Featured DALN Literacy Narrative Series: 3 Narratives To Kick Off the Series!

The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives features over 2,400 unique stories about reading, writing, and composing all around the world.  The narratives are publicly available and searchable through the DALN web site, but we look forward to sharing some of these literacy narratives with you through our blog as well!

If you enjoy these stories, we invite you to

• --Visit the original narratives at the DALN to view their full information --records and any supplemental files.  We've included links to each individual narrative below, but the DALN is also fully searchable by keyword, title, author name, etc.
• --Share these narratives with a friend by sending them the link or sharing the link via social media, and
• --Get inspired to share a narrative of your own or help someone else share their narrative!

In the future we plan to feature narratives one at a time, but to give a small taste of the DALN's diversity of narrators and stories, our kickoff post in the Featured Narratives series includes three narratives!

Featured Narrative #1: Yusuf's "Everyone Has a Gift," recorded in 2009, was the 539th narrative submitted to the DALN!  Yusuf describes the story as being "about my life and change I need for my country, Somalia."

Featured Narrative #2: Kevin DePew's "Being labeled a bad writer has made me a better instructor" was also submitted in 2009 and was the 231st narrative submitted to the DALN.  Kevin submitted the following keywords with his DALN narrative: teaching writing, bad writer, inventing the University, high school, Track and field, and CCCC2009.  The last keyword refers to the narrative's collection location at the 2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Featured Narrative #3: Many of the DALN's stories are video or audio narratives, but the DALN also welcomes text narratives!  Gwyn Casey's "Childhood & Literacy," the 288th submission to the DALN, was submitted as a Microsoft Word .DOC file:

"My literacy story begins with some of my earliest childhood memories.  When I think about it, I hear my grandpa’s black Dodge pull around to the back of the rented building where we lived. Unknowingly, as a child, I thought it was normal for everyone to overlook the Mill Creek Valley and smell the stench of industrial waste.  However, my family was lucky.  We had a car, a roof over our heads, and plenty of food on the table.  My mother worked, my father worked, and my grandfather worked—close to home and within walking distance of our house: Kroger’s on State Avenue and Hutchinson Brothers Sporting Goods on Eighth Street.  That left me at home with my grandmother, a woman who sewed baseball gloves to support herself and her three boys after her husband died suddenly of a heart attack.  So the man I mention above as my grandfather was not really my grandfather but my grandmother’s second husband, but you wouldn’t know it.  The man was my best friend and protector.  I credit him for my interest in reading because, daily, he always brought home the newspaper.  Being the inquisitive child that I was (which probably means I was a pain in the butt), I would insist that I sit on my grandfather’s lap, sip the foam off his beer, and read the newspaper.  Some where along the way, probably because I outgrew his lap, he gave me a pencil and taught me to circle all of the letter “O” that I could find within the section of the newspaper which he had finished reading.  He was proud that I could find so many, and that is the beginning of my literacy story."

Feeling inspired by these narratives? Learn more about recording your own literacy narrative or facilitating a narrative collection event in our DALN Resources section at http://daln.osu.edu/!