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Helping Students Find Entry Points to Literacy
William G. Brozo
"It's the first book I ever read all the way through"
Not long ago I was looking through a wonderful source that had just been loaned to me by a colleague, a book entitled Once Upon a Heroine: 450 Books for Girls to Love by Cooper-Mullin and Coye (1998). Interspersed among the titles and annotations were sections of boxed text in which more than 20 highly successful American women recounted their earliest memories of critical experiences with books. For example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, wrote that The Secret Garden [by Frances Hodgson Burnett] was one of the first books she could read, and she treasures it to this day; Ruby Bridges, a prominent civil rights activist, remembered Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in the Hat [by Dr. Seuss] as the first books that drew her into the literacy club; and Dr. Ellen Baker, a NASA astronaut, became an avid reader as a child after discovering the Madeline books [by Ludwig Bemelmans].
When I finished these personal recollections of important childhood reading experiences, I was struck by the sense that while each of our literate journeys is private and idiomatic, one common characteristic binds all of us who are active readers and writers in adulthood. Like the successful women in Cooper-Mullin and Coye's book, we each began modestly down our own path to literacy. Yet, if from those first stirrings of excitement we experienced as children and teens we continue down the path of lifelong reading, eventually we realize the life-altering and consciousness-expanding power of literacy. Why some of us stay the course of reading and others do not, I am prepared to argue, has to do with whether we are offered (or discover for ourselves) an entry point to literacy in our youth.
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Helping Students Find Entry Points to Literacy