Resistance, conformity, reconstructed subjectivity: Reading three school libraries.

摘要

This study examines third-grade students' patterns of response to implicit and explicit messages about the value and function of literacy in their lives, as they are encoded in the organization of three school libraries and their texts, and in the practices of the students' teachers and of school librarians. Data were collected over a four-month period in three schools that represent a broad ethnic and socioeconomic cross-section of a major southwestern city. Methods of investigation included participant observation, individual and focus-group interviews of students, formal and informal interviews of teachers and librarians, and Likert-scale questionnaires. An extensive semiotic analysis of each school library and an historical investigation of school librarianship as a profession were also conducted, to examine the significance and origins of the dichotomization of "fiction" and "nonfiction" books, that were seen to have a strong influence on teacher and librarian practices. The central project of this analysis was to account, in terms of sociolinguistic, Marxist, and poststructural theory, for observed differences between students in a working class school, who use texts and information in acts of "reconstructed subjectivity," and students in one of the poorest and in one of the wealthiest schools in the city, whose uses of text are, respectively, characteristic acts of resistance and of conformity to the dominant meanings and use of text.