Reading Lives: Working-Class Children and Literacy Learning

by Deborah Hicks

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, humour, 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.

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Deborah Hicks was raised in North Carolina, in a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Educated in public schools, she later earned a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has been a teacher and writer for over two decades, focusing on the lives of children in poor and working-class America. The author of two previous books about literacy education, including Reading Lives, she has written for magazines such as The Progressive and DoubleTake/Point of Entry and for education journals. Deborah is the founding director of PAGE, a partnership supporting educational opportunity for girls and young women in Appalachia. She lives in Chapel Hill and, for part of each year, in Spring Creek – a rural mountain community in Madison County, North Carolina.

Reviews

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-read for anyone looking to teach grade school. The author follows two young working-class children through their kindergarten to second grade careers. Utilizing home visits, a vast amount of research, her own discourses of learned environments, and the children themselves, she comes to understand how current plug-and-play educational expectations are leaving a vast majority of our students, especially working-class demographics, in the dust.

As far as research reading goes, this is exceptionally accessible for all teachers and highly readable. My only complaint is that it is lacking a larger pool of children. I would curious to see if she had replicated these research studies with more children, following the same three years, repetitively. Watching this research develop could be very encouraging and useful.