Submitting, resisting, and getting by: literacy and ideology in a remedial reading program

Abstract

Our current political moment has raised critical questions surrounding the efficacy of public education to deliver on its promise of social uplift. This ethnographic case study utilizes Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology--which insists that the way to dismantle systemic injustice is first to recognize its imprint on our everyday actions--to examine the material practices of two high school remedial reading classes. Findings indicate the negative impact of an ‘autonomous model’ (Street, 1984) of literacy on students’ own literate activities, as well as their multiple methods of engaging with this literacy ideology. Ultimately, this analysis urges more consideration of the (literacy) ideologies at work in public education today, and suggests that efforts at the curricular level to equalize educational outcomes may be prone to fail if larger ideological questions remain unexplored.

Keywords:

• Literacy
• critical theory
• youth resistance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names of participants, places, and district-specific assessments are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica E. Masterson

Jessica E. Masterson (she/her) is an assistant professor of teaching and learning at Washington State University Vancouver, where her work concerns the critical intersections of literacies, language, and democratic education.