This critical ethnography of school libraries contributes to the study of the politics of literacy at the elementary school level as well as provides an interesting case study of "border crossing." The book interrogates two accounts of social reproduction and proposes a third. Students at working-poor Chavez Elementary resisted attempts to get them "hooked" on reading fiction, but while many were socialized to the labor of a piecework economy, many also found ways to use texts as they chose. At professional-managerial Crest Hills, students managed their discourse practices in ways that reproduced those of their office workplace, but their success was achieved at the expense of great anxiety about the future. At working-class Roosevelt, the librarians attended to the rhetoric of librarianship, but students reassembled knowledge on their own terms. A second project theorizes the school library as a geopolitical space, and critiques children's fiction and the social order that its texts help construct through a semiotic analysis of text classification within school libraries. An investigation of the origins of that system and of the ways of reading that it promotes--with particular attention to the history of the popular novel--describes the gender- and class-based politics of leisure reading.

Using Social Theory in Educational Research is organised to help practising educators and novice researchers who have little familiarity with social theory to:

• be introduced to major schools of social theory, their basic concepts, and their general applicability to educational issues
• develop an understanding of and appreciation for its potential to improve their own practice
• gain practical insight into how theory can function as a warrant, or support, for data interpretation
• through the use of multiple practical examples, learn how to integrate theory into their own work more effectively

Selected Contents: 1. Getting Theoretical 2. An Illustrated Tour of How Theory Works (and Doesna (TM)t Work) in Educational Research 3. Framing Research Theoretically, Part One: Planning and Data Collection 4. Framing Research Theoretically 5.When Research Meets Research

Using Social Theory in Educational Research is organised to help practising educators and novice researchers who have little familiarity with social theory to:

• be introduced to major schools of social theory, their basic concepts, and their general applicability to educational issues
• develop an understanding of and appreciation for its potential to improve their own practice
• gain practical insight into how theory can function as a warrant, or support, for data interpretation
• through the use of multiple practical examples, learn how to integrate theory into their own work more effectively

Selected Contents: 1. Getting Theoretical 2. An Illustrated Tour of How Theory Works (and Doesna (TM)t Work) in Educational Research 3. Framing Research Theoretically, Part One: Planning and Data Collection 4. Framing Research Theoretically 5.When Research Meets Research