What do we mean by literacy?
Photo by Ewa Rozkosz on Foter.com / CC BY-SA Literacy is an umbrella term. But as broad as it may be, this very breadth seems to run counter to the needs for specificity and objectivity that being literate demands (Perry, 2012). An analogy may therefore serve us effectively in drawing depth from something that seems too broad (McDaniel & Donnelly, 1996). My stroke of insight came after I reread in Wolf (2007, p. 16) that “[the associative dimension] is part of the generative quality at the heart of reading.” What then could be more generative in terms of analogous concepts than the generation of life itself? If reading and writing are historically considered the core ideas for literacy (Elmborg, 2012) than pregnancy and delivery could equate to the apprenticeship stage and the final coming of age in whatever modality of literacy one might choose – or be forced - to invest. If bearing a baby is hard for some, as becoming literate may indeed be, for other