ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on discourse analysis of selected narratives from the Catholic revisions of the Gray's Dick and Jane textbooks for first graders. It begins with an exploration of the complex relationships between literacy, textbooks, and religiously based reading practices. The relationship between literacy, education and religion is a historically longstanding one that predates the Reformation. The installation of explicitly religious content in revisions of the modern reading textbook by American Catholic educators thus marked a reframing of the longstanding explicit relationship between religious practice and the teaching of reading. In the era of instructional commoditisation, the adoption of a reading series entails the implementation of a regime of instructional practice and the acceptance, however tacit, of a dual theorisation of reading and of reading pedagogy. The possibility of state mollification of religious and political controversy over textbook content lay in the production of a modern "neutral" discourse of curriculum and instruction.
