Dismantling Carceral Logics in the Early Literacy Classroom: Toward Liberatory Literacy Education With/for Multiply Marginalized Young Children

• In Event: Repositioning Criticality in the Writing and Literacies Classroom

Abstract

Early literacy education can be a site for joyful and critical learning. However, schooled early literacy is imbued with carceral logics, criminalizing young children along the lines of race, language, and ability. We argue that routine elements of early literacy assessment, curriculum, and instruction are harmful to young multiply-marginalized children, because they are (1) constructed through a dominant white gaze that utilizes language and ability to position some literacy practices as “normal” and all others as deviant; and (2) enforced through surveillance, classification, exclusion. Liberatory early literacy education must center multiply-marginalized children in conceptualizing what counts as literacy and how those literacies are expressed and perceived.

Authors

• Margaret R. Beneke, University of Washington

• Emily Machado, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Jordan Taitingfong, University of Washington - Seattle