First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1996. Gender, Literacy, Curriculum is a major contribution to research and theory in literacy and curriculum studies. Alison Lee looks at how the texts and discourses of schooling construct 'geography' as a curriculum field, and how this construction is tied closely with students' gendered identities and practices in the classroom. She brings together discourse analyses of research texts, textbooks, classroom talk, students' and teachers' accounts, with a detailed linguistic analysis of students' written work. This title is of particular interest to those working in literacy education and curriculum, discourse analysis and applied linguistics, feminisms and critical pedagogies.

Until now, there has been no systematic analysis or review of the research on gender and literacy. With all the media attention and research surveys surrounding gender bias and the inequities that continue to flourish in education, a synthesis of the research studies was needed to raise awareness of gender issues in learning and literacy, to provide successful interventions and recommendations to educators, and to point out the direction for future inquiries by examining the unanswered questions of the existing research. For the convenience of readers, the studies are organized by genre: gender and discussion, reading, writing, electronic text, and literacy autobiography. Published by International Reading Association

Why are girls outperforming boys in literacy skills in the Western education system today? To date, there have been few attempts to answer this question. Literacy and Gender sets out to redress this state of affairs by re-examining the social organization of literacy in primary schools. In studying schooling as a social process, this book focuses on the links between literacy, gender and attainment, the role school plays in producing social difference and the changing pattern of interest in this topic both within the feminist community and beyond. Gemma Moss argues that the reason for girls’ relative success in literacy lies in the structure of schooling and in particular the role the reading curriculum plays in constructing a hierarchy of learners in class. Using fine-grained ethnographic analysis of reading in context, this book outlines methods for researching literacy as a social practice and understanding how different versions of what counts as literacy can be created in the same site.

African American Women’s Language: Discourse, Education, and Identity is a groundbreaking collection of research on African American Women’s Language that is long overdue. It brings together a range of research including variationist, autoethnography, phenomenological, ethnographic, and critical. The authors come from a variety of disciplines (e.g., Sociology, African American Studies, Africana Studies, Linguistics, Sociophonetics, Sociolinguistics, Anthropology, Literacy, Education, English, Ecological Literature, Film, Hip Hop, Language Variation), scientific paradigms (e.g., critical race theory, narrative, interaction, discursive, variationist, post-structural, and post-positive perspectives), and inquiry methods (e.g., quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic, and multimethod) while addressing a variety of African American female populations (e.g., elementary school, middle school, adults) and activity settings (e.g., classrooms, family, community, church, film). Readers will get a good sense of the language, discourse, identity, community, and grammar of African American women. The essays provide the most current research on African American Women’s Language and expand a literature that has too often only focused on male populations at the expense of letting the sistas speak.

In this groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary book, Rebecca Rogers explores the complexity of family literacy practices through an in-depth case study of one family, the attendant issues of power and identity, and contemporary social debates about the connections between literacy and society. The study focuses on June Treader and her daughter Vicky, urban African Americans labeled as "low income" and "low literate." Using participant-observation, ethnographic interviewing, photography, document collection, and discourse analysis, Rogers describes and explains the complexities of identity, power, and discursive practices that June and Vicky engage with in their daily life as they proficiently, critically, and strategically negotiate language and literacy in their home and community. She explores why, despite their proficiencies, neither June or Vicky sees themselves as literate, and how this and other contradictions prevent them from transforming their literate capital into social profit. This study contributes in multiple ways to extending both theoretically and empirically existing research on literacy, identity, and power: * Critical discourse analysis. The analytic technique of critical discourse analysis is brought into the area of family literacy. The detailed explanation, interpretation, and demonstration of critical discourse analysis will be extremely helpful for novices learning to use this technique. This is a timely book, for there are few ethnographic studies exploring the usefulness and limits of critical discourse analysis. * Combines critical discourse analysis and ethnography. This new synthesis, which is thoroughly illustrated, offers an explanatory framework for the stronghold of institutional discursive power. Using critical discourse analysis as a methodological tool in order to build critical language awareness in classrooms and schools, educators working toward a critical social democracy may be better armed to recognize sources of inequity. * Researcher reflexivity. Unlike most critical discourse analyses, throughout the book the researcher and analyst is clearly visible and complicated into the role of power and language. This practice allows clearer analysis of the ethical, moral, and theoretical implications in conducting ethnographic research concerned with issues of power. * A critical perspective on family literacy. Many discussions of family literacy do not acknowledge the raced, classed, and gendered nature of interacting with texts that constitutes a family's literacy practices. This book makes clear how the power relationships that are acquired as children and adults interact with literacy in the many domains of a family's literacy lives. A Critical Discourse Analysis of Family Literacy Practices: Power In and Out of Print will interest researchers and practitioners in the fields of qualitative methodology, discourse analysis, critical discourse studies, literacy education, and adult literacy, and is highly relevant as a text for courses in these areas.