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Reading Lives:
Working Class Children and Literacy Learning
Deborah Hicks
Foreword by Jane Miller
Language & Literacy
Pub Date: November 2001, 192 pages
Paperback: $22.95, ISBN: 0807741493
Cloth: $49.00, ISBN: 0807741507
 
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"A big question drives this intriguing book: How do we get to the lived complexity of literacy and schooling? Full of heart, theoretically sophisticated, Reading Lives, finally, is a book about perception-an attempt to change the way we see. I know of no other new book quite like it."
—Mike Rose, Professor, UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, author of Lives on the Boundary and Possible Lives"A beautiful, brilliant, sensitive and profound exploration of literacy and class. Deborah Hicks takes us into classrooms and homes with working class children as they struggle not only to learn to read but with the kind of subjectivity that literacy appears simultaneously to hold out to and refuse them. A crucial text for anyone interested in critical literacy and childhood today."
—Valerie Walkerdine, Foundation Professor of Critical Psychology, University of Western Sydney While not shying away from the potent obstacles and dislocating challenges experienced by all children restricted by social class, this text lends a measure of hope, humor, and practical insight to the work of teaching literacy to white children with blue-collar families. Deborah Hicks sets her long-term study of two working-class children alongside her own story of growing up in the rural Southeast of the United States. She also includes the early reading experiences of other writers, such as Mike Rose, Annie Ernaux, and Janet Frame, to show how the class-specific language practices of "Laurie" and "Jake" put them at a tremendous disadvantage as they encounter "middle-class ways of talking, acting, and valuing." By exploring their successes and challenges, the book reveals how children's lived experience influences who they come to be and how they come to know in relation to reading practices. The result is a powerful book that will guide readers to move closer to the intersection of "feeling" and "knowing" in their critical role as teachers. |
