https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0407-0711
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ABSTRACT
In an age of increased accountability and high-stakes testing, educators continuously seek to locate quality reading intervention curricula intended to improve students’ reading performances. Yet, the basics-first emphasis commonly associated with reading intervention curricula may result in districts assigning reading intervention that helps students develop foundational literacy skills through interacting with materials that perpetuate oppressive ideologies. Relying on critical curriculum and critical race theories as an analytic lens, this critical content analysis examines the ways in which twenty books and accompanying lesson scripts in Level U of the Fountas and Pinnell Leveled Literacy intervention (F&P LLI), a widely used intervention curriculum, present racialized representations to students. Iterative layers of inductive coding reveal that 70% of fiction and 20% of nonfiction F&P LLI books present people of Colour as inferior, deviant, and helpless, while 30% of fiction and 100% of nonfiction F&P LLI books present Whites as heroic, determined, innovative, and successful. Implications for inservice teachers, including the importance of recognizing the hidden curriculum of reading intervention selections, are discussed.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Deani Thomas
Deani Thomas is a middle school special education teacher and doctoral student at Iowa State University whose current research investigates hidden curriculum in secondary contexts.
Jeanne Dyches
Dr. Jeanne Dyches, an assistant professor at Iowa State University, researches intersections between secondary literacy and social justice. Her current scholarship examines and problematizes the construct of and contradictions within culturally responsive literacy teaching and investigates applications of critical disciplinary literacies in secondary classrooms. Her work has been published in Journal of Literacy Research, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Journal of Teacher Education, and Harvard Educational Review.