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127 8. The Unintended Consequences of Sponsorship Eli Goldblatt and David A. Jolliffe Sponsors of literacy [are] any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, and model as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way. —Deborah Brandt, Literacy in American Lives (added emphasis) Deborah Brandt’s well-known definition of a literacy sponsor has been used to explore and analyze learning situations inside and outside academic settings. This formulation sensitizes us to the benefits that flow to institutions offering classes or tutelage of any sort. By Brandt’s light we recognize any education or training serves not only the students but also the donors, corporations, nonprofits, and governments that create and fund systems through which learners pass from literacy to literacy. Her focus on the economic history of mass literacy has provided an operational method for performing a Foucauldian power analysis of educational opportunities in America over the last hundred or more years. And yet, the last phrase of her definition—the word gain ringing out, conjuring the rise and fall of housing values in a suburb as funding levels fluctuate for its local school district—has always bothered us as incomplete and overstated. Certainly, county governments fund community colleges to make their workforce more attractive for outside investors, but “gain advantage” does not exhaust the story of sponsorship. Sponsors take risks, too. Indeed, sponsors can be harmed, altered, or even transformed by the population and pedagogy they contract to teach. We raise this question because we are both involved in community literacy projects that require significant sponsorships from institutions with vast investments in the economic development of under-resourced areas. David works with primarily rural populations in Eastern Arkansas, and Eli pursues projects in the stressed neighborhoods of North Philadelphia. Over the years we have come to recognize that the people we know in our respective communities share remarkable similarities despite the obvious Eli Goldblatt and David A. Jolliffe 128 differences of geography and history: Children and adults possess great talents, but, discouraged by poor teaching and underfunded schools, they expect too little from their literacy lives. Both areas offer great possibilities for potential employers, but the jobs do not come, partly because companies can get sweeter deals in places where they will not have to spend so much to train the workforce. Both have potential or actual sponsors—universities and colleges, churches, hospitals, immigration services, and corporations in addition to public school systems in crisis—capable of creating many additional literacy opportunities for the people of the place. Much depends on these institutions undergoing the sort of challenge to their current forms that would allow their sponsorship to succeed for the sake of those not now adequately served. If institutions and their backers take the risk, both sponsors and learners might benefit, but sponsors may have to undergo transformations they neither expect nor welcome in the process of engaging groups not originally included in their charters or missions. Community Learning Network in an Urban University Temple University sits squarely in the middle of North Central Philadelphia. On one side of majestic old Broad Street, the proud but stressed African American community stretches fifteen blocks to the park, ten blocks south, and twenty blocks north. On the other side of Broad, the residents are primarily African American for another five or eight blocks east, and then the Latino community begins—largely Puerto Rican but also increasingly Mexican, with Colombians in the northern margin and Dominicans here and there. Outside the campus the people are haunted by the usual urban ills of near Depression-era unemployment, poor schools, high food prices, vacant lots, violence accompanying drugs exacerbated by easy access to guns. And yet, this area contains neighborhoods rich with small nonprofits trying to serve ex-offenders, new mothers, elders and kids; the churches host literacy centers and food banks; the schools have their share of teachers who care passionately about their students; and cops who are often portrayed as villains can also show compassion and creativity to protect the communities they patrol. North Philly might be characterized as a rich country with tragically inadequate infrastructure. The greatest treasure, the human beings, cannot develop themselves well enough to transform their circumstances or shake the government on their behalf. Our university libraries and lecture rooms and laboratories lie within yards of inadequate housing and dangerous outside basketball courts. Our theaters offer plays and host recitals while only blocks...

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