Literacy research and the uses of history: Studying literacy, schooling and young people in new times

This paper has discussed the potential for using a genealogical approach to the critical study of a problematisation. In a time when discourses and media proliferate, when there is almost a flood of texts, images and productions of truth about young people, literacy and schooling, it is easy for researchers to be swept along in this flood and view as ‘natural’ the current versions of the common sense of schooling, adolescence and literacy studies. Historical study has the potential to denaturalise that process-not so that we as researchers can stand aside from it, on the banks of the swollen river, as it were (there are no fixed points from which we can research these issues). Rather, a genealogical approach provides some tools and devices, like snags and logs in the river, to help researchers swim against and across the discursive current, as well as with it.