LITERACY AS A GENDERED SOCIAL PRACTICE - TASKS, TEXTS, TALK, AND TAKE-UP

THIS STUDY examines gendered aspects of literacy across multiple space s in two bilingual primary classrooms within one working-class Latino community. Grounded within a sociocultural perspective on both literac y and gender, the research centers around a central question, ''How do es literacy construct gender, and gender literacy, across diverse cont exts for literacy learning in school?'' Data that were analyzed includ e field notes taken during 5 months of participant observation in the two rooms, transcriptions of interviews with the teachers and students , 180 pages of students' work from the first classroom and 136 student -authored books produced in the second room. The analysis centers on v alues that are associated with literacy in each room and the gendering of those values through specific classroom practices, with attention to gendered aspects of literacy tasks, texts that were written and rea d, the talk that structured participants' interactions with texts and with tasks, and the ways in which gendered aspects of tasks, texts, an d tasks were taken up by students in each room.