ABSTRACT
With the passage of No Child Left Behind legislation, U.S. policymakers have reshaped school literacy curricula, reducing it to a single standard that homogenizes the multiple languages and literacies children bring to school and ignores the rapid changes in the meaning and use of technologies in a postmodern world. In New York City, these two cultural storylines collide in Stephanie Lukas's kindergarten classroom, located in a public school serving a bilingual community where 92 percent of the students qualify for free lunch. In this chapter, we draw on a yearlong ethnographic study of the mandated balanced literacy curriculum in this classroom to explore the literacies and identities children were expected to take up as they participated in reading and writing workshops. What mattered most to Lukas was offering her students access to high-status knowledge—for example, science discourse and multimedia technologies—and finding spaces for the children's knowledge, questions, and interests to shine through the official curriculum. This was evident in a nonfiction unit of study in which children worked with partners to become experts on wild animals and to write a nonfiction book with a mouse as well as a pen. Our analysis of two pairs of partners shows when the workshop structures allowed for peer-directed interaction, children were able to negotiate with one another and make room for literacies and identities that were important to them. These children remind us that teaching for social justice means interrupting discourses about “at-risk” children by offering curricular challenges and “room to move” within the mandated curriculum. There is more than one way to be literate, and creating hybrid curricular spaces is urgently needed so young children can begin to find their way in, through, and around the “shrink-to-fit” school literacy being thrust upon teachers and children alike.
