Three little boys and their literacy trajectories.

Comber, Barbara

Introduction

There has been escalating concern about the comparative literacy standards of boys and girls in Australia for some time now. Benchmark testing reveals that girls outperform boys in standardised forms of literacy, with more fine-grained analyses of the results indicating that it is particular groups of boys who are not doing well on these tests (Alloway & Gilbert, 1997; Masters and Forster, 1997). Those included some low SES, Indigenous, ESL and rural groups of boys. Of the factors that impact on performance, socio-economic status appears to be the most significant. The 'boys education problem' now runs concurrent with (or perhaps even overshadows) a so-called literacy crisis that has been sustained by the media for over a decade, part of ensembles of wider conservative backlash (Gutierrez, Asato, Santos & Gotanda, 2002).

Two recent large-scale Australian studies have suggested that boys' progress in schooling, and literacy in particular, is affected by the ways in which teachers understand masculinity and boys' repertoires of practices as resources for school learning (Alloway, Freebody, Gilbert & Muspratt, 2002; Lingard, Martino, Mills & Bahr, 2003). The Boys, literacy and schooling study (Alloway, Freebody, Gilbert & Muspratt, 2002) documented three main kinds of interventions to literacy programmes that were shown to have a positive effect on boys. These included students experiencing repertoires of practice for 1) representing the self, 2) relating to others and 3) engaging and negotiating with culture. A key insight here is that improving boys' engagement with school literacies means altering classroom practice so that there is more 'room to move' for boys in terms of their ways of being in the classroom and operating with and on texts (see also Newkirk, 2002). The researchers noted that expanding repertoires for presenting the self might involve making classroom literacy practices 'active and embodied', allowing 'choice and personal experience', and focusing on 'boys' sense of self'; expanding repertoires for relating might involve 'repositioning boys as 'learners' and 'class participants'; and expanding repertoires for engaging negotiating the culture might involve incorporating the 'real' and everyday, popular culture materials, electronic technologies and multi-media and multi-modal work' (Alloway, Freebody, Gilbert & Muspratt, 2002, p. 3). This expansion of repertoires involves a pedagogical shift from the regulation of boys in and through literacy lessons to an opening up of active positions for them to take up. The resultant changed activity structures and roles in literacy lessons may trigger and sustain boys' interest. Later in considering the cases of several boys in early childhood classrooms I return to this idea of 'expanding repertoires of practice'.

Despite considerable interest in boys as a category with respect to literacy, there have been relatively few studies that look closely at particular boys' literacy development over time, especially boys in the early period of their school lives (but see Hicks, 2002). From the mid-nineties until 2002 research teams from Edith Cowan University, Charles Sturt University and the University of South Australia were involved in three major longitudinal studies of children's literacy development (Comber & Barnett, 2003; Comber & Hill, 2000; Comber et al., 2001; Hill et al., 2002). These studies led us to question the effects of normative models of literacy development on different children. Although gender was not a fore-grounded analytical lens in these studies, the rich ethnographic data base provides significant opportunities for a retrospective analysis in terms of gender (as well race and class). The 100 Children studies were located in five very different sites around Australia, including three high-poverty and two affluent communities--one remote, one regional and three metropolitan. We followed 20 students (four in each of the five sites) within a wider cohort of their classroom peers who we assessed over time (the 100 children). Wherever possible, we interviewed parents and caregivers about their perceptions of their children's funds of knowledge and family and community practices and networks (see Hill et al., 2002, 1998). Here, I revisit selected case studies, informed by insights from the recent large-scale studies of boys' education. I discuss the literacy trajectories of three little boys in their first three years of school. I consider the different cultural capital and dispositions (Bourdieu, 1990, 1991) they brought to school literacy and explore what this meant for them over time. Bourdieu's concepts are particularly helpful for thinking about how different children starting school are positioned with respect to a standardised form of language and literacy, ways of being and understandings about the world. Bourdieu directs us to think about children's different and particular histories within their families, the contrasting cultural resources and repertoires of practices that are available as part of everyday life and how children acquire particular dispositions and embodied ways of being which they take with them to school. I identify and discuss the differences in the resources (Nash, 1993) parents were able to bring to bear and offer glimpses of connectedness that were produced for these young boys who were already showing signs of alienation from school/literacy. In particular I consider which children get to 'catch up', under which circumstances and to what extent.

Three little boys playing catch-up

At the beginning of the 100 Children study there were already significant differences in children's dispositions toward literate practices and their ability to perform the literacy assessment tasks. There were a number of 4 and 5 year old boys (and indeed girls also) from each of the preschools who teachers and parents assessed as reluctant to engage with reading and writing and as unable to perform many literacy related tasks that their peers could already do. Campbell (Hillview), Alan (Riverside), and Sean (The Wattles) were among that group. Yet the stories of these little boys and their literacy trajectories are very different. Here I re-visit the case studies of Campbell, Alan and Sean in order to examine the factors that made a difference to their acquisition of school-based literacies.

Campbell's father was a medical specialist and his mother a nurse. They separated just before Campbell started preschool, but both remained actively involved in his early education. Despite Campbell's reluctance to engage with print, he had a large general knowledge, a personal library, loved to be read to and to engage adults in conversation. Alan's parents were both unemployed when he attended preschool and hence they received school card, an indicator of low income; but both were studying certificated courses in nursing and hydraulics and at the same time renovating their house. Alan spent most of his out-of-school time outside, looking after the family's bantam chickens and riding his two-wheeler bike. His mother described him as 'a jack-in-the-box' and, as 'a boy who did not willingly pick up a pen' before he started school. Sean was the younger of two boys in his family and this was the second marriage for both his mother and father. While Sean's father was employed when Sean started school, the family was always on a low income. Later Sean's mother and father were to separate after a period in which his father was incarcerated. Sean's preschool teachers reported 'screaming matches' and refusals to engage with the centre's activities. Campbell and Sean both had to deal with family changes and marriage breakdowns. Sean and Alan were both growing up in households with significant financial constraints. Each of these little boys had important issues they were grappling with at the time they began their school lives. Yet their lives look rosy compared with other boys in this study and others we have followed since in other projects.

Schooling, and with it school forms of literate practices, enter children's lives at different points in a family's development, parents' employment and further education, and at times simultaneously with major life crises; educational agenda have to compete with other priorities and material realities impacting on the child's livelihood. Some families have greater economic, social and cultural resources available to them for addressing these demands. My point is that all was not equal as these little boys, their families and teachers worked towards helping them catch up with their peers and to meet standardised literacy benchmarks. I now turn to a brief but close-up look at these three little boys and summarise where they were after four years of formal schooling.

Campbell was always going to get there ...?

On starting school Campbell was reluctant to persevere with literacy tasks that did not come easily, and he preferred to discuss the pictures than struggle to decode the text. While Campbell scored below the larger cohort in some aspects of literacy, in writing, sight words, book levels in the preschool assessments, by Year 3 he scored above the 90th percentile for reading in the state and at the 75th percentile for reading when compared with other children in his class. From the perspective of literacy requiring cracking the code, making meaning, using texts and analysing texts (Freebody & Luke, 1990), Campbell really only needed to enhance his performance in cracking the code to measure up. Family practices with texts ensured that he continued to develop across the other dimensions of literate practice.

So let us examine how Campbell's dramatic progress might be explained. According to the case study (Rivalland, 2002, 2003) a combination of factors made it possible for Campbell not only to catch up but also to excel in some areas:

* his gradual adjustment to school routines

* responsive diagnostic teaching

* family supplementary literacy instruction

* material literacy resources (personal library & computer)

* social and cultural capital (peers and family)

* the collective belief that he would learn to read and write

Sometimes with children, in particular boys such as Campbell, who appear ready to read and then don't automatically become readers at the start of school, teachers attribute their eventual progress to maturity or to a particular remedial intervention. This can leave existing practices in and out of school that produce inequalities unexamined.

As Rivalland (2002) points out, Campbell had access to considerable family and peer resources. There were active interventions made on his behalf by parents who themselves had access to dominant educational discourses. For instance Campbell's strategic repeating of a school year, by changing schools, re-positioned him and allowed him to take on a successful student identity, without the traces of early failure that may have haunted him had he stayed where he was. Even though Campbell had significant struggles with early literacy learning in comparison with his peers, it could be argued that he was always going to catch up; it was simply a question of when. Indeed he was never that far behind when compared with children in other places. He had grown up in households where educated standard Australian English was the norm and where literacy was constituted as not only essential, but also as desirable. When he changed school he was amongst peers with similar levels of affluence and cultural capital. As he progressed through schooling he was able to make increasingly good use of his wide general knowledge and bookish language plus his facility with ICTs. To sum up, Campbell's repertoires of literate practices were multiple and significant even when basic literacy tests suggested that he was struggling. Once with considerable teacher and parental encouragement, direct teaching and continued belief, Campbell did learn to decode and encode, his complex meaning-making strategies were able to come into play immediately. In Bourdieu's terms Campbell had developed a 'disposition' towards literacy before he was able to acquire specific decoding and encoding practices. While as a little boy starting school, he needed, like his peers, to adapt his habitus to the discipline of the classroom world, he already had a 'feel for the game'--a wide vocabulary, an interest in general knowledge, an inquiring approach to the natural world--that had been inculcated through his family life; indeed he was already expert at eliciting pedagogical attention and resources. Yet as Rivalland (2003) points out while Campbell did have the cultural capital that ultimately made school learning easier, a cycle of early literacy failure can produce risks which without close parental monitoring and teacher intervention can become dangerous and personally damaging. It is important therefore to acknowledge what was accomplished by Campbell, his parents and his teachers in producing such a dramatic 'catch-up'.

Alan came a long way, but ...

In contrast to Campbell, Alan, while he made substantial progress in three years of schooling after a very slow start, was still somewhat 'behind' his peers. Alan did not sit the Basic Skills Test as his mother Carol was reluctant, the Principal explained, for her children to engage in system-sanctioned activities such as testing. She was suspicious of the school as Alan's two older siblings had been in trouble at Riverside, with his brother having been suspended several times. Yet Carol passionately wanted Alan 'to be up with everybody else' and spent many hours helping him with his homework. By Year 3 project testing and observations indicated that Alan had clearly made substantial progress, but that his progress was uneven in different aspects of literacy and that his overall level of performance was still significantly lower than the average.

In preschool Alan typically avoided language-related activities and he largely avoided adults, preferring to play on the equipment or with the blocks and cars. His mother warned that he disliked any form of close adult attention or having to display what he could do in public. Sometimes in preschool, he sabotaged shared rhymes and singing by inserting his own words, which were often marked by slang, refrains from popular culture and on occasions 'swear words'. When he began school Alan appeared to find the many hours of listening and being still difficult and was often in trouble for his unauthorised movements in and outside of the classroom. During his preschool and early school days Alan occasionally played schools with his older sister and did colouring and collage work with his mother and siblings at the kitchen table. In Year 1 Alan did not make significant progress with literacy, but in Year 2 he formed an excellent relationship with a highly skilled and determined teacher who noticed and fostered his skills as an artist and assisted him through small group teaching to make considerable progress in spelling, reading and in writing. Most importantly that year he seemed to find a place for himself in school and was able to form friendships, engage with his teacher and complete tasks with support. In one segment of a spelling lesson we can see how Alan had begun to relate to his teacher.

In Year 2 Eleni, Alan's teacher, and the teacher next door combined their classes for literacy lessons so that Eleni could work closely on word study with a small group of children, including Alan, who were having problems. Eleni explicitly modelled and discussed the sound--/ck/and invited children to offer examples. Alan suggested 'dark' and 'sock', indicating his engagement in the task if not his full understanding.

Eleni: What you're going to do boys and girls is you're going to look in the dictionary and write down /ck/ words. Does everyone know what they have to do? (They all nod.) Tiptoe and get a dictionary. (Alan gets a dictionary and starts looking straight away. He smoothes down the spine but looks too quickly and focusses on first letters. He then looks hopefully to

Eleni for help.)

Eleni: What do you think you can do? You cannot do it that way. Stop.

Eleni: [To researcher] He couldn't do it, so he asked me. That's the difference! (Another child nearly finds a/ck/ word. Alan finds the page and finds the word quickly.) Well done! (Pats Alan on the back. He looks pleased. She watches while he rules his margin and writes the date.) Maybe you could use the ones on the board. (Alan also finds 'backward'.) Excellent.

In the next five to ten minutes Eleni continued to check closely what Alan and his group were doing. She pointed out a mistake and helped him to fix it and she assisted him with whatever he was trying to do when she was nearby. Alan worked when Eleni was near and was very keen to please her. He wrote 'brick' and announced 'I thought of it all by myself', to which Eleni replied, 'I'm so proud of you darling'. But Eleni give Alan more than praise; she gave him specific feedback and instruction as he was in the process of trying to make sense of the task at hand.

She told him when his approach was unlikely to work. The important change was that Alan actually sought help from Eleni and, though he didn't attend perfectly, was open to her instruction and feedback. He appeared highly motivated to find the words and gained satisfaction from his being able to do it. In this lesson and many others like it, words had become the object of study for Alan.

Alan's measurable progress could in part be attributed to:

* his gradual adjustment to school routines

* responsive diagnostic teaching

* family supplementary literacy instruction

* his emerging desire to be able to read and write.

In contrast to Campbell, Alan had to acquire the desire to read and write. It was not something which he, his teachers or even his family took for granted. Indeed a student literate disposition was something that Alan acquired through effort and practise over his first three years of school. Literacy was not a part of his everyday life. Interestingly, Eleni worked with his capacity for artistic pursuits as a way into school literacy activities. Unlike Campbell, at home Alan did not spend his free time browsing through his personal library or using a computer. He no longer took books home from the school library (having been banned due to un-returned books) and by Year 3 there was no classroom library. Nor did he seek the company of adults. Rather he was heavily invested in the activities to which his brother, in particular, gave credence--riding his bike, action movies, gymnastics and looking after animals. While Alan's parents were working on their own higher education, thereby indicating the value they ascribed education, this did not come easily either. Both were studying through paper-based correspondence courses, as they did not have a car or the Internet.

Even though he had made considerable progress, especially in Year 2, he was not 'up with everybody else' in terms of literacy. His continued relative low positioning raises a number of dilemmas. What would Alan, his family and his teachers need to do in order for him to significantly alter his literacy status? Alan's family were committed to his continual improvement and insisted (as far as this was possible) that he complete his homework, often without full understanding of what was intended. For his part Alan attempted literacy-related tasks at school, but he spent very little extended time on literacy related practices out of school. He had not yet acquired a reading for pleasure disposition. It was not part of his habitus. He wasn't going to be moving school to give him a fresh start somewhere else. Hence while Alan was now learning from what was on offer at school, it did not compensate for his late start and limited practice, nor for forms of linguistic and cultural capital upon which many school literacy activities are contingent. As he grows older and progresses through school we can see that Alan will need some luck to 'catch up', or even to maintain the gains he has already made.

Sean didn't play the game

Sean, in different circumstances, had not really made a dent on the literacy ladder and in Year 3 he had been suspended from school three times. He had not yet become socialised in school routines; indeed his approach was often both self-destructive and subversive to the classroom ethos. At this point Sean was not taking up what the school had to offer. In fact he often rejected it quite forcefully. His mother sometimes kept him at home when he was 'in a bad mood'. The assessments that Sean was able to complete show slight progress over four years of schooling, but they clearly demonstrate that the gap between Sean and most other children in the cohort was getting substantially wider.

Susan Hill (2002), the researcher who developed Sean's case study writes that he had 'a wicked self-destructive sense of humour', which mainly appealed to his male peers, and literacy lessons sometimes became the site for resistance. Immediately after an exchange between Sean and his teacher about new spelling words, during which Sean had made jokes by attributing his meanings for each of the listed words and exhibited an overt masculine bravado including putting the list word 'boast' into the context of winning a punching match, Hill (2002, p. 41) notes the following incident.

 The teacher then asked Sean to write the new spelling words in his
 book and do 'look cover write check', to learn them. Sean went back
 to the table where he sat with five other children. He picked up a
 coloured pencil and snapped it in half. 'I don't want to do this' he
 said quietly. He picked up another pencil and held both ends, moved
 his arms up and down and then cracked the pencil against his
 forehead. The other students looked amused. The teacher said to
 everyone 'Please get on with your work!' Sean said 'Here we go!'
 and cracked another pencil on his forehead. He broke all 12 coloured
 pencils during the spelling lesson and wrote nothing.

Interestingly I had witnessed Alan do similar things in preschool and Year 1--both the display of masculine humour during official literacy events and also the self-destructive treatment of his body. Indeed both Alan and Sean performed a working-class linguistic repertoire of jokes, swear words, and physical tricks (albeit self-destructive) as a way of defining their place amongst their peers. Hill goes on to tell a very depressing tale about a little boy headed for serious trouble at school and minimal literacy learning. While Sean had access to sympathetic and skilled teaching, he frequently refused what was on offer, increasingly finding alternative and often aggressive ways of defining himself as a 'boy in school'. This repertoire of practices did not match with who Sean was, or who he wanted to be. Unlike Alan, there had been no breakthrough, no point of connection from which Sean could form a schooled habitus that would allow him and his teachers some respite, some room to move, a pedagogical opening.

Sean's lack of measurable progress with school literacies can, in part, be attributed to:

* conflict with behavioural norms of school

* mismatch between gendered identity and school identity

* lack of engagement and practice with school literacies.

Hill (2002) reports that Sean's literacy development was limited in every area when he was tested in Year 3. Like Alan he enjoyed drawing, particularly his repertoire of Simpsons and Pokemon characters. He also responded well to one-on-one teaching and to teachers who displayed a sense of humour. However, unlike Alan, by Year 3 he had not been able to make a positive connection with the schooling process. His active rejection of tasks and 'spoiling' of enjoyable literacy events made him unpopular and the subject of attention for his behaviour rather than his learning. Whereas Alan had re-connected with the educative process through the sustained efforts of his mother and one exceptional teacher, Sean was becoming increasingly alienated to the point where Hill et al. (2002) argue that there needs to be a second 'safety net' at around ten years of age to provide intense supplementary pedagogical support to children such as Sean to prevent them 'virtually dropping out' whilst still in primary school. The fact that Sean's mother kept him home to avoid him getting into more trouble at school is a major warning for the system.

Catching up is hard to do

These case studies provide potent evidence of how difficult it is for some children to match the advantages of other children who go to school with the linguistic and cultural capital that allows them to adjust more quickly to literacy learning as an institutional practice or receive the kind of ongoing support that allows them to catch up. Some teachers bend over backwards to re-offer literate practices as palatable and in tune with who individual students are (see also Alloway et al., 2002). Alan for instance did find a place for himself initially, through being positioned as the class artist by his teacher Eleni, and he began to learn to read and write. One wonders what might have happened if Sean's talent for cartooning was fostered similarly. Newkirk (2002) in discussing boys, literacy and popular culture suggests that treating 'cartooning as a serious business' as part of a wider curriculum acceptance of 'youth genres' may allow boys the space to productively and educatively explore their 'obsessions' (see also Badger, 2003). However even with added room to move, Alan was still finding schoolwork difficult whether in the classroom or at home. His 'slow start' made a difference in a way that Campbell's did not. It was not that Campbell had significantly greater proficiency with basic literacy as a pre-schooler than did Alan; however Campbell had already accomplished schooled ways with words and a literate disposition prior to his attending to the code-breaking aspects of literate practice. His parents were tertiary educated professionals who were able to offer him supplementary pedagogy and a rich repertoire of inviting literacy practices.

Children who have access to considerable supplementary educational resources and capital at home can catch up, even though that may present parents with an extra burden of responsibility (Dudley-Marling, 2001). However a slow start in school literacy combined with difficult living circumstances at home is very difficult to overcome. We did see evidence of some teachers, parents and students making significant inroads into literate practices later in school, but we do not know whether they would be able to sustain and even enhance the gains they had made. Clearly some children have access to different opportunities for literacy learning and play at home which make a difference to what they are able to take up and make use of at school. Campbell was always going to learn to read. His engagement and learning from books as a preschooler was already more sustained, satisfying and a part of who he was than Alan's experiences with books in Year 3. They may have both learnt to crack the alphabetic code in Year 2, but Campbell already attended to texts like a reader (even if he still needed a parent or teacher to mediate). Other children, however, who were also late to crack the code had not yet found ways of connecting to text-based forms of pleasure, learning and work. It may be that catching up on the literacy ladder is a privilege reserved for the already advantaged. Sean on the other hand didn't learn to play the game.

Indeed Sean's life at school was packed with 'abrasive interaction(s)' (Alloway & Gilbert, 1997, p. 54) as he resisted what was clearly a set of limited and unattractive choices about who he could be. In terms of the three repertoires of practices identified by Alloway et al. (2002) Sean was not able to access and appropriate ways of representing the self that added to the repertoire he brought from home. Those he brought from home increasingly brought him negative feedback and those available at school he increasingly resisted. He was going to need a substantial and sustained intervention to turn this around. His repertoires for relating to others fared similarly. Indeed the peer capital that works to some degree in the playground is often rendered value-less when under the teachers' gaze. Behaviours which might earn 'street cred' are often judged as naughty and/or dangerous. Sean did not find or take up ways of relating as a learner or as a class participant. His acquisition of ways of engaging and negotiating with culture were also limited. His cultural repertoires were 'out of place' in the classroom world and he remained impervious to what the school had to offer. Unlike Alan who had been able to turn his artistic repertoires with popular cultural characters into classroom cultural capital Sean had little to trade beyond the class clown repertoire. Apart from one teacher who recognised his sense of humour and his drawing ability, he was judged as deviant, not only with respect to literacy development, but also in terms of his behaviour.

In these longitudinal studies we tried to avoid simplistic narratives of development and progress. As numerous literacy researchers have noted while research texts typically tell tales of unitary subjects, feminist and poststructuralist theory points to multiple subjectivities; that is people are constituted in different ways which are historically and socially situated (Hicks, 2002; McCarthey, 1998). This means that they are positioned and subjected often in contrastive ways in different cultural events and institutions. It involves, 'reading of a life-in-process' (Honan et al., 2000, p. 18). Even watching the same child in the same classroom provides different visions of that child as student, friend, classmate, leader, comedian, research subject and so on (Dyson, 1993). In addition of course researcher subjectivities and theories produce other stories (Reid et al., 1996; Honan et al., 2000). In developing these longitudinal studies we are aware of the ways in which we are implicated in producing constitutive discourses about literacy, development, literacy development and children in socio-economically disadvantaged communities. Whatever our research accounts and social theories, it is individual children who stand to benefit (or not) from what schools make available.

I finish with several observations about 1) students, 2) literacy and 3) literacy development and educational futures. Firstly, one outcome of this longitudinal work is the way it complicates children as educational subjects (taking on different identities in different situations) and repositions them as both agentic and dynamic. Alan was a different student in Eleni's classroom because he invested in the pedagogic relationships she made available. For her part, Eleni was able to 'see' a different Alan than had previously been visible at school. In this complexity and among the contradictions are spaces for change. That is, rather than being locked into a stage or pathway or diagnosis what we have are much more complex and at times contradictory young people working more strategically, tactically and responsively in schools and with school literacies than is sometimes assumed (see also Gregory & Williams, 2000).

Secondly, the longitudinal projects indicate overwhelmingly that what constitutes literacy is changing and that there are considerable gaps and differences between the literacies and language practices of schools and home (Hill et al., 2002; Carrington & Luke, 2002). Children's repertoires of representational resources, textual practices and knowledges are less and less about what might be deemed to be appropriate literacies for primary aged people. The impact of media, popular culture, ICTs and different ways of family living make the normative model of family literacy, where parents curl up with young children to read a nightly bed-time story a fantasy for many, if not most, children. While Campbell may have had such opportunities, they simply were not available to Sean and it seems unlikely that state premiers' read-a-thons were going to have a long-term impact. Increasingly many children's lives are less governed by what schools may see as desirable and more by parents' needs to cope with changing work practices, altered family relations and wider cultural, social and economic shifts. Preparing children for and supporting children with school literacies is considerable, if invisible, work (Dudley-Marling, 2001) that many school educators still mistakenly assume will be forthcoming.

Thirdly, while it is helpful to consider the dynamism of young people as students who are subject to change and while it is important to understand the multiple and changing nature of literate practices outside of school, it is a major dilemma that school literacies and educational futures seem increasingly subject to normative models of assessment and credentialing. On these scales, many of the children we watched are at risk or already seriously failing. As Deborah Hicks (2002) explains this has a particularly negative impact on poor and working-class children's daily struggles within a middle-class educational system. Yet even the middle-classes are not immune as children can be made at risk when their parents' lives are disrupted and they are not able to fulfil the supplementary literate and emotional work that schools appear to count on (Carrington & Luke, 2002). The problem here is that normative cultures regarding academic achievement and educational trajectories produce 'failures' and produce long-term personal and social effects. Some children are getting resources (academic and cultural capital) from school (however limited and arbitrary that may be) and others leave with a diagnostic record of failure.

These three boys already have significantly different literacy trajectories that relate to class and gender in complex ways. How each of these boys worked on their evolving masculine identities positioned them differently with respect to school literacy. Sean's existing repertoires of practice for 'representing the self', 'relating to others' and 'engaging and negotiating with culture' (Alloway et al., 2002) did not connect with the repertoires required for acquiring school literacies. Rarely did the school program allow him enough room to move to assemble new repertoires of practices in these domains without losing face in terms of the tough and resistant identity he performed at school, perhaps also required by his out-of-school life. Despite experiencing significant identity conflicts in preschool and school, especially in literacy lessons, Alan was able to assemble new repertoires of representational, relational and textual practices that allowed him to engage in pedagogical relationships. This was a significant accomplishment; yet catching up remained unlikely. His out-of-school life was dominated by physical pursuits and literacy was still hard work. Campbell on the other hand was eventually able to merge his home and schoolboy identities in highly productive and positive ways, satisfying his passion for 'knowing' about the world through his reading and computing. Ultimately students' cultural capital, evolving dispositions and their existing material circumstances impact hugely on the extent to which they can put literacy to work in their own lives, which impacts upon their investments in the labour of learning to be literate.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the 100 children and Questioning Development research teams--Susan Hill, Judith Rivalland, Bill Louden, JoAnne Reid, Susan Nichols--in contributing so much to my thinking and learning about children's literacy development. This paper presents my retrospective view on what made a difference to the three little boy's literacy development and any inadequacies in the approach taken here are mine only.

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Barbara Comber

CENTRE FOR STUDIES IN LITERACY, POLICY AND LEARNING CULTURES, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA