Pam Gilbert

Reading Positions and Practices in the Classroom

ABSTRACTThis article examines the classroom construction of “readings” in school literacy and literature programs. Reviewing contemporary theories and definitions of literacy, it argues for the cultural and historical specificity of reading and writing as families of social practices. School texts and classroom events construct selective traditions of particular versions and displays of reading. An agenda for the reconstruction of school reading as discourse critique is outlined.

Poststructuralist Theory and Classroom Talk

Poststructuralist theories, with their focus on subjectivity, discourse and the plurality of textual meaning, have had much to offer in research on classroom talk. The possibility that poststructuralism offers, of understanding meaning as produced within language rather than reflected by it, has moved language study and language research into a social and political domain. Questions of authority, of power relations, and of the discursive construction and control of knowledge, become legitimate fields of inquiry within a poststructuralist paradigm, and, for research on classroom talk, this has been an important and significant shift.

`New' Literacies for `New' Times? Shaping Literacy Curricula for the Post-Compulsory Years

This paper considers tensions associated with constructing literacy curricula for students in the post-compulsory years of schooling, where discourses of work, higher education and school accreditation jostle for prominence. Using an Australian state as example, the paper demonstrates how students are channelled towards different versions of English literacy in the senior secondary school, and how literacy curricula become complicit in the hierarchical sorting and streaming of young adult learners. Students seeking immediate post-school employment are offered a literacy program which emphasises practical, routine literacy skills and procedures, whereas students preparing for higher education entry are offered a curriculum which emphasises public, formal, theoretical analysis and imaginative and creative language play. The paper argues that post-compulsory students need access to a literacy repertoire that extends beyond such simple differentiation: a flexible and intelligent repertoire of literacy practices that prepares students for the changing and dynamic face of contemporary literate practice.