CONGRUENCE, RESISTANCE, LIMINALITY - READING AND IDEOLOGY IN 3 SCHOOLLIBRARIES

This article offers an ethnographic description of the processes of en culturation that occurred within three school libraries, and considers how such libraries may be considered cultural sites in their own righ t, apart from other aspects of schooling. The study examines third-gra de students' patterns of response to implicit and explicit messages ab out the value and function of literacy in their lives as they are enco ded in the organization of three school libraries, in those libraries' texts, and in the discursive practices and backgrounds of their libra rians. Analysis of these responses leads to an interrogation of two pr incipal accounts of how educational institutions in general attempt to reproduce the social order of late industrial capitalism, either thro ugh students' resistance to dominant ideological practices or through sociolinguistic congruence or incongruence between ways of using words at home and in school. As a counterargument to these two well-known f rames of interpretation, the author proposes a third account, in which the meaning of the library and its ritual practices have been playful ly reconstructed by students who have found, in the conflicting discou rses of its librarian, in some of the library's narratives, and in the gaps of its organizational logic and procedures, the agency to make a space for themselves to read and write in ''producerly'' ways that ne gotiate with, rather than resist or conform to, the dominant ways of r eading and using texts that the library promotes.