1. Buffy Hamilton
Focus Questions:
1. What is the history of literacy/reading instruction? What factors have
shaped how literature is taught and the literature curriculum? How have
those practices and curriculum changed or not changed over time?
2. How does this historical influence and how do current practices encourage
or discourage an inquiry stance/transactional approach to reading and
literature? What groups are privileged by the dominant contemporary
literature curriculum? What are the implications of these traditional practices
for creating a culture of lifelong readers?
*Please help me polish question 2---is it too broad? Should I break it into
more than question?*
Proposed Reading List
• Gere, Ann Ruggles. Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S.
Women's Clubs, 1880-1920.
• Sumara, Dennis. Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters:
Imagination, Interpretation, Insight.
• Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading.
• Literacy and Literacies : Texts, Power, and Identity.
by James Collins (Author), Richard Blot (Author), Judith Irvine (Editor),
Bambi Schieffelin (Editor)
Developing a new synthesis of literacy studies, this book explores the domain of power through
questions of colonialism, modern state formation, educational systems and official versus
popular literacies. James Collins and Richard Blot present a critical discussion of particular
cases and discuss the role of literacies in the formation of class, gender, and ethnic identity.
• Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives.
Literacy in American Lives traces the changing conditions of literacy learning over the past
century as they were felt in the lives of ordinary Americans born between 1895 and 1985. The
book demonstrates what sharply rising standards for literacy have meant to successive
generations of Americans and how--as students, workers, parents, and citizens--they have
responded to rapid changes in the meaning and methods of literacy learning in their society.
Drawing on more than 80 life histories of Americans from all walks of life, the book addresses
critical questions facing public education at the start of the twenty-first century.
• Appleyard, J.A. Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from
Childhood to Adulthood
• Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History
• Scholes, Robert. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English As a
Discipline

2. Buffy Hamilton
• Applebee, Arthur. Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A
History.
• Yagelski, Robert P. Literacy Matters: Writing and Reading the Social Self
(Language and Literacy Series (Teachers College Pr)(Paper)
• Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation .