Critical literacies in the making: Social class and identities in the early reading classroom

Abstract

Drawing from a four-year critical ethnographic study of young girls and their literacy practices inside and outside school, this article foregrounds a lived pedagogical moment when conflicting discourses about reading instruction collided in a critically focused second-grade classroom. Through my analyses I make the argument that the pervasiveness of autobiographical connection-making with texts in early reading instruction positions readers to align themselves with the practices and ideological stances of texts rather than to challenge and critique them. This argument will be extended to consider particular literacy-infused experiences of students who are persistently marginalized in society and written out of existence by mainstream children’s literature produced for early readers that sees class-privileged lives as normal. In the conclusion, I suggest that although the Four Resources Model (Freebody and Luke, 1990; Luke and Freebody, 1999) offers four families of practices ‘necessary for literacy in new conditions, but none in and of itself is sufficient for literate citizens or subjects’ (Luke and Freebody, 1999, p.4), the model needs extending to consider issues relating to how marginalized readers may need to feel a sense of entitlement in order to position themselves as text analysts before they can begin challenging and questioning mainstream texts that consistently position their working-class lives as non-existent.