Discipline and Play with/in a Mandated Literacy Curriculum

In this article, the authors explore a young child’s lived experience of discipline and play with/in a mandated balanced literacy curriculum. Mandating balanced literacy presents an interesting case of disciplining literacy because it is rooted in the progressive tradition of meaning-and-process pedagogies. As such, it avoids the most obvious forms of regulation and control found in scripted lessons, yet imposes particular meanings of literacy, teaching, and learning on teachers and children. Drawing on data from a year-long inquiry of one kindergarten classroom, the authors demonstrate how the mandated curriculum disciplined Hector and his teacher but also how they played with/in this curriculum. The slash between serves to highlight the fact that Hector never escaped the limits of the mandated curriculum. Sometimes he was the curriculum, so fully disciplined by it that he sought out recognition as a successful reader and writer. Other times, he played within the spaces made available by independent reading and writing time. In these cases, he untethered school literacy from its individualistic and monomodal roots, but his play remained the bounds of the curricular routines. The fluency with which Hector shifted from a writer at play to a student at work points to the complexities of policy mandates and their enactment in classrooms. (210 words)