Deborah Brandt, in her work on literacy and the workplace, defined the idea of literacy sponsors this way:
“any agent local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy- and gain advantage by it in some way.”
This means our literacy sponsors can be either positive influences on us, or negative ones, or even both. Parents, teachers, classmates, a grandparent, a school environment — anything can have an impact on how we become literate, how we learn to read and write, whether we are comfortable with both, and how we see literacy as part of our everyday and work lives.
