ABSTRACT
This Chapter centers on an ethnographic study that examines the educational experiences of students in a literacy course, who had participated in an alternative education system and then transitioned into a mainstream, traditional schooling experience. The author analyzes the ways students used the term “real world” as a means to characterize their two schooling experiences, where traditional pedagogical and curricular content constituted, through consensus and normalization, the “real world” or “reality.” The author then argues that student conception of the “real world” is connected to market-driven, neoliberal practices in education, demonstrates how this poses a challenge to educators, and makes suggestions for addressing these challenges in literacy-specific courses.
