ABSTRACT
A special quality of the human environment is that it is suffused with the achievements of prior generations in reified form – that is, language, signs, symbols, physical tools, and so on. This chapter discusses carried out in the classroom of a New Zealand primary teacher who had been formally identified by a national body of teachers as having excellent practice in supporting literacy acquisition. It aims to examine students’ identities as literacy learners within the context of her pedagogy and the learning environment of her classroom. The two groups were identified as high or low literacy achievers by the teacher based on mid-year reporting and literacy assessments. There were four students in the higher achiever and three in the lower achiever group and both groups were of mixed gender, ability and ethnicity. The interviews used a method entitled ‘Talking Stones’, a pedagogic tool that addresses the challenge of engaging with a student’s perspective meaningfully.
