This post-qualitative research analyzes the spatialized practices of young people within a working-class community and how those guided the opening and facilitating of a local community center. Seeing place-making as a social and political act, the authors were inspired by Heath's classic study and argument that children's education might be…

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…

Drawing from a larger ethnographic study, this article engages post-structural theories of language and critical feminist theories of social class to examine two fourth-grade, White, working-poor girls' narratives about their urban neighbourhood in the United States. The author argues that young girls should be perceived as social theorists…

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…