Who is entitled to be a literacy expert? Category entitlements of parents and professionals in the literature on children's literacy learning.

This paper critically analyses representations of librarians, teachers and parents in texts pertaining to children's literacy development. Using Jonathan Potter's concept of "category entitlement," we discussed the ways that writers in both the library and information science (LIS) and education discourse communities represent particular groups of people as "literacy experts." We found that representations of librarians' and teachers' professional expertise may serve to devalue the work of parents and children, and that each profession's specification of an exclusive domain of expertise can support the construction of barriers to meaningful collaboration among librarians, teachers, and parents.