All Flourishing is Mutual: Cultivating a Gift Economy of Literacy

In this paper, two scholars and practicing elementary educators argue that the policies and practices of the Science of Reading (SoR) movement in early literacy education are being constructed with the logic of a market economy, shaped by neoliberal ideologies of individualism, scarcity, and competition. Compelled by our concerns for the bodies and beings of readers and reading teachers in the context of our Northeast Georgia public elementary school and provoked by our shared engagement with The Serviceberry, Indigenous scientist and scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book on lessons from the natural world, we engage a postqualitative approach to emergent, relational inquiry that asks how we may think about early literacy research and pedagogy differently. Kimmerer’s concept of the Serviceberry gift economy provides a theoretical lens rooted in relational abundance, gratitude, and reciprocity that extends throughout the inquiry, analysis, and implications. This paper offers a critical analysis of a market economic logic and its neoliberal formations in education that we argue have created the conditions for specific SoR provisions, such as universal screeners and intervention plans (two requirements of Georgia’s 2023 Early Literacy Act), to have a significant impact on the early literacy landscape. We illustrate how market logic works to reduce, nominalize, and commodify reading and reading education, producing problematic identifications and performances for readers and their teachers. Refusing the individualized competition and scarcity embedded in these practices, we (re)conceive early literacy learning—as a rich, complex interrelationship of reading, writing, community, place, bodies, language, and more—in a gift economy. We explore how a gift economy of literacy was cultivated in a professional development session, shared writing project, and community engagement event and offer action-oriented invitations that engage educators and researchers in keeping the gift of literacy in motion.