Conclusion

            by Jeff Sapp

    I recently had a conversation with a friend, 11-year-old Madeline, who is determined to be an author when she grows up.  I have read some of her manuscripts, and they are quite clever.  We were deeply engaged in a dialogue about Harry Potter, and she was telling me how he was like Cinderella, “because they are both orphans, like me.”  We talked for 45 minutes, books strewn all across the living room.  Finally she just sighed and said, “I wish I had a hundred hands so I could write and write and write.”

    Henry Giroux once wrote, “Literacy is not approached as merely a technical skill to be acquired, but as a necessary foundation for cultural action for freedom, a central aspect of what it means to be a self and socially constructed agent.” (1)  Because of the excellent research presented in articles like these, and because of students like Madeline who are passionate about reading and writing, I find myself optimistic and enthusiastic about the future of literacy.

ENDNOTES:

• 1. Henry A. Giroux, “Literacy and the Pedagogy of Political Empowerment,” introduction to Literacy:  Reading the Word and the World (South Hadley, Mass.:  Bergin and Garvey, 1987).

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