Conclusion
This project, although an excellent educational opportunity, has been a truly meaningful experience in my personal life as well. I have information from my mother and grandmother and I will forever treasure. I thought I know both of them so well, but from the interview questions I learned things I would have never thought to ask them about on my own. I especially liked learning about their experiences learning to read and write in school. They both knew me as a student, and it was really fun for me to get a glimpse at what they experienced as young students.
Throughout the semester I have been exploring my own literacy, and as fulfilling as that experience was, getting to put my literacy into conversation with my mom and my grandmother has been an even more powerful experience. When I think about my own literacy, I can see how how it was influenced by both of them.
One thing that I noticed when I look back over all three interviews is that my mother and grandmother seemed to have very similar experiences in education and experiences that were very different from my own. Neither one was pushed to go to college. Both left high school and began work and a family before returning for further education. When I graduated high school, there was no question as to whether or not I was going to college. My mother would have forced me to go if I hadn’t wanted to. Neither one of them were even encouraged to go. I suppose that times were just very different. It is interesting, though, that times hadn’t changed much between my grandmothers’ and my mothers’ generations, but they did change between my mothers’ and mine.
Another trend that I noticed among my family is that we all seem to have a true love of reading. I have always been a bookworm, starting in the 3rd grade when I started reading The Baby Sitters Club series and became hooked on reading. My mother, although she has never been a reader of novels, has always read a great deal–usually newspapers, magazines, and bible devotions, smaller types of texts. She actually reads more than her interview indicates. My grandmother has always read–she even says so in her interview. She and her family are “readers” according to her. And it’s true–I’ve grown up watching her read, reading with her, and reading her recommendations.
I’ve been exploring my literacy throughout this semester and I believe this final project has really helped me gain a greater understanding of who I am as a literate person. It has shown me where I come from and what my family background is in terms of literacy. A lot of things that I have known about myself to be true, for example, the fact that I love to read, makes so much sense now that I see it in context with my mother and my grandmother’s literacy history. Learning about their literacy, in connection to mine, has been an amazing experience that I will, thanks to this blog, be able to treasure throughout my life.
