark for reading again.
Sam:
Sam is what we can call a “success” narrative. She never had a bad experience with writing, and always strived to be better. The writing was never worked for Sam, as she says “So what did I think about the process of writing? I loved it, I really did. I enjoyed just being able to get lost in the moment of sharing my thoughts on a piece of paper”(2). According to Alexander of “Successes, Victims, and Prodigies”, “Students like Anna value the success master narrative as a lens through which they understand their literate experiences, and they do so by generalizing about literacy and its power of pointing to future success” (617).
Hannah:
Hannah’s story was trickier to put into a literacy narrative perspective, but I believe that Hannah is a “hero”. In the face of a teacher telling her that all her hard work was wasted, Hannah showed self-reliance and believed in her own essay. Hannah’s college essay was helping her heal from her brother’s death, and no teacher, grade, or college acceptance was going to change how she felt about the paper.
Blake:
While reading Blake’s story, I realized that he fits into the literary narrative of “hero”. To Alexander, a hero is someone who “equates literacy acquisition with success, liberation, development, and progression”(615). We see Blake try and try again to find out the problem with his paragraph. When Blake succeeds in solving his grammar error, he is proud of his own progression. Later in life, he learned to overcome his grammatical obstacles, “Still to this day when I find myself rushing through projects I have to stop and tell myself to slow down”(2). The obstacles he overcame helped Blake grown as a person.
