- Title
- 'We throw away our books': Students’ reading practices and identities
- Creator
- O'Shea, Cathy, McKenna, Sioux, Thomson, Carol I
- Subject
- To be catalogued
- Date
- 2019
- Type
- text
- Type
- article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/187128
- Identifier
- vital:44570
- Identifier
- xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2018.11.001"
- Description
- The aim of this research was to understand university students’ self-reported reading practices. The students attended the University of Fort Hare in South Africa, a historically black institution in a rural and under-resourced setting. A framework of New Literacy Studies (NLS) was used to understand students’ self-reported reading practices and the links between these and their identities. Tools provided by Gee, 2005, Gee, 2011 were applied to conduct a CDA of focus group discussions. In the ‘We Blacks’ Discourse, interviewees ‘othered’ the idea of reading as not being culturally valued. It was closely allied to the ‘Resistance to Reading’ Discourse, as participants explained that they tended to disregard books and did not enjoy leisure reading. The ‘Better Than Us’ discourse was drawn upon to suggest that reading was associated with attitudes of superiority. These discourses tended to homogenise class and other differences between black students and indicated the ways in which their experiences made adopting academic identities difficult. The analysis suggests that the racism of the past continues to impact students’ reading identities. The article concludes that the effects of these and related discourses require a response across the education sector, and transformative pedagogies might be needed in higher education.
- Format
- computer, online resource, application/pdf, 1 online resource (10 pages), pdf
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Linguistics and Education, O'Shea, C., McKenna, S. and Thomson, C., 2019. ‘We throw away our books’: Students’ reading practices and identities. Linguistics and Education, 49, pp.1-10, Linguistics and Education volume 49 p. 1 2019 0898-5898
- Rights
- Publisher
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Elsevier Terms and Conditions Statement (https://www.elsevier.com/legal/elsevier-website-terms-and-conditions)
- Rights
- Closed Access
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Collections
Thomson, Carol Irene (Dr)
McKenna, Sioux (Prof)
RU Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL)
RU Department of Education
SDG 04. Quality Education
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | McKenna we throw away our books.pdf | 762 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |