Abstract
Classroom observations and interviews with students, their teacher, principal, and former teachers are used to understand how reading lessons and classroom situations more generally were socially constructed during a summer school remedial reading program. The teacher, feeling constrained by what the students' former teachers had ritualistically listed as skill needs, and the upper-middle-class students, feeling that they might get into trouble if they questioned what the teacher assigned and that their parents could help them anyway, seemed to collaborate unwittingly in constructing reading lessons which did not remediate reading deficiencies. These patterns of resistance and accommodation to contradictions in their experience are also seen to help reproduce certain ideological and structural features of an unequal political economy, even while the basis for a fundamental critique is in reach.
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