In this article, we share findings from our process of “reading the past, writing the future” of elementary research in NCTE’s journals. Our analysis focused on major domains of the field, including literature, writing, reading, language, and multimodal literacies, and spanned Elementary English Review, which first appeared in 1924, was renamed Elementary English in 1947, and became Language Arts in 1975; Primary Voices, which ran from 1993 to 2002; and Research in the Teaching of English (RTE), which began in 1967. Findings revealed both surprising continuities across decades as well as clear and important social and cultural shifts that influenced theory, methods, and practice in the field, emphasizing the importance of 1) recognizing the level of historical and political influences in elementary literacy research, 2) paying explicit attention to how the cultural-historical zeitgeist shapes our work as scholars, and 3) interrogating how our representations of research problems may contribute to the continuance of social and cultural inequities.

In this article, I present a qualitative analysis of third graders’ experiences with a unit from their district-mandated commercial reading curriculum in which the children made strong connections between a fictional account of a Depression-era farm family’s economic hardships and their own 21st century lives in a city with one of the highest childhood poverty rates in the United States. The language of the curriculum revealed class-privileged assumptions and an instrumental, competency-based approach to literacy that provided no official space for resonance between reader and text around the issue of poverty. Employing depth hermeneutics, a form of critical discourse analysis, I discuss analyses of three texts: the literature selection, the children’s written responses, and the teacher’s edition for that unit. Implications for research and practice include the importance of analyzing complex interactions between curriculum, policy, and the material realities of children’s lives; the need to hold commercial curricula accountable for recognizing and engaging the experiences of children living in poverty; and the academic and moral imperative to include the lived knowledge of students and the emotional dimensions of response in what counts as successful literacy engagement.