Thesis

Social justice and learner identities in ability-grouped reading in primary school

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Awarding institution
  • University of Strathclyde
Date of award
  • 2023
Thesis identifier
  • T16665
Person Identifier (Local)
  • 201888551
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Department, School or Faculty
Abstract
  • This thesis explores the practice of ability-grouped reading, often termed guided reading, from children’s perspectives and through a Bourdieusian lens of social justice. Guided reading has been a common feature of UK primary classrooms since the 1990s, following education reforms that repositioned literacy as a key driver of wealth production in neoliberal knowledge economies. With this study I reclaim and reopen a critical debate about ability- grouped reading that has been remarkably quiet since the inception of guided reading. The thesis is based on an ethnographic study of children learning in such hierarchical reading groups and then in alternative mixed-attainment reading contexts. The ethnography took place over 18 months in three Scottish primary classrooms, across two schools. The children were aged between 6 and 9 years old. By attending to posture, gesture and gaze as closely as to words and the prosody of those words, the study presents unique insights into how reader identities are shaped by ability- grouped and mixed-attainment reading. Ability-grouped reading was found to reinforce hierarchies that pervade the classroom and to discriminate against those who were allocated to the commonly termed ‘bottom reading group’. Children were agentic in accommodating, resisting, perpetuating and at times transforming those hierarchies. How social class comes to matter in this process is a central aspect of the thesis. The thesis ends with a provocation: how might literacy pedagogy change if the iterative disruption of constraining hierarchies, wherever and whenever they are witnessed, became the moral compass of pedagogical change. This requires a strong commitment to social justice, a turn away from policy-driven initiatives and a turn towards deep listening to children’s experience.
Advisor / supervisor
  • Thériault, Virginie
  • Taylor, Yvette, 1978-
Resource Type
Note
  • Previously held under moratorium from 1 August 2023 until 1 August 2025.
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