The Way Literacy Circulates: 20 Years of Literacy Sponsorship in/across a Community-Based Rhet/Comp Program

by Shannon Carter, PhD

I see Brandt’s sponsors of literacy playing a central role in how I went about training new teachers to attend to the material, sociopolitical, embodied dimensions of writing (the way literacy lives, to call attention to my first book).

My study emerged largely from the circumstances of my life after graduate school, at my first tenure-line position: Director of Basic Writing and the Writing Center at A&M-Commerce. The program I inherited in 2001 was a progressive one, deeply influenced—like Deborah’s—by the one at the University of Pittsburgh described in Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts. Indeed, the person most influential on our various writing programs, including BW, Donna Dunbar-Odom, trained under Bartholomae in the then still quite famous Pitt program. She brought this approach to our entire writing program in 1993, around the time Deborah was most deeply immersed in her research and I was beginning graduate school.