Project 1 — Digital Archive
Karen Chen
Joseph Navarro
English 1A
7 Dec. 2020
In Project One, I completed a Literacy Autoethnography that explored my personal connection with literacy using my own personal experiences, and the textbook “Local Actions” by . To complete this project, one of the first things I had to do is reflect on myself and who I am as a writer and consider my background. From this project I was able to realize how my community viewed literacy, and how that influenced my subconscious thinking of what literacy was and how it affected my ability as a writer.
More specifically, I learned that my community viewed literacy as just text, whether it be text from newspapers, textbooks, or just any scholarly article. This limited my ability to perceive things in more than one way. It would show up throughout my everyday life, including school. However, after having my first college English class, I learned that literacy is just more than text. Precisely, I learned that literacy can come in forms of media, financial, informational, civic and much more. This idea was reinforced after reading my textbook “Local Actions” by Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman.
Checker stated ,“An ever globalizing world brought Western and non-Western societies even closer, particularly in terms of higher education and media access.” .This quote helped me realize the media was one of the reasons that we as society have been able to come this far. Since most likely, the majority of people that came from the Western and non-Western parts of society weren’t able to speak the language, images could convey a message for both parties to fully understand. Realizing that media was a way that helped people communicate, made me realize that it was a form of literacy because people were able to understand things through media.
After learning this, I was now able to see things more than what they were upfront, seeing beyond the black and white of things. Doing this project made me realize that subconsciously I knew that there were other ways that people were able to perceive others emotions besides text but I was never able to realize it.
I remember one time when i was feeling sad and I wanted to express how I felt so I started playing a piano song. It comforted me because I was in control, I was able to control how quiet, and slow I wanted the song to be with nobody telling me how I should play it.
