Reconstructing Literacies Beyond the Page: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Elementary Literacy in the Context of a State-Level Early Reading Policy

Yerkes, Emily

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Reconstructing Literacies Beyond the Page: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Elementary Literacy in the Context of a State-Level Early Reading Policy Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/6q182n004

Abstract

In response to a proliferation of early literacy policy interventions and heightened and divisive rhetoric around an often-misunderstood concept referred to as the science of reading, this study interrogates the discourse surrounding a state-level early literacy policy within three distinct realms: the macropolitical, the local media, and the elementary classroom. Drawing on critical poststructural theories of discourse that recognize how language shapes and is shaped by relations of power in society, this analysis unearths the ways that language use in each of these areas constructs literacy, literacy instruction, teachers, and students. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the primary methodological and theoretical tool, this study applied a CDA protocol based largely on Fairclough’s approach with an additional productively disruptive lens derived from queer theoretical commitments to examine texts produced within the macropolitical, local media, and elementary classroom spaces. Findings point to discursive formations that privilege functionalist views of literacy imbued with neoliberal beliefs about education reform that limit what counts as literacy, who is defined as literate, as well as who is capable of teaching literacy to children. While much of the analysis demonstrates repetitions of neoliberal technocratic views of literacy and literacy instruction that focus almost entirely on reading print to the exclusion of other forms of literate ways of knowing and being, analytical moves inspired by Foucauldian conceptions of power and discipline, queer theory’s refusal of limits, and moment-to-moment understandings of individual communication provide reason for hope. Analysis of conversations at the elementary classroom level suggest ways of thinking differently about teacher identity in relation to teaching and learning in spaces of restrictive policy enactments, as well as possibilities for performing resistant literacy practices as an intervention to reconstruct more liberatory and expansive discourses that celebrate literate lives beyond the page.

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