Popular culture in the literacy curriculum: A Bourdieuan analysis

Reading Research QuarterlyVol. 41, No. 2

April/May/June 2006© 2006 International Reading Association

(pp. 160–174)doi:10.1598/RRQ.41.2.1

T

Popular culture in the literacycurriculum: A BourdieuananalysisJACKIE MARSHUniversity of Sheffield, Sheffield, England

he potential role of popular culture in the literacy curriculum has been the focus ofa growing body of research over the last few decades (Alvermann, Moon, &Hagood, 1999; Dyson, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2002; Marsh & Millard, 2000,in press; Vasquez, 2003). This research has explored ways in which children recon-textualize the stuff of home and community and use popular texts to build bridgesbetween official and unofficial worlds (Dyson, 2002), in addition to detailing howthe overt use of popular-culture texts in the classroom by educators can inform thecritical literacy curriculum (Comber & Simpson, 2001; Larson & Marsh, 2005)and orientate children toward schooled literacy practices (Alvermann et al., 1999).

Popular culture is integral to children and young people’s engagement in awide range of literacy experiences, many of which are mediated by new technolo-gies, and is therefore a central part of their social practices outside of school(Hagood, 2003). If used to provide a “culturally-relevant pedagogy” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 465), popular culture offers a range of material that children andyoung people find engaging and that has the potential to motivate students whomight otherwise think their particular cultural interests are excluded from the cur-riculum (Alvermann et al., 1999; Marsh, 2000). Nonetheless, the curricula ofmany elementary and primary schools generally do not recognize the place of chil-dren’s out-of-school literacy practices (Gregory & Williams, 2000; Knobel &Lankshear, 2003; Luke & Luke, 2001).

The role of teacher knowledge and agency within this process has been lessextensively examined, yet an exploration of how the official literacy curriculumframes knowledge in relation to popular culture must also include an analysis ofhow preservice and inservice teachers passively accept, actively collude in, or resistits exclusion. Studies so far suggest a general reluctance on the part of many teach-ers to use popular-culture material in schools (Makin et al., 1999; Suss et al.,2001). A number of studies have outlined concerns that some teachers have with

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This article discusses data arising from a longitudinal study of the attitudes, beliefs, and experiences of preserviceteachers regarding the use of popular culture in the primary literacy curriculum in England. Eighteen studentstook part in a series of interviews throughout their three-year initial teacher education course. Data were inductivelycoded. The responses of three students are analyzed using a number of the theoretical concepts developed byBourdieu in order to explore how students’ agency was limited in relation to their use of popular cultural texts.Findings indicate that consideration needs to be given to the way in which habitus, capital, and field interrelate ifpreservice teachers’ decision-making processes with regard to the curriculum are to be understood, rather than ex-amining any or all of these concepts in isolation. In addition, challenges to dominant practices can occur when thereis tension between habitus and field. It is suggested that preservice teachers need opportunities to explore the rela-tionship between structure and agency if they are to understand the limitations on their practice and challenge tra-ditional models of the literacy curriculum. Implications for teacher education and future research are addressed.

Popular culture in the literacycurriculum: A Bourdieuananalysis

Este trabajo discute los datos surgidos de un estudio longitudinal sobre las actitudes, creencias y experiencias de fu-turos docentes con referencia al uso de la cultura popular en el currículo de alfabetización de nivel primario enInglaterra. Dieciocho estudiantes participaron en una serie de entrevistas a lo largo de los tres años del curso deformación de docentes primarios. Los datos se codificaron inductivamente. Se analizaron las respuestas de tres es-tudiantes usando varios de los conceptos teóricos desarrollados por Bourdieu a fin de explorar de qué modo los es-tudiantes estaban limitados como agentes en relación con el uso de textos de cultura popular. Los hallazgos indicaronque, para entender los procesos de toma de decisiones de los futuros docentes respecto del currículo, debiera tomarseen consideración la forma en que interactúan hábitus, capital y campo, en lugar de examinar alguno o todos estosconceptos en forma aislada. Asimismo, cuando hay tensión entre hábitus y campo podrían plantearse desafíos a lasprácticas dominantes. Se sugiere que los futuros docentes necesitan oportunidades para explorar la relación entreestructura y agente a fin de comprender las limitaciones de su práctica y desafiar los modelos tradicionales del cur-rículo de alfabetización. Se mencionan las consecuencias para la formación docente y la investigación futura.

Cultura popularen el currículo de alfabetización:Un análisisBourdieuiano

Dieser Aufsatz diskutiert die aus einer Langzeitstudie hervorgegangenen Daten von Einstellungen, Überzeugun-gen und Erfahrungen von angehenden Lehrern bezüglich der Nutzung populärer Kultur im Schreib- undLeselehrplan für Grundstufen in England. Achtzehn Studenten beteiligten sich in einer Serie von Interviews imVerlauf ihres dreijährigen anfänglichen Lehrerausbildungsstudiums. Die Daten wurden induktiv kodiert. DieAntworten von drei Studenten wurden unter Verwendung einer Anzahl theoretischer, durch Bourdieu entwickel-ter Konzepte analysiert, um zu erforschen wie die Mithilfe der Studenten sich in Relation zur Verwendung vonTexten populärer Kultur limitierte. Die Ergebnisse zeigen auf, daß Überlegungen über die Art und Weise angestelltwerden sollten, inwieweit Habitus, Kapital und Umfeld zusammenwirken, wenn Entscheidungsprozesse der ange-henden Lehrer in bezug zum Lehrplan verstanden werden sollen, anstatt nur einige oder alle Konzepte in ihrerIsolation zu betrachten. Hinzu kommt, daß Herausforderungen zu vorherrschenden Verfahrensweisen entstehenkönnen, wenn Spannungen zwischen Habitus und Umfeld bestehen. Es wird empfohlen, daß angehende LehrerMöglichkeiten zum Sondieren der Beziehung zwischen Struktur und Mithilfe benötigen, damit sie die Grenzenihrer Einwirkung verstehen und um traditionelle Modelle des Schreib- und Leselehrplans in Frage zu stellen.Auswirkungen zur Lehrerausbildung und zukünftigen Erforschung sind angesprochen.

Populäre Kultur im Schreib- undLeselehrplan: EineBourdieu Analyse

ABSTRACTS

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Ce texte discute les données provenant d’une étude longitudinale des attitudes, croyances et expériences d’en-seignants en formation concernant l’utilisation de la culture populaire dans le programme de formation à la lettra-cie en Angleterre. Dix huit étudiants ont participé à une série d’entretiens tout au long de leurs trois années de for-mation pour devenir enseignants. Les données ont été codées de façon inductive. On a analysé les réponses de troisétudiants en utilisant plusieurs concepts développés par Bourdieu afin de voir comment l’action des étudiants estlimitée en ce qui concerne leur utilisation des textes de culture populaire. Les résultats montrent qu’il faut prendreen considération la façon dont l’habitus, le capital, et le champ sont interreliés si l’on veut comprendre les proces-sus de prise de décison des enseignants en formation en ce qui concerne le programme de formation, plutôt que d’ex-aminer un concept particulier voire tous mais isolément. De plus, des mises en question des pratiques dominantespeuvent se produire quand il y a une tension entre l’habitus et le champ. On suggère qu’il est nécessaire que les en-seignants en formation aient des occasions d’explorer les relations entre structure et action pour pouvoir compren-dre les limites de leur pratique et mettre en question les modèles traditionnels du programme de formation en let-tracie. On propose des implications pour la formation des maîtres et de nouvelles recherches.

La culturepopulaire dans le

programme deformation en

lettracie : analysebourdieusienne

ABSTRACTS

regard to the use of popular culture in the literacycurriculum, concerns that focus on the ideologicalcontent of noncanonical texts and thus prevent theiruse in classrooms (Green, Reid, & Bigum, 1998;Makin et al.; Suss et al.). There is, as yet, little workon the attitudes and practices of preservice teachersin this area.

The aim of the study reported in this articlewas to determine the attitudes, beliefs, and experi-ences of student-teachers on an undergraduatecourse in the United Kingdom in relation to the useof popular culture in the primary literacy curricu-lum. My focus here is on how preservice teachersconstructed the literacy curriculum and, in theprocess, marginalized popular-culture and mediatexts. Although there have been a number of studiesof preservice teachers’ construction of the curriculum(Britzman, 1989; Grossman, 1990), these have fo-cused on factors relating to individual characteristics,such as life history. In general, there has been littleempirical exploration of how structural processeshave an effect on the formation of the primary litera-cy curriculum. This issue is particularly importantwhen considering the construction of a literacy cur-riculum in which popular-culture texts are marginal-ized or excluded, because the “utter complexity ofthe power/knowledge nexus” (Apple, 1992, p. 4) ishighlighted in relation to this area. Popular-culturetexts are located within discourses that are potential-ly problematic for educators (Luke & Luke, 2001)and contest established notions of canonicity.

In this article, I examine the choices made by agroup of preservice teachers through a theoreticallens that draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu(1977, 1984, 1990a, 1990b, 2000). This is, obvious-ly, only one of a range of approaches that could beused to examine the relationship between teachers’beliefs and practices (Richardson, Anders, Tidwell,& Lloyd, 1991), and the focus on such an analysishere is not to suggest that this is the only possible, oreven desirable, interpretation. Nevertheless, the workof sociologists such as Bourdieu, although somewhatunderused in relation to analyses of literacy curricula(Collins, 2000), is central to an exploration of ideol-ogy and education. In addition, although there hasbeen extensive use of Bourdieu’s theoretical toolswithin educational research, there is a lack of appli-cation of his major concepts to the study of teachers’decision-making processes. I use Bourdieu’s key the-oretical concepts of field, practice, capital, habitus,and doxa to explore how student-teachers acceptedor resisted dominant literacy traditions withinschools. Often, if any of these concepts are used ineducational research, they are used in isolation rather

than as part of an integrated theoretical framework,as Bourdieu intended (Bourdieu, 1984; Reay, 2004).This article, therefore, looks at how these conceptsrelate to one another, but, first, definitions and inter-pretations are explored.

Bourdieu’s theoretical toolsPedagogic Action

Bourdieu’s work has been central to an explo-ration of the dialectic between structure and agencywithin the education system. Education was a persis-tent theme in his writing. One of the most signifi-cant works in this respect was Reproduction inEducation, Society and Culture (Bourdieu &Passeron, 1977). This text introduces the concept ofPedagogic Action (PA), which describes the activitiesundertaken as part of the official curriculum.Bourdieu and Passeron argued that all PA is “sym-bolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cul-tural arbitrary by an arbitrary power” (p. 5). Theyalso suggested that the domination of particular so-ciocultural groups in society is arbitrary; thesegroups have not achieved their superior statusthrough achievement but by other means. This dom-ination constitutes a form of violence on the valuesand social practices of other groups—not physical vi-olence but symbolic violence. PA, therefore, ensuresthat the ideology of dominant groups is embeddedin the curriculum at the expense of that of other so-ciocultural groups. The curriculum does not simplymirror society’s values, as the work of Durkheim(1956) suggested, it transmits those values that arelocated within the domain of the dominant classes.In addition, we do not recognize the arbitrariness ofthe dominant culture as it permeates the curriculum,we “misrecognize” it as something that is there byright (Bourdieu & Passeron).

However, Mahar, Harker, and Wilkes (1990)suggested that the usual translation of the originalword Bourdieu used, méconnaissance, to misrecogni-tion is oversimplistic. Rather, they proposed that méconnaissance implies not only a lack of recognitionbut also a reconstruction. This proposition makesthe reproduction of structural inequalities rathermore dependent on individual agency than somewho have critiqued Bourdieu’s work suggest (seeSharp, 1980). If we do not recognize the power rela-tionships within the curriculum and, indeed, recon-struct them as taken-for-granted habitual practicesthat go unchallenged, then we are responsible tosome extent for the status quo. This process is also

Popular culture in the literacy curriculum 163

explained through the concept of habitus (Bourdieu,1990b).

HabitusHabitus, as outlined by Bourdieu, is a set of

dispositions created in an individual over time andshaped by structural elements in society, such as thefamily or schools. These dispositions, in turn, influ-ence the subsequent attitudes and behavior of indi-viduals and thus perpetuate long-standingdiscourses. In other words, we absorb the ideologiesand practices that are a part of our everyday lives andthese become habitual, shaping our future choices.Any complete understanding of the term, however, isnot helped by the fact that Bourdieu’s “presentationof the theory is riddled with contradictions, ellipsesand evasions” (Nash, 1999, p. 179). Nevertheless, itis possible, from a reading of Bourdieu’s work acrossdecades (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984, 1990b; Bourdieu &Wacquant, 1992), to suggest that habitus can estab-lish itself as the dominant discourse on the termina-tion of PA, thus becoming a self-perpetuating systemthat needs no external reinforcement. The arbitrarynature of the cultural values transmitted in the cur-riculum is internalized by individuals over time andsubsequently perceived as natural (Bourdieu &Passeron, 1977). Habitus, then, and the concept ofthe “internalized arbitrary,” are important to the de-velopment of an understanding of how practices areperpetuated across time and can account for theprocess by which individuals develop learned behav-iors and attitudes that uphold dominant discourses.

Field, capital, and practice Three further concepts of Bourdieu deserve

some attention next: field, capital, and practice. Afield is “a network, or a configuration, of objectiverelations between positions” (Bourdieu & Wacquant,1992, p. 7). It is a field of forces, a site in which dif-ferent groups compete for power. Education, for ex-ample, can be conceptualized as a field, withdifferent groups within it wrestling for prominence.A field has its own internal logic and set of accepteddiscourses that become internalized by social actorswho operate within that field, within that particularcultural and social sphere. Thus, people workingwithin education start to recognize a specific set ofpractices and adopt particular values that are peculiarto the field.

Different forms of capital compete for primacyin a particular field and, in his discussions of this dy-namic, Bourdieu (1986) focused on cultural, eco-

nomic, and social capital. Cultural capital refers tothe store of experience and knowledge individualsacquire throughout life, influenced by family back-ground and sociocultural experiences. Economiccapital is obviously related to material goods andwealth, and social capital denotes the social networksindividuals develop through the course of their lives.A field is a dynamic nexus of cultural, economic, andsymbolic capital that structures the discourses withinit in particular ways. The field of education, for ex-ample, has practices specific to the field that are fash-ioned by the various forms of capital operatingwithin it. Bourdieu’s conceptualization of field wasinconsistent, but in his later work (Bourdieu, 1996,2000) he refined the concept and provided a cleareranalysis of its scope.

This clarity was not the case in relation to histheory of practice. Several conceptualizations ofpractice have been identified in Bourdieu’s work(Warde, 2004), but the most relevant to the currentdiscussion relate to his use of the term in The Logicof Practice (Bourdieu, 1990b) where practice refers toroutine behaviors, the patterned sociocultural prac-tices in which individuals engage. Bourdieu arguedthat these practices are the result of the interactionbetween habitus, capital, and field, and inDistinction (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 101), he even sug-gested a formula to explain this dynamic: (Habitus ×capital) + field = practice. Practices within the class-room can therefore be seen to be formed by a com-plex set of relationships between the field ofeducation, the habitus of pupils and teachers, andthe cultural capital that individuals bring to the siteof learning. This process is central to the analysis un-dertaken in this article, in which all of the conceptsoutlined in this section will inform a discussionabout student-teachers’ practices with regard to theuse of popular culture in the literacy curriculum.

DoxaThe final Bourdieuan concept to be explored is

that of doxa (Bourdieu, 1990b). The dynamic be-tween field and habitus is important to an explo-ration of how people shape their practices. Thehabitus of individuals can be in contact with a num-ber of fields such as education, the world of work,and a range of other sociocultural contexts. If thevalues and practices embedded within individuals’habitus are perfectly synchronized with the valuesand practices of a particular field in which they areoperating, then doxa occurs. Doxa describes thepractice that results when habitus and field are at-tuned, it is the “pre-verbal taking-for-granted of the

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world that flows from practical sense” (p. 68). Wherethe habitus of an individual is perfectly in accordwith the values held within a particular field, doxicattitudes prevail. These core values of a field are thenseen as natural and uncontested, and alternatives tothis practice are not even considered.

However, there are occasions on which habitusand field can be at odds, and in Pascalian MeditationsBourdieu (2000) suggested that such discrepancycan create cognitive discomfort:

Habitus is not necessarily adapted to its situation nor neces-sarily coherent. It has degrees of integration—which corre-spond in particular to degrees of “crystallization” of thestatus occupied. Thus it can be observed that to contradic-tory positions, which tend to exert structural “double blinds”on their occupants, there often correspond destabilized habi-tus, torn by contradiction and internal division, generatingsuffering. (p. 160)

This disjuncture between field and habitus canlead to new knowledge and to improvisations thathave an effect on the structure. This assertion, ofcourse, still leaves Bourdieu open to criticism fromthose who argue that the subject is constituted andreconstituted through discourse (Butler, 1997), butBourdieu (2000) argued that this constant revision-ing of the subject leads to dysfunction.

Overall, a close study of Bourdieu’s workwould suggest that his theorization of the field/habi-tus dynamic presents a more nuanced account of in-dividual power than is often assumed, and thisposition has led to a recent interest in building onBourdieu’s notion of improvisation in relation tohabitus (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain,2001). However, a sustained analysis of Bourdieu’swork, including texts published in his final years(e.g., Bourdieu, 2000), still leads to the conclusionthat the habitus can only be improvised upon withincertain structural limitations. Nevertheless, ratherthan (a) discount the theoretical tools provided byBourdieu because they ultimately cannot provide asufficiently detailed account of the dynamic betweenindividuals and structure and (b) turn to otherequally problematic attempts to delineate this dy-namic, such as Giddens’s (1984) work on structura-tion, it would seem important to consider theaffordances of Bourdieu’s theoretical tools. What canhis key concepts offer an account of preservice teach-ers’ construction of the literacy curriculum? Such so-ciological, empirical analyses of the construction ofthe literacy curriculum are needed to explore howideology frames the literacy work undertaken inclassrooms (Luke, 2003). In this study, the beliefsand practices of preservice and inservice teachers

with regard to the use of popular-culture and mediatexts in the primary literacy curriculum were ex-plored and analyzed using a range of Bourdieu’s the-oretical concepts. Two key research questions areaddressed here: (1) What are the beliefs and practicesof preservice teachers with regard to the use of popular-culture and media texts in the primary liter-acy curriculum? (2) How do structural and agenticelements shape the dynamic between these beliefsand practices?

It is, perhaps, important to note that otherconceptual tools would be relevant in the analysis ofthis data. For example, Gee’s (1999) work on D/dis-courses provides a strong framework for an explo-ration of preservice teachers’ practices (see Wade &Fauske, 2004). Nonetheless, an insistence on an ex-ploration of the data collected in this study in thelight of Bourdieu’s theories offers an opportunity totrace some of his concepts in more detail than is of-ten the case. Although Bourdieu argued that his con-cepts needed to be used empirically to have anymeaning (Bourdieu, 1990a), they have not extensive-ly informed an analysis of the literacy curriculum(Collins, 2000). When they have been used, the em-phasis has been on habitus and cultural capital asseparate entities rather than an exploration of the re-lationship between field, habitus, and capital.Therefore, this article focuses on the dynamic be-tween these concepts in an exploration of student-teachers’ beliefs and practices.

MethodologyContext

The research project was undertaken over fouryears and centered on preservice teachers who at-tended a university in the north of England. Theuniversity offers a wide program of initial and con-tinuing teacher education courses at undergraduateand postgraduate levels. This study focused on pre-service teachers undertaking a three-year undergrad-uate course, a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) PrimaryEducation with Qualified Teacher Status. At the startof the research, I was working at the institution andtaught this particular cohort, but I moved from “in-sider” to “outsider” in this process when I took up apost at another university partway through the study.

Teacher education in England has undergonesuccessive reformations over the last decade, aprocess that has led to increased centralization andloss of autonomy for higher education institutions.The introduction of the National Literacy Strategy

(NLS) in 1998 provided an opportunity for theTeacher Training Agency to insist on a centralizedteacher education curriculum that related closely tothe structure of the NLS Framework, with its atom-ization of the literacy curriculum into text, sentence,and word levels (Department for Education andEmployment [DEE], 1998). It is within this climatethat this study was undertaken.

The course consisted of university-based mod-ules and teaching placements. Preservice teacherscompleted one sustained teaching placement in eachyear of the course, each lasting from six to eightweeks. They visited schools for short periods duringother modules to undertake specific tasks and obser-vations. The course did not offer modules on theplace of popular culture and media in the literacycurriculum. Therefore, this study was not undertak-en with any expectation that the preservice teacherswould develop informed practices in this area; it wasconceived in an attempt to trace the subjective andobjective barriers to the development of curriculumand pedagogy that reflected children’s interests.

Eighteen preservice teachers were involved in aseries of interviews over the first three years of thestudy. Five of these students were subsequently inter-viewed at the end of their first year of teaching asqualified teachers. Participants were each invited totake part in three interviews altogether. The data re-ported here were collected during two sets of inter-views with preservice teachers during the first andthird years of their course, after they had experiencedschool placements. The focus is on 3 of the originalgroup of 18 participants recruited in the first year ofthe study: Hannah, Rachel, and Tessa. All three stu-dents were white, monolingual women who hadjoined the course as mature students. Of the 119students who originally registered for the course,97% self-identified as white, 83% were female, and43% were 25 years of age or older, a demographicpattern common to many teacher education coursesin higher education institutions in the UnitedKingdom. The responses of these three participantshave been highlighted not because of issues of repre-sentation but because their varied responses illumi-nate the theoretical contradictions and complexitiesof the study. In the case of Hannah and Rachel, thedata from their interviews resonate with that of theother students, and thus they serve to highlightprominent patterns discerned in the data analysis.However, Tessa’s interview raised contradictory evi-dence and thus is drawn upon in order to tease outthe theoretical implications of this dissonance.

MethodsThe data reported here come from two sets of

interviews undertaken in the first and third years ofthe course. In the first year, group interviews wereconducted for two reasons. Primarily, I believed thatconducting a group interview might provide oppor-tunities for participants to develop shared discourseson the use of popular culture and literacy in the pri-mary curriculum. Group interviews can promotepolyvocality and enable a rich range of reflections tobe undertaken on a particular subject. Participantscan be stimulated by others’ responses, and throughhearing other opinions they can be prompted to of-fer further reflections (Watts & Ebbutt, 1987). Thisview is grounded in a Bakhtinian notion of conversa-tion as a joint construction of meaning (Bakhtin,1981). Second, group interviews are more effectivein terms of time management.

There are, however, some disadvantages to theuse of group interviews. They can be dominated byone or more persons who may influence opinionsunduly and silence less assertive group members; itcan be difficult to identify how far one person’s re-sponse is influenced by another’s (Casey, 1995).During the interviews, I attempted to address thesedifficulties by directing questions at specific individ-uals where necessary. In addition, in the data analysisI was careful to reflect on instances when an answermay have been influenced by that of another personin the group. There is only one instance in the datadiscussed here when a student appeared to be influ-enced by another’s contribution. The group inter-views took place on a university campus and lastedfor approximately 90 minutes each. Interview ques-tions focused on whether or not students had usedpopular culture on their teaching placements. If theyhad, what were the processes and outcomes? If theyhad not, what were the reasons? What were the pre-service teachers’ beliefs in relation to the use of pop-ular culture in the literacy curriculum, theirexperiences of its use in their own schooling, andtheir attitudes toward its use in their first and im-pending teaching placements?

Individual interviews took place in the secondand third years of the course. Their use was not de-signed to address any perceived difficulties of polyvo-cality evident in group interviews, for I acknowledgethat conducting interviews with individuals is alsoopen to multiple interpretations. Nevertheless, theseinterviews did enable me to explore issues relevant tospecific individuals in more depth. Interviews weresemistructured, which enabled me to compare re-sponses yet pursue individual lines of inquiry when



students raised issues that were specific to their owncircumstances, as is the case with Tessa in this article.The average duration of these individual interviewswas 40 minutes. The questions at this stage of theproject focused on the student-teachers’ experienceswhile on teaching placement. I wanted to know howfar they had incorporated popular culture into theirliteracy curriculum, what the reasons were for usingor not using such material, and what the influenceson their construction of the literacy curriculum hadbeen. As in the first interview, questions that deviat-ed from the structure were used when students raisedissues specific to their own contexts and experiences.The data analyzed here arose from both the groupand individual interviews.

Data analysisGroup and individual interviews were audio-

recorded and fully transcribed. The transcripts wereanalyzed using the principles of inductive coding(Strauss, 1987) in order to allow patterns to emerge.To enhance validity, I asked students who had beeninterviewed to code a selection of data. The studentswho volunteered to take part in data analysis workedin dyads on the same set of randomly selected tran-scripts and developed codes inductively. Table 1 pro-vides an overview of the codes developed by each ofthe dyads and indicates that each of the codes I hadoriginally developed appeared in a similar form inthe coding of one or more pairs (with an interrateragreement of 78%). This article focuses on only one

of the codes identified by all groups: habitus.(Although habitus was conceptualized differentlyacross the groups, I included in this category thosecodes that indicated current practices had beenshaped by the past.)

A further level of analysis then took place, oncethe application of the codes was made. A set of theo-retical concepts was applied as a result of a closestudy of the coded data. These theoretical conceptsdrew from the work of Bourdieu (1977, 1990b),Bernstein (2000), and Foucault (1977) because ofthe emerging themes that related to cultural repro-duction and normalization. Only the concepts em-bedded within Bourdieu’s work are considered here.

The limitations of this study lay in the restric-tions imposed by self-reporting. Interviews presentopportunities for people to represent themselves inparticular ways, forget or misrepresent details, oreven deliberately lie about events (Sikes, 2000).Because of this possibility, a number of steps weretaken to enhance the “trustworthiness” (Ely, Vinz,Downing, & Anzul, 1997) of the study. These in-cluded research participants’ involvement in dataanalysis and member checks (Lincoln & Guba,1985), in which participants were sent the final re-port for comment. However, member checks arethemselves problematic (Rogers, 2002) because ofthe usual lack of contestation of the researcher’s in-terpretation. In this study, none of the students dis-agreed with my interpretation of the data, but thislack of response does not necessarily indicate thatthey validated my analysis. The approach taken was

Group 1’s codes Group 2’s codes Group 3’s codesResearcher’s coding Rachel and Tessa Ruth and Jenny Hannah and Gemma

Confidence ICT (confidence in information Confidence/skills Lack of confidenceand communications technology)

Own school experiences Own experiences Experience in school Own experiences

Perceived suitability of texts Popular culture: song lyrics, Suitability Positive attitudes Batman, violence, Ninja turtles ViolenceSwearing Language

Lack of knowledge/guidance — — Lack of guidance

Construction of canon Traditional English — —

Social class Class Social class —

Classification and framing Big Books — —GrammarLiteracy Hour

School habitus Constraints of Literacy Hour Keeping within constraints of school Lack of use in primary schools

TABLE 1CODES DEVELOPED FROM DATA

grounded in a poststructuralist concern for “crystal-lization” rather than triangulation (Richardson,2000). In this context, “crystallization” refers to theconfirmation of theoretical analyses. The followingdiscussion draws on the theoretical concepts ofBourdieu in order to trace the influences on the pre-service teachers’ construction of the primary literacycurriculum and their stance toward the use of popular-culture and media texts.

Restricted beliefs and practicesOver the course of the study, many of the pre-

service teachers expressed favorable attitudes towardthe inclusion of popular culture in the primary liter-acy curriculum (Marsh, 2005a). However, it wasclear from these data that the positive attitudes relat-ed to the way in which popular-culture texts couldbe used to enhance motivation and orientate chil-dren toward schooled literacy practices; none of thepreservice teachers indicated that the study of popu-lar culture was a useful literacy practice in its ownright, as a means of enhancing critical literacy skills(Alvermann et al., 1999; Comber & Simpson, 2001)or developing skills in relation to the production andanalysis of media texts (Hagood, 2003; Marsh &Millard, 2000; Nixon, 2003). A number of studentsexpressed the view that popular-culture texts weregenerally too trivial and ephemeral in nature to war-rant a specific focus. In addition, although there wasbroad agreement with the potential use of popularculture in the literacy curriculum to motivate pupils,there were some aspects of popular culture that wereseen as undesirable—for instance the lyrics of popu-lar songs and computer games, despite evidence thatthey have much to offer literacy learning (Gee, 2003;Meacham, 2004). Educators’ concerns over theracism, sexism, and other forms of oppressive dis-course within popular-culture material are not to bedismissed, but often such stances are used to inhibituse of less controversial material. In addition, suchissues can be valuably addressed through critical lit-eracy practices in which children explore the tensionsinherent in a range of both popular and canonicaltexts (Alvermann et al.; Comber & Simpson).

Such beliefs were frequently voiced within thecontext of a particular view of childhood. Often, stu-dents stated that popular culture could not be usedbecause of the material contained within it, contentthat was deemed unsuitable because it introducedchildren to what they considered to be age-inappropriate material. However, the texts of con-temporary childhoods contain discourses that are

different from those encountered by these preserviceteachers in their days as school pupils and do intro-duce them to situations that would have been con-sidered taboo 20 or 30 years ago. Many of theparticipants thus ascribed to a vision of childhood inwhich the individual child was to be protected fromthe corrupting influences of contemporary media, anagenda influenced by commentators such asPostman (1992) and Kline (1993).

Other preservice teachers expressed anxietiesabout the way the landscape of childhood was shift-ing in the new media age and worried that their owntechnological skills would be outstripped by those ofthe children they taught. Childhoods are changingrapidly in the wake of innovations in digital tech-nologies, as Carrington (2004) attested. She suggest-ed that in the anxieties expressed by educators, wecan see echoes of Freud’s notion of the uncanny, ordas unheimlieche. This concept refers to the experi-ence of encountering the familiar in unfamiliar ways,which can engender feelings of anxiety and unease.As Carrington noted:

[T]he notion of the uncanny speaks to the sudden unfamil-iarity of the literacy practices of and text of young peoplearound digital technologies, both in terms of the anxietycaused by the unexpectedly familiar and for the increasingfuzziness of the concepts of texts and literacy. (p. 4)

Despite the broadly positive attitudes and be-liefs expressed throughout this study, the use of pop-ular culture in the literacy curriculum during thepreservice teachers’ placements was minimal. To ex-plore further this lack of attention to the texts thatare often of immediate concern and interest to chil-dren, Bourdieu’s formula (habitus × capital) + field =practice (1984, p. 101) is discussed in relation to theinterview data in order to develop an understandingof the constraints and influences on the students’ de-cision making.

Hannah, Rachel, and habitus Two of the preservice teachers taking part in

the study, Hannah and Rachel, were close friends.Both were mature students who had grown up insimilar kinds of families. Their parents had wantedtheir children to succeed educationally, working hardto save in order to provide them with a range of ex-periences they themselves had not enjoyed as chil-dren. Hannah and Rachel fitted in well at school andwere successful students. Memories of their ownschool experiences were positive, in the main, and



they had not been aware of any lack of congruencebetween home and school practices and values.

As outlined earlier, habitus refers to a set of dis-positions created over time and shaped by the socialstructures in which they are formed, in turn shapingthose structures and thus perpetuating elements ofthat structure. Habitus offers a useful means of trac-ing how hegemonic discourses became embeddedwithin Hannah and Rachel’s pedagogical and cur-riculum practices:

Rachel: I was very, very influenced by the class teacher.Well, she sat with me on Fridays, and we plannedthe following week, and they had a very set pro-gram of what they did in literacy, so I felt very con-strained myself, as though I was just going along.

In “just going along” with this state of affairs,Rachel’s habitus was shaped by the norms of theschool, but she also contributed to a continuation ofthese limiting practices by the lack of contestation.Similarly, habitus can be traced in Hannah’s response:

Jackie: I want to go back now to your first placement; didyou use popular culture?

Hannah: No, because I took the literacy out of three of thefour weeks and had a good go at it, but I was real-ly within the constraints of what the school want-ed me to do. Although thinking about it now, Isort of went down the road that you use Big Books.

Constraint is a word that cropped up frequentlyin the student-teachers’ responses. This occurrencesuggests sensitivity to the “structuring structures”(Bourdieu 1977, p. 72) that operated within theschool, the established forces that limited future prac-tice. However, Hannah’s response does indicate thatshe contributed to the structuring of these structures:“Although thinking about it now, I sort of wentdown the road that you use Big Books.” By goingdown this road, Hannah reinforced these traditionalmodels. This reference to an almost unconsciousmode of operation can be further explained with ref-erence to Bourdieu’s (1990b) notion of doxa.

As outlined previously, Bourdieu used the con-cept of doxa to explain how the interrelationship be-tween habitus and a particular field (a site of powerrelations, such as education) can create an uncon-scious acceptance of the status quo of that field.When an individual’s habitus is perfectly attuned tothe set of discourses operating within a field, doxicattitudes can prevail. The core values of a field cometo be seen as natural and uncontested, and alterna-tives to this practice are not even considered.

Rachel: I was going to say, I don’t think you think about it;do you? You are told Big Books, so you go andlook at the Big Book collection and bring out whatyou think.

Hannah: Yes, so I went along to the Big Book departmentand then used one of those, but thinking about it,there were probably quite a lot of things I couldhave used.

This excerpt is an example of how, in the groupinterviews, students did pick up on the concerns ofothers and, drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) notion ofdialogic speech echoed one another’s words andphrases, as in the use of “think” and “thinking” here.

The concept of doxa could not be exclusivelyapplied to the data from Hannah and Rachel’s inter-views. The preservice teachers constantly drew atten-tion to the ways in which they had not thoughtabout alternatives to the canon and established cur-riculum. As Bourdieu (1990b) pointed out, withdoxa, “The most improbable practices are thereforeexcluded, as unthinkable, by a kind of immediatesubmission to order that inclines agents to make avirtue of necessity, that is, to refuse what is anywaydenied and to will the inevitable” (p. 54).

Popular culture as the “unthinkable” is evidentin Rachel and Hannah’s interview. The concepts ofinternalized arbitrary and symbolic violence, as rein-forced by Pedagogic Actions (PAs), can also be identi-fied as salient here. The data suggest that thepreservice teachers readily accepted the status quothey found and had internalized the power structureswithin schools, not questioning the capricious natureof the rules thus set down. The arbitrariness of theconstruction of the literacy curriculum was not recog-nized by the students, and they reconstructed its pri-macy through the choices they made. Many of them,not only Hannah and Rachel, positioned themselvesas passive in relation to the construction of the cur-riculum on their placements. They were constrained,“restricted,” “hemmed in.” Schools were institutions,out there beyond the individual student-teacher, in-stitutions that remained locked into traditional mod-els of literacy teaching. In these interviews, we canclearly trace the workings of habitus and symbolic vi-olence in addition to the consequences of the intro-duction of a curriculum that had such strongclassification and framing (Bernstein, 2000).

However, habitus does not operate in isolation;it interacts with capital in providing agents within afield with particular resources to compete for thestakes involved. Bourdieu (1986) identified a num-ber of types of capital—economic, cultural, social,and symbolic—and it is not clear to which of these

the formula refers. In this instance, the interaction ofhabitus with cultural capital will be illustrated withreference to Hannah in order to draw out some ofthe complexities involved in such an analysis.

(Habitus × capital)Bourdieu (1986) made it clear that there is no

simple correlation between economic and culturalcapital. Hannah came from what she described as aworking class family, yet she described herself as hav-ing middle class cultural interests:

Hannah: I’ve probably got quite diverse interests [laughs]...and they are quite middle class interests, funnilyenough, although I would say I came from a work-ing class background.... I was reading Peter andJane books at home and having them at school,but...I went horse riding and [to] Brownies andthings.

Thus, in her case, cultural capital that was at-tuned to the familiar practices of schools reinforcedthe habitus, which prevented Hannah from chal-lenging these normalized practices:

Hannah: I would have not been prompted to think, “Oh, Icould use a comic,” or...I’d have thought it wasmaybe a taboo thing in school.

Jackie: Now, where did you get that message from?

Hannah: I don’t know...I think just...probably because itdidn’t happen to me in school...I didn’t do anypopular culture.... I don’t know, and I just thinkbecause it’s all the Big Books and everything else,I haven’t seen teachers using it, so I presume thatit’s not a done thing in school.

The interaction of Hannah’s habitus with hercultural capital becomes particularly significant whenplaced within the context of the field of education, asthis interaction shaped her practice in specific ways.The final complication in Bourdieu’s formula, the ad-dition of field to the interaction between habitus andcapital, is considered in the next section.

(Habitus × capital) + fieldIn Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu (2000) dis-

tinguished between habitus and field thus:

It is in the relationship between habitus and field, betweenthe feel for the game and the game itself [italics added], that thestakes of the game are generated and ends are constitutedwhich are not posited as such.... The game presents itself to

someone caught up in it, absorbed in it, as a transcendentuniverse, imposing its own ends and norms unconditionally.(p. 151; italics added)

The field is seen as a game with particular rules,consisting of a number of players who each have spe-cific resources to bring to the site of play. The playerstake part in the “illusio” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 11); thatis, they invest in the game itself, believing that it isworth playing. When the habitus, informed by an in-dividual’s cultural capital, integrates seamlessly into afield, then certain practices become naturalized andunthinking, and the habitus becomes like “‘fish inwater’: it does not feel the weight of the water, and ittakes the world about itself for granted” (Bourdieu &Wacquant, 1992, p. 127).

It can be seen in the previous extract fromHannah’s interview that her individual habitus relat-ed to the field of education so clearly that Hannahwas like a “fish in water.” In Hannah’s case, the inter-relationship between habitus, capital, and fieldmeant that in her first teaching placement she didnot contest the dominant discourses, was not evenaware of them as such, and so her practices did notchallenge the structures in any way. She was, ofcourse, not alone; the majority of the students didnot challenge traditional conceptions of the literacycurriculum. In a later section, the way in which theinitial teacher education course contributed to thisprocess will be considered.

The restricted practices of these preserviceteachers were narrowed further because they were ina relatively powerless position as students on place-ment. This is, inevitably, a period when students aresubjugated to a number of discursive practices thatserve to ensure they are located in specific ways asapprentices in these particular communities of prac-tice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). There were rare in-stances in the study of preservice teachers resistingthe dominant discourses in schools with regard tothe use of popular culture in the literacy curriculum.Nevertheless, an analysis of this limited data is im-portant because attention to contradictory themes indata can illuminate tensions in overarching theoreti-cal frameworks. In the following section, I include a“telling case” that “serves to make previously obscuretheoretical relationships suddenly apparent”(Mitchell, 1984, p. 239).

Structured improvisationInterviewed in her third year of the course,

Tessa thought, as did many other students, that the



topic of popular culture in schools was taboo. Thisword occurred frequently within the interview dataand, although fraught with all of the limitations em-bedded within a psychosocial analysis, recalledFreud’s (1950) observation that taboos are not basedon rational analyses:

Jackie: Why wouldn’t you feel confident to say to theteacher that you were going to use popular culture?

Tessa: Well, it’s taboo, isn’t it?

Tessa’s account of her use of a Pokémon text inher second teaching placement is outlined in full be-cause of its significance and raises a number of issuesin relation to the concept of taboo. (Pokémon was apopular cultural phenomenon at the time of thestudy, based on a computer game and television pro-gram that spawned a wide range of cultural artifacts.)

Jackie: Did you get a chance to use popular culture or me-dia at all?

Tessa: Not really. The only bit that I used was usingPokémon with one boy for reading because he justwasn’t interested in anything. His reading was verypoor. I had to follow some children to correct theirreading, and this was my lowest ability child. He wasreally struggling, he just wasn’t interested in the read-ing books the school were giving him, and so I wastrying to find out what he was interested in, and allhe would talk about was Pokémon. So I went out andbought a Pokémon handbook, and it actually gothim looking at—well, it’s not a contents as such butthe numbers to find the characters he knew—andthen finding them in the book. And we did that fora little while, letting him go backwards and forwardsusing the numbers. And then I had him reading, andsome of the language in it is quite difficult. But onceI’d helped him with the words he didn’t know, hewas remembering them. It just needs the motivation—something he’s really interested in.

Jackie: And you thought it really did provide him with that?

Tessa: Yes. And I was on a sticky wicket because the schoolhad banned Pokémon.

Jackie: Had they? Why?

Tessa: Because, I think, at the time there was all the badpublicity anyway, and they’d had trouble in school—fighting over the stickers and things.

Jackie: Right. So did you feel a bit nervous?

Tessa: Yes, yes. And it was sort of done, I mean, somebodysaw us doing it, started looking at the Pokémon hand-book. And it was done, sort of unofficially really.

Jackie: Why did you feel as though you had to do it unoffi-cially?

Tessa: Partly because there was nobody sort of overseeingwhen I was seeing these children anyway. So it was

not that structured time as far as school [was] con-cerned and what I was doing. And also, I think, cer-tainly one of the teachers, the teacher that taught theEnglish would have said, “No.”

Jackie: Really? Why would she have said, “No”?

Tessa: I think, because it’s Pokémon. And I just think, Imean, I talked to [my student] about all sorts to tryand find out what he was interested in, what he didwhen he played out and all he did was talk aboutPokémon and swap cards, and all he did was talkabout Pokémon—everything came back to it. So Idon’t know whether that was good or bad really—itwas like having this obsession. But, at the same time,if that helped his motivation with his reading.

Jackie: Now, I’m really interested in the fact that you hadto do it secretly. What do you think about the ethicsof all of this?

Tessa: It’s not right. The only other time, and that wasPokémon again, was last week [that teacher] askedme if I’d do story writing again, and so I did [and]took a [sort of] waistcoat in. It had got 20 odd pock-ets in it, and [I] put the Pokémon handbook in oneof them and then let the children come out and findwhat was in the pockets, and she sort of glared. Butthat was it. They weren’t looking at the Pokémonhandbook—it was just that it was one of the things inthe pockets.

Jackie: Did you feel a bit nervous about being caught?

Tessa: Yes. And what I was bothered about was him goingback into class really excited about it and stirringeverybody else up so there would be a do aboutPokémon again.

Jackie: You must have been like a cat on a hot tin roof!

Tessa: I said to him, “You mustn’t go back into class all ex-cited about this because we’ll be in trouble.”

This transcript offers a clear example of hownontraditional, noncanonical texts are “othered”(Scheurich, 1997) in educational arenas. The “other-ing” of popular-culture texts occurs because they arenot located within the literacy practices of the domi-nant classes and thus can be more easily trivializedand marginalized. Schuerich suggested that theprocess of othering requires an active engagement inensuring that whatever is not othered is made thesame in some way. Certainly, texts that were seen tobe acceptable in schools by the students were oftenreferred to in a generic sense (as “Big Books” or “settexts”) and were rarely individualized in the way thattheir references to popular texts often were. Tessaclearly perceived the school to have othered popularculture, particularly Pokémon texts, and her trans-gressive use of such material challenged the estab-lished orthodoxy. Her use of the cricket metaphor“sticky wicket” suggests that she felt at risk through

such action, and the subterfuge with which she en-sures the secret is kept extends even to making thechild complicit in the deception.

Some would argue that this vignette provides achallenge to the theoretical framework developedhere. There has been extensive critique of Bourdieu’sapparent inability to provide a sufficiently nuanced ac-count of the discursive production/negotiation ofpower at the microlevel (Butler, 1997; Chaney, 2002).Yet within his later work, Bourdieu (2000) developedmore complex accounts of habitus and field, whichprovided spaces for a conceptualization of habitus thatoffers the possibility of improvisation. Nevertheless, itis with regard to the processes involved in improvisa-tion that Bourdieu’s work offers a less robust analysis.To explore aspects of those processes, I would suggestthat we need to return to his formula (habitus × capi-tal) + field = practice (1984, p. 101), although, ofcourse, I am not suggesting this formula can be ap-plied to data in a simplistic manner, as if it were amathematical procedure. Instead, the formula helps toilluminate how habitus and capital are not isolatedconcepts and can inform an understanding of howthey can interrelate to disrupt the status quo. It is inthe dynamic between an individual’s habitus and capi-tal that the opportunities lie for disruption of the con-tinuity between habitus and field and subsequentchallenge to the “illusio” (p. 11).

In Tessa’s case, an exploration of her personal his-tory revealed that her particular cultural capital createddisjuncture for her between home and school. Herworking class family did not, unlike Hannah’s, adoptthe cultural practices of the middle class, and she hadnot found any correlation between her experiences athome and school. This lack of congruence between thehabitus of home and school may have prompted cog-nitive dislocation, which provided Tessa with the impe-tus to challenge established practices. Bourdieu (2000)argued that “the principle of the transformation ofhabitus lies in the gap, experienced as a positive or neg-ative surprise, between expectations and experience”(p. 149). This notion of the transformation of habitushas important implications for teacher educationcourses, considered in the following section.

Teacher education and PedagogicActions

The teacher education course undertaken bythese preservice teachers was similar to many othersin England, in that all had to follow a common syllabus that was related closely to the subject

knowledge requirements of the NLS (DEE, 1998).There were, at that time, no identified sessions in thetimetable focusing on the use of popular-culture ormedia texts. This reinforcement of a particularly nar-row interpretation of the literacy curriculum can beread in the light of Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1977)notion of PA, which constitutes “symbolic violenceinsofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitraryby an arbitrary power” (p. 5). Since the introductionin England of the Education Act of 1870, this cul-tural arbitrary can be traced throughout the variousinstantiations of the primary English curriculum insuccessive government legislation (Marsh, 2004).

Perhaps the most important work teacher edu-cation programs can do is to provide students withopportunities to analyze the sociocultural, economic,and political restrictions on their practice. Offeringcurriculum and pedagogic spaces for students to tracethe shaping of habitus by capital and field can provideopportunities for teachers to reflect on how their be-liefs can be undermined in decision making throughthese insidious and invisible processes. Teacher educa-tion programs that develop students’ understanding ofhow power operates at the macrolevel and microlevelcan contribute to the cognitive dissonance necessaryfor the improvisation of habitus.

The potential role that preservice and inserviceteacher education programs can have on attitudesand practices with regard to the use of popular cul-ture in the literacy curriculum has been explored byXu (2001a, 2001b) in the United States. Xu (2001a)described the practice of one teacher who attended aninservice program and reflected on her pupils’ en-gagement with popular culture. Xu explained howthe act of reflecting on students’ choices of populartexts and preparing a series of lessons based on thesechoices enabled the teacher to understand the poten-tial role that such texts could have in bridging homeand school cultures. In a further study involving sixpreservice and seven inservice teachers who enrolledin a course that addressed the teaching of English, Xu(2001b) surveyed the teachers’ experiences of the useof popular culture in the curriculum before and afterthey implemented work on popular culture in theircurriculum. The findings suggested that, through theaction research project in which teachers introducedelements of popular culture into the literacy curricu-lum, the teachers became convinced of its value as ameans of recognizing students’ own literacy experi-ences and enhancing motivation for literacy. Withoutthe development of teacher education courses such asthe ones offered in these models, preservice teachersmay be limited in their ability to construct a primaryliteracy curriculum that challenges established



practices and addresses the complex literacy practicesprevalent in the “changing landscape of communica-tion” (Kress, 1997, p. 161) of contemporary society(Hagood, 2003; Marsh, 2005b; Nixon, 2003).

ConclusionIn this study, it is apparent that the students’

construction of the literacy curriculum was complexand affected by a range of structural issues relating tohabitus, cultural capital, and the processes of internal-ized arbitrary and doxa (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990b) inthe field of education. The data indicate the effectthat habitus had on the curriculum planning of thesepreservice teachers. Habitus counteracted any inclina-tion they may have had to use popular culture, basedon their rather utilitarian beliefs that popular textscould be used to orientate children to schooled litera-cy practices. The dislocation of these beliefs fromtheir practices was a strong indication of the imper-ceptible way in which habitus worked to reinforcehegemonic discourses. Thus, drawing from the theo-retical concepts developed by Bourdieu has facilitatedanalysis of the dialectic between structure and agencywith regard to this group of students, but it also hashighlighted the difficulties inherent in any such task.The analysis offered here is, as Collins (1993) sug-gested is the case, when drawing from Bourdieu’s the-oretical toolkit, inevitably “one-sided” (p. 134). Thisis not to discount such an endeavour, as it is impor-tant to explore the implications of Bourdieu’s intellec-tual project for the literacy curriculum, but it is clearthat new conceptual tools are needed in such explo-rations, tools that will enable thick descriptions of indi-viduals negotiating the subjective/objective interface.

This study has raised a number of issues thatcontribute to the important and ongoing debateabout the role of popular culture in the literacy cur-riculum (Alvermann et al., 1999; Dyson, 2002;Marsh & Millard, in press; Robinson & Mackey,2003). In particular, it suggests that a crucial area offocus in challenging normative practices should bethe education of preservice teachers, given the impor-tance of this foundational work for their future cur-ricula and pedagogical choices (Richardson, 1996). Ifwe do not ensure that preservice teachers are aware ofthe realities of children’s out-of-school literacy lives,shaped as these are by popular culture, media, andnew technologies, then we are likely to continue tohave literacy curricula in the international arena thatare anachronistic and inadequate in terms of theirability to address the complex economic, social, andcultural demands of the 21st century.

JACKIE MARSH is Reader in Education at the University of Sheffield.Her research interests focus on the role and nature of popular culture,media, and new technologies in early childhood literacy in both in-school and out-of-school contexts. She may be contacted at theUniversity of Sheffield, School of Education, 388 Glossop Road,Sheffield S10 2JA, UK, or by e-mail at [email protected].

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Received December 12, 2003Final revision received March 7, 2005

Accepted March 17, 2005


Documents

Popular culture in the literacy curriculum: A Bourdieuan analysis