Defying the Odds: Class and the Pursuit of Higher Literacy (review)

Donna Dunbar-Odom’s Defying the Odds is framed by a question that troubles most teachers of first-year writing courses: How can people for whom higher literacy comes easily—people, for example, who cannot even remember learning to read—teach such literacy skills well to students who see these concepts as uncomfortable, forced, or even as enemy territory? Dunbar-Odom’s book gives few new answers to these questions, but rather demonstrates some of the ways they have been answered over time. She analyzes literacy narratives from writers of varying backgrounds, published and unpublished, contemporary and historical. For the educator seeking a road through these difficult questions, or even for students who see themselves as part of the group she describes, Dunbar-Odom’s work can serve as a very useful map.

Defying the Odds addresses a variety of subjects relating to higher literacy acquisition in underprivileged students. Each of its six chapters could stand alone, and the ties between them do occasionally seem to be stretched quite thin. While this may make it an unfulfilling read for those seeking deep detail on any of her major topics, it also serves to make the book a solid introduction to many of the issues that affect the debate of acquisition of higher literacy in disadvantaged student populations who are beginning undergraduate study.

The book begins by outlining the position of literacy in culture and discussing some of the reasons students from working-class backgrounds may pursuer higher literacy against the title’s long “odds.” Taking into account several specific literacy narratives, Dunbar-Odom offers thoughtful readings that outline the ways their authors, from Frederick Douglass to her own students, have explored issues of class background in their writing. Especially useful is the work of Shirley Brice Heath, whose research included students from multiple racial backgrounds and who discusses what Heath (and Dunbar-Odom) adopts as the key issue of class background.

The fourth chapter, “Metaphors We Write By,” is a highlight in which Dunbar-Odom’s own work as a teacher shines brightly. Here she compares the results of literacy narrative assignments she has given to two very different student populations: struggling first-year undergraduates and graduate teaching assistants. She asks both groups to describe literacy through one controlling metaphor, and the differences she finds between and among these groups are fascinating and insightful.

The final chapter, which examines the success behind Oprah Winfrey’s television book club and what the reasons behind its popularity can teach the academy, ranges rather far from the rest of the book’s focus, but would make an informative read as cultural analysis for those researching the intersection of middle-class female culture and literature. Dunbar-Odom’s own literacy narrative is clearly a strong motivation for her writing, since she herself was the first person from her family to consider such higher literacy a career goal as well as a lifelong passion. While it is quite understandable for her to relate personal stories along the way, and this tendency makes sense given the focus of her work, there are times when these feel somewhat out of step with the book’s overall scholarly tone.

Two groups of students are described in Defying the Odds: those who come from working-class backgrounds, and those who, for one reason or another, express difficulty with writing and literature courses. In Dunbar-Odom’s deep concern for the place where the two sets in this Venn diagram would overlap, she sometimes fails to address students who remain only in one group or the other. Moreover, the pregnant term “class” in the book’s subtitle seems to conflate these categories, as though to be of a particular class were a certain indicator of a person’s relationship with higher literacy. Yet it is clear from the attitude of her work, as well as her own story, that Dunbar-Odom has a sincere...