Reading Between the Lines and Against the Grain: English Language Arts and Social Reproduction in Alberta

Abstract

Alberta's 2003 High School English Language Arts curriculum produces differential literacies because it grants some students access to high-status cultural knowledge and some students access to merely functional skills. This differential work reflects an important process in sorting, selecting, and stratifying labour and reproducing stable, class-based social structures; such work is a functional consequence of the curriculum, not necessarily recognized or intentional. The process, however, does not occur in isolation and is in fact complementary to other social processes of stratification. Nonetheless, this dissertation argues that by changing the curriculum, emphasizing tactical and strategic literacy, and teaching the practice of critique, we — teachers, students, and citizens — may interrupt the hegemonic action of the dominant ideology and reveal a space for transformative social change.