Negotiating a Permeable Curriculum: On Literacy, Diversity, and the Interplay of Children’s and Teachers’ Worlds

Negotiating a Permeable Curriculum: On Literacy, Diversity, and the Interplay of Children’s and Teacher’s Worlds is part of the Garn Press Women Scholars Series. Originally printed in 1993 in the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Concept Paper Series, Negotiating a Permeable Curriculum revisits Dyson’s powerful concept of a permeable curriculum, a socially constructed learning space created by teachers and children.

Negotiating a Permeable Curriculum is a timeless piece as it is relevant to current moves in education with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). In 2010, the CCSS were released as a set of standards devised to create national benchmarks of student knowledge and skills in literacy and math. While not specifically mentioning curriculum, the CCSS explicitly outlines what should be taught from kindergarten to grade 12 and, therefore, it has had a major impact on establishing a national curriculum and assessment system led by private, corporate companies.

Challenging the standardization of learning, Dyson ask readers to push back the “curricular curtain” to wonder about the complex social and intellectual work in which children engage when they become writers. The emphasis on becoming focuses on how learning to write is always a dynamic state, as children learn about themselves while they learn about written language. In Negotiating a Permeable Curriculum, Dyson provides concrete examples of the social and cultural challenges learning to become writers entails. Dyson highlights how teachers can enact a permeable curriculum so that the worlds of teachers and children come together in instructionally powerful ways.

Anne Haas Dyson, Ph.D., is Faculty Excellence Professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She began her career in education as an elementary school teacher at the El Paso Catholic Diocese in El Paso, Texas in 1972. Dr. Dyson received her Ph.D. in Education from the University of Texas in Austin, Texas in 1981. Dr. Dyson has published 12 books and over 100 journal articles and book chapters all regarding children’s writing. Her most recent book will be an edited volume titled Child Cultures, Schooling, and Literacy: Global Perspectives on Composing Unique Lives, which will be published by Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group in 2015. In 2015, Dr. Dyson, along Dr. Celia Genishi received the prestigious Outstanding Educator of the Year Award from NCTE.

Bobbie Kabuto, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Literacy Education in the Elementary and Early Childhood Education Department at Queens College, City University of New York. She teaches and advises in the B-6 Literacy Program that leads to New York State certification as a B-6 Reading Teacher. Her research interests include the relationships among early bi/literacy, socially constructed identities, and language ideologies. She currently works with families of struggling beginning readers and writers. Her work has been highlighted in journals such as The Reading Teacher, The Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, and Early Childhood Research and Practice. Her book Becoming Biliterate: Identity, Ideology, and Learning to Read and Write in Two Languages was published by Taylor and Francis in July 2010.