" Transformative College Literacy of Literate Black Women Peer Counselors" by Robin Wisniewski

The article by Robin Wisniewski started off discussing the importance of literacy in black woman from a quote from a third semester which basically says that literacy is your agent of change and influence because without it you are ignorant and in ignorance you can't cause change. If you are knowledgeable about what's going on around you in the world, then you can't change it and that is why it's important to be literate. The author then goes on to discuss the peer counseling program which "provides literacy support for college students with disabilities." ( 70 Wisniewski) She discusses the growth of the program and analyzes how much it helped the students as well as her and the peer counselors and introduces her own journey.

What stood out to me was when she discusses the process of schema construction that is the construction of your own knowledge based off of what you know and what someone else teaches you. This was interesting to me because I had learned about the construction of knowledge in ADW and this is exactly what happens when you go to college. You take everything you know, challenge it with what you are being taught and find what is real and what isn't thus controlling your own literacy.

Construction of knowledge is especially important in contributing to your own personal literacy because your literacy is yours and you solely are responsible for it. Meaning that you can’t just accept anything that someone tells you is truth or knowledge but you having the right, for you literacy’s sake, to examine and research and determine on your own whether or not the information is valuable or necessary. As Wisniewski further discusses construction of knowledge she talks about the classroom being a democratic setting and everyone contributing but even then, don’t just rely on others for your literacy.