Drawing on our documentation of transforming an informal learning centre (the Playhouse) in a multilingual, working-class neighbourhood, this paper presents significant and deliberate material-discursive changes at the Playhouse that produced unpredictable shifts in belongings among young children. More specifically, this paper entwines our…

Using Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1947/1964) phenomenological notion of the "threads of intentionality" that tie subject and object together meaningfully and Pierre Bourdieu's (1986, 2000; Bourdieu & Waquant, 1992) reflexive sociology and constructs of "habitus," "field," "capital," and "nomos," we theorize social class-sensitivity in literacy…

Drawing from a four-year critical ethnographic study of young girls and their literacy practices inside and outside school, this article foregrounds a lived pedagogical moment when conflicting discourses about reading instruction collided in a critically focused second-grade classroom. Through my analyses I make the argument that the pervasiveness…

This manuscript draws from a 4-year feminist ethnographic study of eight young girls and their caretakers in a high-poverty, predominantly White, urban community in the USA. Themes of mothers, mothering, and motherhood were dominant across 4 years of data generation and in this article I focus on the girls' and mothers' narratives to explore…

This essay describes a vision of social class-sensitive pedagogy aimed at disrupting endemic classism in schools. We argue persistent upward mobility discourses construct classist hierarchies in schools and classroom practice and are founded on misunderstandings of work, lived experiences of social class, and the broader social and economic…

Grounded in feminist notions of valuing lived experiences and constructing knowledge about the wider world from material realities, this article uses autobiographical narratives and poststructural and critical theories to argue for change in children's literature. The author presents two simultaneous streams of shifting, representations and…

This article draws from a three-year ethnographic study of girls and their mothers in a high-poverty, predominantly white community. Informed by critical and feminist theories of social class, I present four cases that highlight psychosocial tensions within the mother-daughter-teacher-researcher triangle and argue that white, middle-class female…