Literacy disrupted: Re/scripting possibilities for critical curriculum change in Australian primary schools

Abstract

As top-down educational policies continue to dominate and shape pedagogic practices, this paper examines the reconceptualization of curriculum for disrupting literacy in Australian primary schools. It speaks to the pedagogic possibilities arising from change making to curriculum in the teaching and learning of literacy to provide an account of the problematic persistent pedagogic inequalities faced by children who have experience(d) issues of social, cultural, and economic disadvantage. Weaving storied vignettes of classroom practice throughout, we articulate how within the world of schooling, standardized pedagogic practices reinforce inequality and constrain opportunities for how some children learn to be literate. We draw on the process of currere to think with theory about how educators enact the enterprise of critical re-negotiation of curriculum. Central to this paper is recognition of the subjectivities of educators who work with children in classrooms who live between, within, and outside of the technicalities of ‘document-based’ curricular work as enacted in hegemonic literacy classroom routines, practice, and behaviours to articulate a pedagogy of possibility and of hope.