For N. Hall, J. Larson & J. Marsh, & (in press/2011) Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy.

2nd Ed. London: Sage.

Textbooks and Early Childhood Literacy

Allan Luke

Victoria Carrington

Cushla Kapitzke

Texts as artefacts of childhood

If childhood is a social construction, then its social practices are contingent upon and
undertaken with historically evolving cultural technologies and artefacts. These technologies
include the domestic implements of infant care and childrearing. They include the core
technologies of modern childhood: toys and books. In the current political economy of
childhood, toys and books, in traditional and digital forms, have a special place, having
evolved into linked and co-marketed pedagogic commodities. They are the cultural artefacts
that parents, families and care-givers purchase with income that is surplus to basic
requirements for food, shelter, and health. They are the aesthetic and didactic objects of
children’s work and desire. They are the nexus of everyday discourse and interaction by
children and adults.

Particularly in light of the emergence of digital technology – it is worth recalling that the
centrality of the book and the textbook in childhood is a recent phenomenon. Walter Ong
(1958, p. 150) observed that the book was a “pedagogical juggernaut” which “made
knowledge something a corporation could traffic in, impersonal and abstract.” Since the
Protestant Reformation and the emergence of state-sponsored schooling in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, Anglo-European childhood involved institutional training in schools and
churches with print, (cf. Elson, 1964). Indeed, the orientation towards common core text
study was characteristic of Confucian educational traditions, predating Western developments
and spreading throughout East Asia (Nozaki, Openshaw & Luke, 2003). Nonetheless, and
despite longstanding Muslim, Hebraic and alterior Judeo-Christian traditions of hermeneutic
training and exegetic study by youth (Kapitzke, 1995), what counts as the textbook and its
centrality in formal schooling continues to be defined by modernist Western/Northern
educational theory and practice. Current educational policies focus on standardization of text
(and affiliated assessment, pedagogical approach and/or professional commodity) as a key
strategy for improving achievement and, purportedly, more equitable educational outcomes.

Throughout the history of schooling, formal education of children entailed formal

pedagogical interaction with an official school text: the textbook. The textbook is a print or
digital artefact comprised of written, visual and multisemiotic text designed for pedagogical
purposes. That is, textbooks are didactic in form and content, authored and authorised for the
selection, construction and transmission of valued knowledges and practices to apprentice
readers. As such the forms and contents, ideologies and discourses of textbooks constitute an

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official and authorised version of cultural knowledge and literate practice.

In the current “political economy of textbook publishing” (Apple & Christian-Smith, 1991),
school-based early childhood literacy still involves primers, basal readers, and, more
generally, reading instructional series including graded or levelled storybooks for children in
the initial years of schooling. This current situation has been linked to varying forms and
kinds of political control of early reading instruction via policy imperatives around systems
“accountability” (Willis & Harris, 2000). Sixty years ago, the development of print materials
reached its zenith in the large-scale deployment, adoption and sales of reading series and
adjunct materials by publishers like Scott-Foresman, Ginn, Harcourt-Brace, Macmillan and
others. These textbooks have evolved to include home study and readings for an expanded
educational marketplace.

Developments in current cultures and economies of childhood are marked by two major
developments. First, there is an increased targeting by multinational publishers of middle and
upper socioeconomic classes concerned about their children’s early literacy and numeracy.
Second, there is an accelerated uptake of digital technology, mass media, and linked
children’s toys and consumables among these same classes of child/parent consumers. So
while current policies have focused educators on the role of standardized texts and tests in the
remaking of school literacy, our concern here is what has been a major move in the economy
and production of textbooks that has gone relatively unremarked amongst educational
researchers: the articulation of new technologies, popular culture and textbooks in home and
out-of-school pedagogy.

What follows is an historical introduction to ideology and political economy of the school
textbook, describing its design principles and current policy uses. We then expand the
definition of textbooks on two axes. First, an overview of “graded” children’s and infants’
literature and reading materials that are commercially marketed for home, preschool and
childcare reading events is developed. We then turn to consumer and popular texts in print
and digital formats as home and public pedagogies.

Textbooks and the production of the modern reading child

Childhood and the “reading child” have been objects of pedagogical discourses and practices
for over five centuries (Aries, 1962). The development of a formalized, transportable and
replicable technology for the construction of the child through literature was realized in the
earliest Reformation textbooks. One of the earliest, most successful reading textbooks for
children was written by the German churchman, Johann Comenius. His Latin primer, Orbis
Sensualium Pictus, (The Visible World in Pictures), was printed in 1658 and subsequently
used across England, Europe and America for two hundred years (Venezky, 1992).
Comenius’ text was different from other incunabular pediatric and pedagogical literature
because of its illustrations, which were included to assist reading comprehension. Typical of
Protestant Reformation primers, readership and identity were tied to religious belief and the
German state. The technology of the printing press coupled with religious zeal in Protestant
Germany to generate new discourses and practices for and about children. In stated purpose,
reading and writing linked the lives and identities of children — which were often brutally
short — to issues of eternity. Pragmatically, however, textual practices developed as
modalities of social and cultural control. These textbooks prescribed for children how and
what one could read, in what lingua francae, for what cultural and religious, social and

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economic purposes. The mandating of basic early childhood literacy teaching, the
development of secular reading textbooks and a school inspectorate to monitor and control
classroom practices with the book were linked institutional strategies used by Luther and
colleagues (C. Luke, 1989).

Residual traces of Comenius’ influence on the design and format of textbooks remained until
the second half of the twentieth century. Textbook production and use in this pre-modern era
was ad hoc and particularistic. Written and published by individuals, textbooks were also
brought to school by individual students. Some teachers kept small, eclectic collections in
their classrooms, but these were used with individuals and small groups, rather than with
whole classes. In the US, spelling was taught from a range of texts, which might include
Noah Webster’s Spelling Book (c. 1783), or Dilworth (c. 1740) and Perry’s (c. 1777)
common spellers. Other significant textbooks in the development of literacy acquisition and
public schooling during this era included McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers (c. 1836) and Latin
primers such as Kennedy’s The Public School Latin Primer (c. 1866) and Arnold’s Latin
Prose Composition (c. 1839). Whilst these texts each had their own curriculum and
instructional method, they had continuing influences on reading and writing instruction for
more than a hundred years until the 1950s with the demise of Latin grammar as a required
curriculum subject (Westbury, 1990).

The historical development of the early literacy textbook was strongly tied to religious and
moral training, affiliated with Protestant state ideology, and featured overt attacks on other
belief systems – a case in point is Webster’s Spelling Book depiction of the Roman Catholic
Pope.

With the eighteenth and nineteenth century spread of empire, textbooks and early literacy
training became ideal vehicles for the inculcation of colonial values and allegiance to the
crown (Pennycook, 1996). Hence, books like the Irish Readers (c. 1830), the Royal Readers
(c. 1890), and the Ontario Readers (c. 1880) all presented strong colonial themes of empire
and race, national and linguistic hegemony. Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish and German
colonial administrations also imported curricula and textbooks. Prior to the emergence of
cheap, accessible and widely distributed books in the early twentieth century, for many rural
and urban communities in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, early school
textbooks and affiliated religious texts (e.g., the Bible, hymnals, prayer books, Paradise Lost)
were the only available print materials in many colonial homes, and were the staples of
family and communal readings. In this regard, before the advent of mass commercial print
culture, the influence of the textbook on moral and ideological formation was profound by
virtue of its near-universal availability and relative exclusivity. Further, home-based early
childhood literacy events and those of the schools often shared religious and colonial literary
contents (Luke & Kapitzke, 1994; Kapitzke, 1999).

Development of the basal reading series by American educational psychologists in the early
twentieth century has, to this day, profoundly shaped what counts as literacy, literacy
instruction and reading in early childhood. Historical studies by Shannon (1989) and Luke
(1988) document the emergence during the early and mid-twentieth century of the
commercially structured, “scientifically” designed and mass marketed reading textbooks in
the US . The prototype of the contemporary reading series was William S. Gray and May Hill
Arbuthnot’s Dick and Jane (c. 1925) series, which dominated early literacy instruction in the
US, Canada and other parts of the English-speaking world for over a half-century.

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A continuing focal point of public and scholarly debate is the matter of overt moral and
cultural content of early childhood reading materials. Since the Dick and Jane prototypes,
questions about textbook ideological representation have been recurrent. These include
critiques of the representation of gender relations in early readers, the exclusion of
minoritised identities and cultures in children’s literature, and, indeed, the construction of
particular White and middle class versions of childhood (Baker & Freebody, 1987). In this
way, content analyses have called attention to the degree and extent to which textbooks
construct, rather than represent, worlds of childhood, prescribing national, regional and local
forms of cultural identity and social action (e.g., see articles in Apple & Christian-Smith,
1991; Chen, 2002; Nozaki, Openshaw & Luke, 2005).

In contrast with Protestant and colonialist traditions, the designers of modern textbooks
consistently have focused on literacy instruction qua scientific method rather than ideological
and moral training. This view of the textbook as codification of pedagogic method is the
dominant paradigm of American educational science, more specifically, of the field of
reading psychology.

But what is distinctive is not only the particular scientific definition of reading of any
textbook per se. In the case of Dick and Jane, the books were premised on then contemporary
models of word recognition, while current legislated approaches in the US and UK have
moved towards direct instruction in phonics. More profound was the pedagogic logic of the
modern textbook: (1) that narrative reading text could be designed on the basis of
psychological theories of instruction and skill (whether behaviorist, cognitive or
psycholinguistic) and not on literary content or religious values per se; (2) that a whole suite
of “teacher-proofed” curricular commodities including guidebooks, student workbooks,
adjunct visual and instructional materials, and tests could be delivered as a total ‘curriculum’;
and (3) that standardized tests could be developed on comparable design principles to assess
teacher and system efficacy at delivery of the whole package. This sets the grounds not only
for a redefinition of literacy pedagogy as the object of science (and not moral or literary
training), a move formalized in the current US and UK policy environments, but also for
transnational corporate production and marketing and, indeed “snake oil sales” (Larson,
2002).

To this day, then, the early reading textbook is a key design/artefact - in its aesthetic and
representational form (as marketed and consumed curriculum commodity) and via its
educational and sociocultural functions (as mandated ‘skill’, interactional tool and ideological
message system). It is a powerful economic phenomenon in its own right: a multinational
product that can be adapted, translated, and niche marketed in a range of national and
regional markets; a comprehensive suite of educational commodities with a pedagogic reach
that extends far beyond children’s narrative reading text; a scientifically “tested” and
“proven” product. Current market research estimates the overall US Prep-12 print textbook
market as over 8 billion dollars (Simba Information, 2010); the 45 million tests conducted
each year in the US under the No Child Left Behind policy framework are estimated to have
an annual market value of $517 million to the private sector (Jackson & Bassett, 2005).
Further, many US or UK reading series are editorially altered for local adoption across
English-speaking markets.

In the UK and US, the textbook is a central policy tool for a regulatory system that aims at
standardization and quality assurance of classroom literacy events. While the Reformation
textbook was a response to the demands of mass schooling in the newly invented secular

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nation-state, the modern reading series was the response of educational sciences and large
publishing houses to the demands of modernist, urban society par excellance. As an
embodiment of pedagogic method (phonics, word recognition, whole language, etc.), it
promises discipline, standardization and accountability in the mass delivery of literacy skills.
As an educational commodity, large scale adoption across state systems guarantees efficient
economies of scale, interstate and transnational export potential, and, increasingly, viable
economies of scope for the development of further editions, adjunct and affiliated products in
other areas of educational demand and consumption.

There is some recent evidence of the enlistment of many of these approaches to textbook
development, with their attendant epistemological and curricular assumptions, in the
educational systems of rapidly industrializing and globalising states in Asia, the Pacific and
Africa (e.g., Suaysuwan & Kapitzke, 2005). In some instances, as in Korea, this has entailed
a direct and explicit textual translation of the values, ideologies and semiotic codes of
American reading series (Lee, 2005). The role of the state in the political economy of the
textbook, of course, depends upon nation or region specific regulation and policy. In the case
of many developing countries, the state has retained the responsibility not only for adoption
and monitoring of textbook form and content, but often for their production and distribution.
In the North and West, the political economy of textbook production, adoption and
implementation tends to be more complex, linking government policy, assessment and
accountability systems, and the establishment of regional and state markets for multinational
educational commodities. The current debates over literacy and reading in the US and UK are
cases in point.

The implementation of national literacy-in-education policies in the US, UK, Australia and
New Zealand have again focused policy and academic debate on methods, reviving
simmering debates over the place of phonics, direct instruction, literature study and
standardized achievement tests as principal measures for assessing school and program
efficacy. These debates begin from the baseline assumptions of the technocratic model. The
first assumption is that the best methods for teaching literacy and the best textbook packages
can be determined by reference to an evidence-base wholly reliant on classical psychological
experimental design and achievement tests. The second assumption is that the optimal
instructional method can be coded, broadcast and implemented across large educational
jurisdictions through the mandating of preferred textbooks and affiliated instructional
sequences – with ongoing controversies over the US Federal government’s moves to provide
support only for those reading programs (e.g., Open Court) based on “scientific evidence”
(Cunningham, 2001; Garan, 2001).

The crossover of textbooks into home reading

Goodman, Shannon, Freeman and Murphy (1988) used the term “basalisation” to refer to the
textbook development practices described above. Typically, this involves: the attachment of a
teachers’ guide to direct the pragmatic use of texts – the “running metatextual commentary”
(Luke, deCastell & Luke, 1989) on the children’s narrative; and control of the “level” of the
text, usually through the application of a conventional readability scheme that places limits
on vocabulary, lexical density and syntactic complexity. Texts are leveled and “graded” for
the incremental introduction of digraph and dipthong combinations, basic grammatical
structures, punctuation and orthographic patterns, and core word recognition patterns for
sequenced skill outcomes.

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These and other linguistic, semiotic and physical characteristics of the textbook have evolved
in relation to the sociolinguistic and cultural context where they are most likely to be read and
used: the classroom. There are ongoing debates among early childhood educators about how,
when, and with which techniques children should receive formal and informal instruction in
literacy, whether this should occur in schools or homes, under whose professional
jurisdiction, and so forth. There has been an international push to extend and formalize
aspects of early literacy experience into earlier years of schooling, and home and childcare
settings. In part, this reflects the policy focus on early intervention, widespread concern about
home school transitions for children from lower socioeconomic, cultural and linguistic
minority groups, and an affiliated movement for family literacy, home reading activities
preparatory to formal schooling. At the same time, the market in both print materials and
educational toys amongst middle class parents who seek to accelerate their children’s skill
and intellectual development has expanded.

The early twenthieth century architects of the literacy textbook worked in an era in which the
sales of Dick and Jane readers to schools would have been the largest market available. In the
early to mid-twentieth century, working families still relied greatly on public and school
libraries for access to books. To this day funding cutbacks in public libraries have their most
direct effects on those communities without the surplus income to purchase books. Yet few
publishers could have imagined the market possibilities for early reading instructional
materials into homes. The use of books in home and community settings for formal and
informal introductions to literacy practices now constitutes a significant and growing
proportion of the trade publishing industry.

By recent accounts, the children’s literature market is now a multi-billion dollar transnational
enterprise. According to Cummins (2001), the average American book price of all children’s
and young adult titles is $US8.41 for paperbacks and $17.57 for hardbound texts, rising on
average 5.7% per year in cost. The Achuka Children’s Book Resources website
(www.achuka.co.uk), describes UK children’s books as a £225 million industry. This
industry includes, of course, best selling children’s books, with over 10 million copies of
Beatrix Potter books in print, such early childhood classics as Mercer Mayer’s Just Me and
My Dad, with almost 5 million copies in print, Dr. Seuss, Sesame Street reading materials
and other books.

In recent years there has been an extension of textbooks into the home reading environment,
beginning with the movement of “graded” texts into trade markets. Trade journals like the
School Library Journal have long categorized “children’s and young adult titles” sales by
age/grade, for example, “preschool to grade 4”, “grade 5 and up”. But more recently,
marketing has involved increased “basalisation” and branding by level. Series like the best-
selling I Can Read series and many Golden Books have long branded reading ages through
readability formulae. But in the UK and many other countries, popular bookstore chains like
WH Smith list, shelve and market books by official National Literacy Strategy levels.
Textbook-style design features are crossing over into the general trade children’s literature
field, and home reading is being brought into alignment with the official categories and
practices of school literacy events.

In its most overt form, this involves crossover product development and marketing by
multinationals like McGraw-Hill. McGraw-Hill’s Open Court Reading series has received
official sanction from the US federal government’s recent moves to legislate “scientific”

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approaches to reading (there are hotlinks to the relevant legislation for teachers and educators
on the McGraw-Hill publishing website www.sra-4kids.com). Beginning from an enhanced
market share position in early childhood textbooks, McGraw-Hill has expanded its range of
affiliated products into the home market. Graded readers similar to those used in Open Court
are sold on the McGraw-Hill Children’s Publishing website, an Amazon-style operation, for
parents:

Your first grader has been introduced to math, phonics and language art skills at
school. This is the perfect opportunity to initiate your child’s study habits and help
build their confidence level at the same time. With workbooks, software and
flashcards from McGraw-Hill Children’s Publishing, your child can practice these
tough new subjects. Practicing with McGraw-Hill… materials will help eliminate
confusion… (www.mhkis.com/cgi-bin/gradeprod.cgi?grade=1).

In this marketing text, the push is on for parents to better align their home reading practices to
those of the reading series through the purchase of textbook-like commodities. But this
doesn’t stop with reading and literature per se. In the same catalogue, grades 1 and 2 test
preparation materials are marketed to parents: “Test preparation material from the nations #1
school testing company!” is said to “…offer… children the preparation they need to achieve
success on standardized tests”. All of this occurs under the umbrella of official endorsement
of a co-marketed product by the Federal government and various scientific “experts”.

Textbooks for the teaching of reading – and their affiliated worksheets, flashcards and
standardized tests – are no longer the focus of formal instruction solely in schools. Textbook
design and marketing principles have been extended into the non-school market, making for a
de facto institutionalization and domestication of home reading — among those social
classes with sufficient surplus income — by state literacy policy. This involves both the
leveling and scientific grading of texts, their marketing in relation to official school levels,
badged products which are based on product recognition and loyalty (e.g., SRA), print and
multimedia that are derived from school series, activities and texts officially adopted for
school use. The modern textbook thus is extending into the home, into “family literacy”,
“early intervention” and new constructions of early childhood, abetted by a multinational
political economy of text production. These developments mark the confluence of state
intervention in the shaping of what counts as literacy, the standardization of school reading
practices, and the expansion of consumer markets by multinational publishers (Beder, Varney
& Gosden, 2009). This confluence functions to align parental aspirations for children with
policy conceptions of the literate learner as a skilled, measurable, performance-oriented
entity. As a governmental strategy, it mobilizes citizensnamely, parents and childrenas
technically competent textual users and “economized” human capital for the global
knowledge economy.

The move from home reading to mass media and new technologies

While there has undeniably been a standardization of state mandated practices around literacy
extending from teacher education to classroom literacy textbooks and into reading
pedagogies (the UK’s Literacy Strategy alongside OFSTED inspections and accreditation of
university provision and classroom audits is a prime example) during the same period, there
has been a diversification of what we would consider to be instructional literacy texts in
homes and communities. This expansion of the format and scope of the reading “textbook”
and pedagogies into informal educational settings has more recently been complicated further

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by the emergence of a child-focused mass consumer market and the impact of digital media.
It is no longer only formal literacy texts or the school-like texts created for the family market
described above making their way into homes and family literacy practices. In addition to
these more obvious literacy textbooks, the textual artefacts of mass media consumer culture
have become deeply entrenched in contemporary family life and now are pedagogic literacy
teaching tools in their own right.

A decade ago there was still a clear delineation between mass-market early literacy
instruction texts aimed at aspirational parents and the texts that could be associated more
directly with a globalized mass media culture. However, the increased disaggregation of the
consumer and media market in the ensuing years has led to the emergence of an entire niche
market of artefacts, media and consumer items focused specifically around children. These
include texts – online social networking and games sites, virtual worlds, magazines,
television programming - that position children as consumers in their own right and often as
active participants in globalized information and cultural flows. There is a large and growing
body of research and scholarship chronicling the pedagogic power of popular cultural texts
(Marsh 2000; Marsh & Millard 2000) alongside the emergence of new textual practices
around digital media and the various technologies associated with it. This work takes account
of the complexities of literate practices in contemporary multimodal textual landscapes
(Bearne 2005; Kress 2003; Kress & van Leeuwen 2001; Marsh 2005; Sadin 2007), the
emergence of new models of childhood to accompany these emergent practices and cultural
formations (Bullen & Kenway 2001; Dowdall 2009; Holloway & Valentine 2003; Ito,
Baumer, Bittanti, boyd, Cody, Herr-Stephenson, Horst, Lange, Mahendran, Katynka,
Martinez, Pascoe, Perkel, Rosngon, Sims & Tripp, 2009; Jenkins 2006) and the implications
of these shifts for classroom practice (Burnett 2009; Davies & Merchant 2009; Lankshear &
Knobel 2007). The argument is therefore well established that while not replacing print-based
textbooks and textual practices, these emerging multimodal practices respond to, and bring
with them, new cultural, economic and political contexts, and consequently have implications
for literate identities and constructions of “child” and “childhood”.

A key shift that has accompanied the advent of digital technologies and media is the
reconceptualization of children as creators and distributors of text and other content rather
than as receivers of text via school and home-based textbooks and adult mediation (Jenkins,
2006). The word produser has moved into circulation in media and cultural studies fields in
order to describe the new relationship that young people are carving out with technology,
audiences and the various media to which they now have access (Bruns 2009). This is a new
model of childhood that inserts children as agentive individuals within global flows of
information and technology and the identities and skill sets that attach have implications for
the role and form of textbook in literacy instruction. As is the case with the older forms of
instructional textbook provided for children, these identities and skills are never neutral and
not always optimal.

Leaving aside issues of access, there is a large and growing diversity in the types of
pedagogic experiences with text that are available to children both online and off. Online
virtual worlds for children are an interesting emergent example of this diversification in
action and its implications for young children as they learn to be literate across various forms
of text. Media and gaming industry analysts predict that by 2011 more than 50% of all
children between the ages of 6 and 12 will be regular visitors to online virtual worlds. This is,
of course, the precise age group that is the particular focus of the traditional literacy
textbooks of schooling. Currently, worlds like Habbo, Neopets and Club Penguin have 124

8
million, 50 million and 22 million registered users respectively. This makes these sites a
significant cultural and social influence for contemporary children. And, following in the
footsteps of the children’s literature and text market described earlier, they are also highly
profitable business ventures. According to some analysts, the most popular half dozen
children’s virtual worlds, including Club Penguin, Neopets and BarbieGirls, generated
around $US300million in 2009.

One of the fastest growing virtual worlds for children, with registrations already passing 15
million, is Mattell’s BarbieGirl™. BarbieGirls™ is a beautifully constructed Barbie-themed
virtual world where players, predominantly young girls, create an avatar and play games,
chat, earn currency, buy clothing and personal features (such as eyes and hairstyles for their
avatars) and furnish their loft-style apartments. To facilitate these interactive and shopping
activities, the virtual world incorporates a range of text across a series of in-world activity
zones that include bedrooms, clothing shops, cinema, furniture stores, pet stores, mall and
theme park. These texts include orienting information; a range of safety and consumer
information; game instructions; chat-bubble advice and encouragement from in-game
characters; billboards, both animated and static; email and chat; word search games; and
videos. Across this set of texts and sites there are opportunities to read and interpret texts in a
variety of genres and a range of levels and limited, monitored opportunities to create email
and chat texts. However, while the safety and consumer information presented on the
outskirts of the site requires high levels of comprehension and the ability to process quite
complex and lengthy onscreen text, the game instructions and conversational texts with
which players come into regular contact as they navigate the various games and shopping
opportunities make lesser demands on decoding, comprehension and critical analysis
capacities (Carrington & Hodgetts 2010; see also Marsh (in press) for an analysis of young
children engaging with Club Penguin). There is a large volume of text across this online site
as it creates a ‘virtual’ world.

In a print-based publication concerned with textbooks and early childhood literacy, it is

possible to write online sites and texts off as “not textbooks” and not “real” literacy.
However, like the classroom-based text of traditional reading instruction, these texts are
highly pedagogic and play an important role in the construction of young people’s identities
as literates and as citizens. BarbieGirls™ is just one of the many and varied online sites with
which young children may engage on a daily basis, yet it is a powerful one: in its straddling
of popular culture, mass media and digital technologies it is a timely illustration of the
pedagogic reach of these new informal texts. The textual demands of the site are low but at
the same time, the texts are highly gendered, and work to construct young girls as “natural
consumers” (Rappaport 2001). While the formal texts of school instruction work to construct
a state-authorized literate citizen, these powerful informal instructional texts are constructing
other identities, practices and skill sets around text. It is also increasingly clear that online
social networking sites and virtual worlds are highly significant cultural sites for young
people in contemporary cultures (boyd 2007) where a range of social and cultural practices
are developed and practiced.

Our point here is that these are now sites where children encounter a large volume of text and
develop dispositions and practices in relation to citizenship and literacy. Where discussions
of the pedagogic texts of early literacy would once have been limited to religious or school
based textbooks, texts from mass media and popular culture now claim the authority to
instruct children in how to participate in childhood and how to be a particular type of literate
citizen. In his analysis of “unschooled learning”, Mahiri (2001) argued that the official

9
curriculum and the institutionalised school are at risk of being superseded. Commenting more
recently in relation to digital media, Jenkins (2006) fears for the future of young people who
do not access the “hidden curriculum” of participation and learning in online communities of
practice. Where earlier generations of children were socialized into textual practices primarily
within the boundaries of family, school, religious organization and community, media culture
now provides a key apprenticeship into practices with text and literate identities, and provides
many of the social and cultural markers of engagement and successful participation. This
makes these texts key sites and technologies of literacy instruction

From textbooks to pedagogic texts

Ong’s (1958) print-based “pedagogical juggernaut” rolls on. Aided by current policy settings
that emphasise accountability via standardized testing, the modern textbook continues to
assert a dominant influence on early childhood literacy. More than a corpus of valued
knowledges, official ideologies and beliefs, the reading series acts as a codification of
instructional approach, of educational science and as a way of steering from a distance
teachers’ and children’s interactions with literacy. As we have shown here, textbooks,
primers, basal readers, and the common “graded” or “leveled” texts designed for pedagogical
and literary uses in the home remain a central part of childhood in print-based economies and
cultures.

The political economy of text publishing is actively seeking out new products, new markets
and new niches for children, parents and teachers as text consumers. If there is an axiom that
arises from the commodification of school-knowledge and literacy, it is that publishers and
their affiliated knowledge and entertainment corporations necessarily establish, constitute and
build new consumer wants, new communities and new target groups of youth and parents.
Emergent information technologies have helped to shape and accelerate these developments.

At the same time, traditional print-based industries have expanded, consisting of interesting
blends of smaller “start-up” publishers and large multinational affiliates of larger
media/entertainment corporations. The cross-over effects we have described are not just from
textbooks to children’s literature, but also involve the co-development, co-marketing and
development of toys and parenting products, movies and websites, videogames and other
mass media products (Cope & Kalantzis, 2001). On bestseller lists we find children’s
literature and reading series with spin-off connections to movies and cartoons. In this way,
narrative literature acts to directly market products, from Arthur stuffed figures to Bob the
Builder tool-kits. Band-aids, cereals and household products also are spun off from these
characters and themes. Movie and videogames producers routinely purchase the rights of
best-selling children’s books to produce other textual products based on these characters and
stories. While its hegemony in the school-based production of the literate subject remains
unrivalled, the textbook has lost any monopoly on children’s moral, intellectual and
psychological development that it might once have had. In information societies and
economies of signs, the textbook has become one of an array of textual products that are
changing the face of early childhood literacy practices.

In ways that early analysts and critics from Ong (1958) to Elson (1962) couldn’t have
foreseen, the textbook is morphing into new shapes, both as a textual genre and as a
commodity, an object of media cross-over and textual/semiotic convergence (Kalmbach,
1997). Exploded diagrams and “callouts” in textbooks illustrate this process of intertextual
transference and hybridity. Callouts, copied from technical illustrations of the “model kit”
and “repair manual” genre, are the captions of visual/verbal display in exploded diagrams.

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Each callout assembles an arrangement of descriptive and contextual details that complement
and extend the visual image. This shift to visual display in school textbooks is to be expected
as designers, authors and illustrators — who themselves were reared on Sesame Street, MTV,
video and computer games — enter the publishing industry.

The advent and spread of a globalised but differentiated consumer culture based on the
commodification and consumption of texts has already had a visible impact on the reshaping
of the experiences and discourses of childhood (Lee, 2001), and of children’s early literacy
texts and literate practices. In the semiotic economies of “developed” and advanced capitalist
societies, the production and consumption of text and discourse have become key economic
and cultural foci. Early childhood in home and school, mass media and shopping mall is
being reframed as a training ground for early literacy. At the same time, these sites have
become focal points for the commodification of childhood. At once, the literacy textbook is
reasserting its traditional authority over the shaping of what counts as literacy in the school,
while it inexorably seeks out new niches, new crossovers, new forms and new markets.

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