Akeelah and the Bee was an uplifting and inspiring movie about an 11-year-old girl who beat the odds and won a national spelling bee. Akeelah lives in an inner-city community of Los Angeles, a domain (Barton 2007) where academics-and spelling bees, are looked down on. However, Akeelah was determined to work hard and shed the reputation that had been placed on her and her community. Akeelah-once an underdog ended up becoming a sensation on news outlets and in society and was seen as the change the community needed.

This movie has literacy themes around every corner. Firstly, the actual spelling bee competition itself represents a literacy event as is it a social event where people engage with and observe literacy (Barton 2007). The physical act of spelling words, which Akeelah does while tapping her leg and pretending to jump rope is a literacy practice (Barton 2007). Akeelah’s community is quite poor, and she explains that her school can barely pay for dodgeballs, so there is no way they can offer language classes such as Latin, a course that would benefit her spelling abilities greatly. Most children in the film are from high socio-economic communities and households and are visibly provided with strong literacy sponsors such as school and parents (Brandt 2003). Akeelah however, is not granted access to the same type of sponsorship. Her mother is a single mom who works long shifts at a hospital and doesn’t have time to help Akeelah with literacy skills.

This movie helps its audience become aware of much of the disparity between communities, and how this impacts literacy skills. This movie highlights a skills view of literacy (Barton 2007), which places importance on traditional literacies. However, being aware that while having traditional literacy skills are important, facilitating a social view of literacy into a classroom is vital as well (Barton 2007). By doing so, we are honoring our student’s literacy-in-persons, which is a theory developed by Johnson (2009) which states that we all have individual and unique literacy skills that deserve to be celebrated and validated.