One negative sponsor can ruin years of positive experiences with literacy. Deborah Brandt, an English professor, writes about the way sponsors can filter literacy from learners. She states, “Sponsors…enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy- and gain advantage by it in some way.” In other words, Brandt believes that people expose others to literacy to benefit themselves. Austin Scaglione, a college student, was exposed to a bad sponsor in high school. He was an avid reader growing up, then Mrs. Lofromento changed his perspective. “For the 42 minutes I was in that class not a single thing was taught to me,” he writes. Scaglione loved to read, then he stopped because his teacher wasn’t trying to teach him anything, so he lost momentum. This is an example of a student losing interest in literacy because it wasn’t taught well.

Sponsors don’t always have student/learner engagement in mind. Brandt knows that sponsors typically have alternative motives when they teach. She says, “people throughout history have acquired literacy pragmatically under the banner of others’ causes.” This means that sponsors aren’t really teaching to educate all the time. Dustin Tripp is a college student that was bored by the reading material in his fourth grade class, even though he used to love reading. “Not only was I uninterested in the books that were assigned to read, I didn’t like having to read a certain number of pages each night.” Had Tripp been able to relate to the book, or even choose his own book, he would’ve gotten more from the class.