“Images of Empowerment” Linda Flower

This chapter has a lot of stuff going on.  I don’t understand it as a whole, but I do understand bits and pieces.

According to Flower, when put in practice, empowerment can mean several things depending on how you answer three questions: “Who is being empowered?  To what end?  By what means?”  If you’re a poor person and excluded from power because you see that the rich and privileged have it all, then you will view empowerment differently from the privileged who are “developing their own capacity to resist, serve and act on the behalf of others (123).”  You will also view empowerment differently if your goals are different and how you plan to reach those goals. 

Flower says that “empowerment depends on speaking appropriately, speaking up, and speaking against as well as speaking with.”  I believe by speaking appropriately you have to be willing to understand that there are cultural differences amongst us.  You would speak to someone from Spain differently than you would to a middle class white man from Virginia.  There are several differences amongst cultures, ethnic groups, classes and regions of the country and world.  I understand Flowers notion of speaking up as being willing to speak your own “voice.”  Your own ideas and understanding of society must come out in your writing and speech.  Being willing to put yourself out there will hopefully help others begin to understand your ideas.  This will start a conversation and lead to discussion and debate to hopefully create a larger understanding of society needs.  Since this country has several cultures, we need to be able to speak against ideas in order to challenge and learn from them.  By challenging others ideas and understandings, we can teach them new things, but also learn from others. 

At this point in the chapter, I began to get more confused because Flowers tries to explain the problems with the above dependencies of empowerment.  Anther option of speaking against ideas is to actually speak across differences.  Use shared ideas to work together rather than the differences.  Or, as Kurt Spellmeyer suggest,  in composition classes “students are first recognized as meaning makers in their own right, involved in the work of reading and writing because it addresses questions that matter to them....the goal is not to preserve or transmit knowledge but to appropriate it—to use writing to discover what these differences mean for each individual.

Flowers then sites a study that tries to explain a theory of empowerment, that I don’t understand.  What I would like to learn is how all of this works together as a whole text.  What does it all mean?

Flower, Linda. Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. Carbondale: Southern      Illinois UP, 2008. Print

"What's in a List?" Jack Goody

                Jack Goody explains how the early writings from 3000 B.C.E. in Egypt and Mesopotamia have influenced the “cognitive operations” of the human mind (32).  He focuses his argument on ‘the list’ because he believes that just like today’s writing, the list has a purpose, to influence “the organization of social life and ... the cognitive systems (33).”  According to Goody, the list can be divided into three different categories: inventory, shopping, and lexical.  The inventory list was used mainly for administrative purposes.  Estate inventory, taxes, itemization and several other things were written down to keep track of things.  It was an economic tool that helped keep records for the state.  The shopping list was a sort of events list that recorded things to be done or things that had been done.  Goody gives the example of recording star distances from one star to another by the Mesopotamians.  Other things recorded with this type of list are recordings of the weather and administrative boundaries.  Finally, the lexical list was like an early dictionary.  Words of the same meaning or morphology were grouped together to show “relationships among the words in the vocabulary of the language (42).”  Based on the Onomasticon of Amenope, an early Egyptian writing, Goody explains that the author of the Amenope creates a lexical list that is put in a hierarchy order.  By doing this the author is showing how the people viewed society; the gods and kings at the top, working men in the middle and everything else (e.g. trees, animals, etc.) at the bottom.  The list reflects a more complex idea compared to the inventory and shopping list, which are more simple abstract things.  Overall, Goody says that words have a value when they are placed in a list because they the words grouped together have a relationship.  The words can give a result (inventory), they can record happenings and help predict what’s going to happen (shopping), and they can reflect society’s awareness of the world or their beliefs (lexical).

Who is Matthew and What is Community Literacy?

My name is Matthew Garcia and I am a junior at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.  I am studying to get my BA in English with 8-12th grade Teacher Certification.  Going into teaching is something that I have always been hesitant about because over time I have lost interest in reading.  However, I will not lose hope that I will gain that interest back, but for now I will just continue to concentrate on graduating.

Community Literacy is something I am not familiar with, but I hope that it will give me the tools I need to be a successful educator.  This class includes service learning in which I will be required to go out into the community and put the skills that I learn in this class to test.  I hope that this experience will get me more comfortable with helping others.  While I have some experience volunteering and tutoring, I still get nervous when I have to help and educate someone.  I am ready to learn and hope that this semester will teach me new and enjoyable things.