The literacy success narrative influences incentives and compliance by putting this idea in our heads that literacy leads to success. Debra Brandt literacy scholar states “literacy looms as one of the great engines of profit and competitive advantage” Drawing a connection between literacy and making money.  So much focus on master narratives, blinds novices of literacy (students) to other incentives, like self fulfillment. Teachers do not get into the business of teaching literacy for money or access to “social goods”(Gee). They work to benefit others. The teacher’s incentives are to help the student grow and prosper. Students need to comply to their Teachers (sponsors), Novices comply with the teachers to receive the education and a passing grade in their current course. Being a member of an educated community, is a social imperative for some. This is an example of an incentive to be literate. When your able to communicate with someone on an educated level, your able to get more out of that interaction. People want to feel a sense of belonging, if someone can’t connect with another by words, it can lead to a lack of understanding each other. If you can’t understand someone, it leaves a lot more room for assumptions and judgments.  

If we as students are always thinking or expecting we’ll get an award, it is a bad mindset for learning. Real life doesn’t hand out awards for completing every task. Real life doesn’t give you a positive outcome every time you overcome a problem. As Alexander writes” When we view literacy as serving specific means, we limit it’s influence and affect.” I think this statement goes hand in hand with expecting too much. The cognizance and realization that literacy doesn’t always lead straight to achievement, is imperative to novices with having a realistic mindset to literacy.

 

Compliance is very much related to incentives. For example, if you are an apprentice the incentive to comply with your mentor (sponsor) is how you are going to get into the discourse and eventually reep the benefits of social goods. The entire apprenticeship is about complying with the instructor in order to advance. Debra Brandt says “sponsors nevertheless set the terms for access to literacy and wield powerful incentives for compliance and loyalty” Just as anyone in an apprenticeship, you need to comply with others who are higher on totem pole than yourself, or you won’t make it. The idea of sponsorship requires one to lead and another to follow, in most cases. These sponsors are of high importance to their predecessors. So much that as Debrah Brandt explains  “sponsors seemed a fitting term for the figures who turned up most typically in people’s memories of literacy learning; older relatives, teachers,priests, supervisors, military officers, editors, influential authors.”

 

Novice skill level (beginners) are not the only ones who get the privilege of reaping the benefits of the specialized training they receive from their sponsor. The sponsor themselves “lend resources or credibility to the sponsor but also stand to gain benefits from their success. Whether by direct repayment or indirectly by credit of association” (Brandt) For example if a orchestra teacher at a school, takes a young aspiring violin player, and this new member of the arts, who is trying to learn to play, ends up being a world class violinist one day, the sponsor benefits by credit of association, years after, when the sponsored has mastered the discourse. If a Private Piano teacher does daily lessons with their client, they’re benefiting from this with direct payment.

 

The conclusions I have drawn here are that Literacy is driven by Compliance and Incentives. People comply in order to receive incentives later on. The constant development in Literacy is in the hands of sponsors. “Obligations towards one’s sponsor runs deep, affecting what, why, and how people read” (brandt).  That is a reference to the effectiveness and the foremost power sponsors bear. With that kind of esteem presence comes responsibility to direct that influence in the right direction. A negative effect that associating literacy with success can have is as Alexander writes “ one consequence is a view of literacy as utilitarian and practical, a means to an end rather than something that can serve other purposes, such as pleasure, satisfaction, self awareness, self expression, or learning for learning’s sake”

 

If we as students are always thinking or expecting we’ll get an award, it is a bad mindset for learning. Real life doesn’t hand out awards for completing every task. Real life doesn’t give you a positive outcome every time you overcome a problem.