Examining Opportunities to Learn Literacy: The Role of Critical Sociocultural Literacy Research

This chapter illustrates, through the analysis of one small bit of classroom transcript, that critical sociocultural perspectives may be the only available tools for demonstrating how children’s opportunities to learn are both supported and constrained by the role of power in everyday interactions of students and teachers and by the systems and structures that shape the institution of schooling. It begins with a theoretical discussion of some central constructs in work: learning, identity, agency, and power. Learning is motivated, as G. Kress argued, by a need to understand something, whether an act, a word, a sensory experience. Learning, however, also leaves a residue; it makes a mark on the participant. Power is a complicated and challenging construct, precisely because the working of power in people’s learning lives is often neglected or is relegated to a position of outside agent acting on the subject.