ABSTRACT
In this chapter I focus on a group of children in a classroom and the work of one teacher, Sally Bean, who taught in a class of 6–7-year-old children, in an infant school in the North of England. The school was situated on the outskirts of a town with a history of coal mining and farming. The study was ethnographic, and took place over a two year period (2005–7). I collected a wide range of data: interviews with Sally drawing on her own research notes as she reflected on her practice, my own fieldnotes, and photographs, building up a linguistic ethnography. Using this data, I developed a dense and many layered picture of the context of Sally's work, the way she enacted her beliefs and dispositions in the classroom and how the children responded to her work. I attempt to trace the enactment of her pedagogic habitus (see Grenfell 1996 and this volume) in the context of an initiative to promote creativity in the classroom. I focused on literacy events and practices, with a particular interest (mine) in the children's multimodal text-making, and seeing this process of textmaking as being ideologically situated (Grenfell Chapter 4 this volume; Pahl 2007; Street, this volume).
