Sesta, Jenny (2024) Literacy Disrupted: A Critical Autoethnographic Inquiry into Teaching and Learning in the Primary School Classroom. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

Top-down educational policies and pedagogic practices continue to dominate early literacy learning in primary school education. The increase in standardised approaches have amplified concerns of many teachers around the limitations placed on children by the curriculum. In this thesis, I think of the ways in which children’s literate identities become constructed in the domain of primary schooling that are increasingly territorialised by neoliberal priorities and accountability measures. I seek to investigate how hegemonic notions of early literacy approaches operate in and through the daily classroom routines practice and behaviours; most significantly how pressures to standardise and measure children's learning results in marginalising children from low socioeconomic and culturally and linguistically diverse communities. To address these persistent pedagogic inequalities, I use a qualitative critical autoethnographic approach that puts postfoundational theories and concepts to work. As such, this thesis is (re)presented as critical, performative, layered texts of reflective practice. These are threaded with postfoundational approaches that draw on posthumanist ideas, affect theories and agential realism, which it is argued, enable a critical examination of issues of social justice and expand our readings of literacy classroom life. In order to achieve this, insights are generated through an analytical focus on one child, Grace and her experiences of being in a low ability group, to understand how issues of inequities are produced in the everyday human, non-human and more than human learning worlds we inhabit. By challenging the hegemony of early literacy instruction in institutional domains, this thesis will examine entangled relations that emerge in early literacy learning that are implicated in issues of inequality that have become obscured in the neoliberally configured classroom world. A significant claim argued throughout this thesis is that the use of less examined theories and concepts from the postfoundational world of ideas can open us to more expansive ways we can understand everyday classroom life. An emphasis on generating alternative narratives to reimagine literacy pedagogy in order to create more socially just spaces for children to learn, thus becomes an ethical endeavour.

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