ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on a micro-ethnographic study conducted in a second grade classroom of a rural primary school in North India. It describes and analyzes the means through which children appropriate literacy; the purpose that drove their development as writers; and the ways in which, as they enacted their purposes in this context, they grew as persons or were empowered. The term appropriation is used in this context to mean “making one’s own.” To appropriate literacy is to add to one’s symbolic repertoire aiding one in interpretive, constructive, creative interaction with the world and others in it. Appropriation is also used in the Marxian sense of appropriating a power-commodity or a set of practices controlled by dominant classes or cultures.
