In this narrative video, this Africa-American history professor recalled her memory about her early literacy experience, high school, college and graduate studying situation, changes in values and attitude to new form of literacy. Via this video interview we can catch some clues about how her view, value and personality were developed and shaped.
The narrative begin with early her pre-school literacy life. This professor’s parent, different from others, put education into a very high position. Since narrator and her sister at the age of 3, they were told stores and lead to read by their parents. According to her own words, they were not aloud to watch TV until in high school and the main activity during her spear time is only reading books, mostly adventure novel. It is the funnest things to do, since the absent of TV. Not only reading along, they are also told to retell the context they have read to their parents. If there is anything else that interested her, it must be jazz music because her parents all love it, despite the fact that both of them can’t play any instrument, and they may influenced her. After they moved to California from Chicago, she and her sister always love to create store base on the books they read and make up these stores in real life. They also change some stores into shows playing during festivals.
When the time she studying in elementary school, except reading novels, she read encyclopedia and magazines, mostly about nature under the influence of her mother. In the elementary school, main task is writing, and quote her own words “i am more like a reader but not a writer”.
Nevertheless, the real hard wok appeared until she was admitted by Stanford University, where she have to read and write a lot. Her writing skills got practice and improved a lot ,which, she said, “is useful later”. Then she was asked how literacy and history study in high school, but, unfortunately she didn’t have much interest toward her high school study life, instead of that, she believe college is the turning point of her life. So what’s the difference between high school history class and the college one? The first is her high school history teacher actually is a football coach who knows less about history and don’t care about it. Secondly, the high school history class is based on traditional narrative which is boring. However, the college history involve a huge mount of diverse knowledge. She learned many thing outside western civilization and many new topics.
To her own memory, before going to college, she was concerning which college should go and she felled very lucky to be admitted by Stanford. As for her sister, first went to Vanderbilt and then transfer to Stanford. Surprisedly, her parents gave total freedom to her in education issue without any passive-she were told just do the thing that she love.
In the college, she read and write much more, and began to conduct researches- first one in the second year which called minority summer exchange project, and Martin Luther King paper project nest year. They are both beneficial for her.
After graduate school, she started working Ohio State University until now. In the end, she talked about her opinion about some now technology which changes literacy. Like she dislike reading on screen, hardly ever send Email, rarely text people on phone because all of these make her feel far and far away from reading and writing. A very transitional serious scholar.
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