“WE LOST THE PLADO”: Tracing privileged school literacies in one kindergarten classroom

Abstract

Drawing from a network case study, this article traces enactments of a letter writing enquiry in one Kindergarten public school classroom in New York City, and in doing so, explores both the affordances and limitations of sociomaterial approaches employed by the researcher towards school literacies. Looking down at one morning meeting revealed rotting pumpkins, playdough, pocket charts and cheese sandwiches, doing the work of environmental nonprofits, DOE officials, and cafeteria staff, all becoming entangled with the teacher and students in solving the problem of food waste at lunch, and ultimately to students writing letters to their school administrators. Yet, in looking out from this same data, I reconsider how the curriculum was not only constituted by networks of circulating materials, but also by networks circulating students' bodies into unequal school spaces, fuelling changes in the school’s enrolment and funding through neighbourhood gentrification. I propose ways in which sociomaterial accounts of literacy curriculums may contribute bridgework along with accounting for structural inequalities mobilized in and through schools.

Theorizing Literacies as Affective Flows: Attuning to the Otherwise Possibilities of Hip-Hop's “In-the-Red Frequencies”

“…To move away from conceptualizations of literacies that are human-centric, some literacy scholars take up actor–network theory (Latour, 1996) to demonstrate the ways objects, as agentive matter, become networked actants with/in literacy practices (Brandt & Clinton, 2002; Leander et al, 2010). Less attention, however, has been given to how racialized histories and ideologies (whiteness in particular) function as actants, moving through official literacy curriculum (Ferguson, 2021).…”

Scoping the field of literacy research: how might a range of research be valuable to primary teachers?

“…And there are many classroom practices, both institutionalised and serendipitous, that help to construct literacy in ways that do not necessarily reflect teachers' espoused beliefs (e.g. see Ferguson, 2021). Engaging with a wide range of literacy research may therefore provide an important starting point for critical reflection or review of the range of assumptions that underpin current practice.…”

Reorienting curriculum materials as agents of restorative justice in early literacy classrooms

“…Recent calls in the USA to return to prescriptive curricular programs are no different in how they promote a narrow conception of both literacy (e.g. as simply decoding and comprehension) and literacy curriculum, reducing the curriculum here to a passive object of knowledge or program, rather than a set of dynamic relations among students, teachers, materials, and outside actors (Ferguson, 2021). However, we view newly adopted curricular laws that embolden parental objection to curriculum materials—be it for their diversity or their alleged misalignment to “science”—as a disorienting force (Ahmed, 2006) among those relations, one that is capable of disenfranchising marginalized students and teachers by (re)orienting the curriculum around white comfort.…”