ABSTRACT
Historical events, policies and practices shape personal experiences of literacy learning and are embodied in ways of thinking, valuing, conversing and doing. This chapter takes a historical perspective to understanding how curriculum is enacted and experienced, using an autoethnographic approach to examine how policy, practice and personal experiences are intertwined. It draws on Bourdieu’s concept of field, cultural capital and habitus to trace the changing fields of Singapore’s literacy landscape, particularly reading, from the 1980s till 2019, and the interplay between familial and institutional habitus in cultivating dispositions of engaged English literacy as valued cultural capital.
