What ‘Hard Times’ Means: Mandated Curricula, Class-Privileged Assumptions, and the Lives of Poor Children

In this article, I present a qualitative analysis of third graders’ experiences with a unit from their district-mandated commercial reading curriculum in which the children made strong connections between a fictional account of a Depression-era farm family’s economic hardships and their own 21st century lives in a city with one of the highest childhood poverty rates in the United States. The language of the curriculum revealed class-privileged assumptions and an instrumental, competency-based approach to literacy that provided no official space for resonance between reader and text around the issue of poverty. Employing depth hermeneutics, a form of critical discourse analysis, I discuss analyses of three texts: the literature selection, the children’s written responses, and the teacher’s edition for that unit. Implications for research and practice include the importance of analyzing complex interactions between curriculum, policy, and the material realities of children’s lives; the need to hold commercial curricula accountable for recognizing and engaging the experiences of children living in poverty; and the academic and moral imperative to include the lived knowledge of students and the emotional dimensions of response in what counts as successful literacy engagement.