ABSTRACT
Wood-Kofonow and Meyer present us with the idea that literacy experiences in school may be joyful or they may inflict a host of different kinds of wounds upon our children. In this extension we present two children’s experiences, one as evidence of wounding and the other as an instance of joy. Wood-Kofonow and Meyer suggest that there “are wounds of: creativity, compliance, rebellion, numbness, underestimation, perfectionism, the average, isolation, inattentiveness to home learning, language and culture, and wounds of disregarding technology in the world outside of school” (p. 98). They also suggest that the potential for joy is strong and present within every child and every classroom. Sadly, at this point in time, we believe that certain practices often enacted to supposedly help young children, such as labeling them based on something viewed as a deficiency, are often more of a source of wounds than a vehicle for providing support and help. As former elementary classroom teachers who are now teacher educators, we see the current assessment atmosphere in particular as one that consistently inflicts many of the wounds Wood-Kofonow and Meyer describe. There is a more robust and complex theory of reading that can be a source of joyful work in school and that theory is articulated in many of the chapters of this volume (see Goodman and Goodman, Chapter 9 and Cambourne, Chapter 2). We are committed to helping teachers and teacher educators work to reclaim spaces that validate the sociocultural knowledge, strengths, and interests of children.
