Literacy in the Library: Negotiating the Spaces Between Order and Desire

(Hardback)

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This critical ethnography of school libraries contributes to the study of the politics of literacy at the elementary school level as well as provides an interesting case study of border crossing. The book interrogates two accounts of social reproduction and proposes a third. Students at working-poor Chavez Elementary resisted attempts to get them hooked on reading fiction, but while many were socialized to the labor of a piecework economy, many also found ways to use texts as they chose. At professional-managerial Crest Hills, students managed their discourse practices in ways that reproduced those of their office workplace, but their success was achieved at the expense of great anxiety about the future. At working-class Roosevelt, the librarians attended to the rhetoric of librarianship, but students reassembled knowledge on their own terms. A second project theorizes the school library as a geopolitical space, and critiques children's fiction and the social order that its texts help construct through a semiotic analysis of text classification within school libraries. An investigation of the origins of that system and of the ways of reading that it promoteswith particular attention to the history of the popular noveldescribes the gender- and class-based politics of leisure reading.

Reviews

Dressman provided a thought-provoking account of three elementary school libraries, their librarians and children's responses to the literacy programs in each.-The Australian Library Journal
This work...contributes to the studies of the effects of cultural and geographic space concepts upon the school library. It will appeal to the theorists in literacy studies and possibly to the doctoral student searching the literature in this field. It...is recommended for libraries with strong literacy curriculms and library science collections.-Reference & User Services Quarterly
"Dressman provided a thought-provoking account of three elementary school libraries, their librarians and children's responses to the literacy programs in each."-The Australian Library Journal
"This work...contributes to the studies of the effects of cultural and geographic space concepts upon the school library. It will appeal to the theorists in literacy studies and possibly to the doctoral student searching the literature in this field. It...is recommended for libraries with strong literacy curriculms and library science collections."-Reference & User Services Quarterly

Author Bio

MARK DRESSMAN is Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Houston. He was a teacher in Morocco with the Peace Corps, on the Navajo Indian Reservation, and in Cincinnati for over ten years. He is author of several recent journal articles.