Literacy and Gender

Book excerpt: Why are girls outperforming boys in literacy skills in the Western education system today? To date, there have been few attempts to answer this question. Literacy and Gender sets out to redress this state of affairs by re-examining the social organization of literacy in primary schools. In studying schooling as a social process, this book focuses on the links between literacy, gender and attainment, the role school plays in producing social difference and the changing pattern of interest in this topic both within the feminist community and beyond. Gemma Moss argues that the reason for girls’ relative success in literacy lies in the structure of schooling and in particular the role the reading curriculum plays in constructing a hierarchy of learners in class. Using fine-grained ethnographic analysis of reading in context, this book outlines methods for researching literacy as a social practice and understanding how different versions of what counts as literacy can be created in the same site.