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This article examines the code-switching (CS) practices of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) young children in kindergarten and grade 1 classrooms. The author argues that their use of CS went beyond relief of psycholinguistic stress or coping with liminality (sense of living between two languages and cultures). Through several narratives constructed using ethnographic data, the author explores CLD students' use of CS to respond to the sociolinguistic and sociopolitical dynamics that they encountered in their early-years classrooms. CS enabled students to address their language and literacy needs, assert their identities, and defy subtractive and assimilative orientations that they experienced with respect to lack of incorporation of their first languages. Further, data affirm Cummins'(2001) assertion that students do not passively accept dominantgroup attributions of inferiority, but actively resist the process of subordination.

This paper is a critical examination of the state of Canadian literacy education and research and its effects on young children. Its purpose is to appraise the ways in which disability is currently being produced and practiced in early school curricula and to argue for a theoretically rich curricula which begins from children’s strengths. To accomplish these goals, this paper commences with a brief appraisal of curriculum studies’ lack of attention to issues of dis/ability, considers major movements in literacy curricula, then contends that an innovation in literacy curricula the authors term, “the biomedical approach”, is pathologizing entire school populations and inflicting upon them reductionistic literacy curricula. This paper illustrates the biomedical approach through a narrative of a public school and the experiences of its early years staff and students.

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In the current industry‐driven educational climate, resources are produced, marketed, and subsequently understood to be synonymous with “balanced literacy.” This article critically examines various programs currently in wide use to demonstrate this occurrence. The examination specifically provides examples of how the appropriation and marketization of limited understandings of complex theories can restrict teachers' classroom practice. To this end, conceptualizations of balanced literacy are offered and discussed in relationship to products identified as providing balanced literacy instruction. The limitations of these programs and the effects they have had on the organization of classroom time and teachers' decision‐making processes are analyzed. The analysis is intended to provoke critical conversations about the nature of mass‐purchased literacy “solutions” and teachers' professional practice and development. Whether readers are in a position to purchase or to implement mandated programs, a guide to foster good “teacher consumerism” is offered to address the inadequacies of purchased literacy programs. The article considers questions and concerns and provides insights regarding the roles students and their teachers play in negotiating how literacy teaching and learning are understood and developed in classrooms. There is no sure cure so idiotic that some superintendent of schools will not swallow it. The aim seems to be to reduce the whole teaching process to this sort of automatic reaction, to discover some master formula that will not only take the place of competence and resourcefulness in the teacher but that will also create an artificial receptivity in the child. H. L. Mencken, 1918, in Postman, 1995, p. 49