My Literacy History

Headshot: Gary Gold

Hello everyone! I'm Kyra Pitts, a senior here at New Jersey City University pursuing my Bachelor of Fine Arts, with a major in Dance in collaboration with the Joffrey Ballet School in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. As you can probably tell from my major, my primary passion is dance, complemented by other art-based hobbies like knitting, drawing, and photography. Balancing both my college education and my job as a professional dancer with the Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company, my life is a rather busy one. However, I was interested in taking this Contemporary Literacies class as I enjoy looking critically at the world around us, especially through a lens of media and literacy. Understanding and analyzing the culture in which we exist is crucial for navigating the modern day.

Coming from a white middle-class background, literacy became a part of my life at a fairly average age. While not initially interested in reading or writing before preschool, my curiosity grew rapidly during my early years of structured education. In the beginning, I would "pretend" to read tracing my finger along each line of text in a book speaking absolute gibberish. But once I was in elementary school and my knowledge of the alphabet was applied programs like "book-in-a-bag" used in my kindergarten and first-grade classes, allowed me to choose books according to my reading level and interest to practice reading at home, this played a significant role in my early literacy. My parents greatly supported my literacy journey during this time. Embracing phonics, the sound-spelling method, further fueled my passion for learning new words daily, outside of school (and made me feel quite excited to share my knowledge of these new words I had learned on my own). Writing came naturally by early 1st grade, and by 2nd grade, I felt confident in my reading abilities. My literacy improved year after year, each year feeling more confident than the one before. 

In middle school, I was placed in "advanced" classes, surrounding myself with strongly literate peers that further enhanced my literacy skills. This period also marked my discovery of a visual and audible approach to reading, incorporating audiobooks alongside physical books to boost comprehension. Then, transitioning to online high school while pursuing dance training in New York City exposed me to eloquent and highly literate individuals over the age of 20 in my dance school. Striving to match their level of literacy, my word choice strengthened during my high school years. A significant source of inspiration for my literacy development was the artistic director of the pre-professional training program at Joffrey Ballet School. After graduating last spring, my continued motivation to enhance my literacy comes mostly from reading articles, driven by my natural inclination to always learn and absorb new information. Ultimately having an unconventional education path and choosing a career that is not typical, I already analyze the world we live in and I feel that this class will help me take an even deeper look and approach.