These annotations are me underlining what I think is important, relating this narrative to the scholarly texts, and questioning things.
Sometimes these victim narratives can be associated with rebel narratives, but that does not mean they are overall rebel narratives. Social class plays a huge factor. When students rebel in victim narratives it has to do with social class and upbringing; somewhat. Brandt says “How are we to understand the vicissitudes of individual literacy development in relationship to the large scale economic forces that set the routes and determine the wordly worth of that literacy”? There are factors that play into a child’s development of learning. One is social class and getting used to what people are doing around you; they will literally follow. Different social class comes with different factors. In the first quote, we can conclude that when kids rebel in victim narratives, it is usually from lower social classes because they do not see importance in schooling (sometimes), and follow what their peers are doing around them. This one is the exact opposite. Alexander says: “Perhaps Kristy’s willingness to adopt the victim role may be the product of entitlement where, from her priveleged socioeconomic place, she sees it as a natural right to critique schooling… where as others without privelege may not.” Both Alexander and Brandt talk about economic class, but with different approaches. Alexander says that priveleged kids are more likely to critique schooling (because of how they grew up and the people around them) and Brandt says that kids rebel against learning in lower classes (because of how they grew up and the people around them). So, they do have opposite ideas, but the same reasons for their respective ideas.
The way Alexander states how victim narratives are supposed to be is very similar to Williams ideas. It is often said that, with victim narratives there is a negative sponsor or educator, who seems to work counterintuitively and making reading and writing worse than it is. Alexander says “[Someone] is a victim of negative literacy experiences” and “discusses how someone took the fun out of reading and writing”, and classifies that as a victim narrative. According to him reading and writing tends to be fun when one is younger, but kids start to dislike it when people start telling them how to read and write. Students simply do not like to get told what to do and how to do it and when teachers start assigning things to read, (Instead of reading for fun) students start to lose interest. Alexander uses the word “stigmatized” to describe victim narratives and how the student or victim feels. It seems that in Williams text, “Heroes, Rebels and Victims: Student identities in Literacy Narratives” she uses the same terminolgy as Williams. Willaims says “Paterson (2003) also found students who wrote about being stigmatized through their literacy experiences, particularly in school where the student is the victim of bad or intensive teaching.” Both Alexander and Williams have similar ideas about the victim narratives. They do because they think the teachers (or teacher-like figures) bad teaching styles or ways, force these victims dislike reading and writing. They are saying that it is not the victims fault, but the person in charge either “took the fun out of reading and writing” or the student is the victim of insensitive teaching.
collreadwrit2a
