Part of a series exploring how language influences and is influenced by educational processes, this book describes difficulties boys and girls experience in learning to read and write due to gendered divisions of labor. The book draws on an ethnographic study that followed 13 children from kindergarten through second grade and found that, in learning to read and write, children construct gendered identities and negotiate their social relations with parents, siblings, teachers, and peers; thus even in learning literacy, traditional gender roles in family, school, and society are often unwittingly perpetuated. The book's chapters are: (1) "Learning about Literacy from Children," presenting the assumptions of prevailing research perspectives: emergent literacy, social construction of literacy, and literacy as social status and identity; (2) "The Roots of Literacy Learning in Families," introducing four of the children and their families and showing how literacy is grounded in family relations and how children constructed their own orientations toward literacy; (3) "Literacy Instruction in the Kindergarten Classroom," presenting the pedagogical context of children's literacy learning, and the approach to literacy learning in the kindergarten and its theoretical basis in the various perspectives on literacy; (4) "Children's Orientations toward Literacy in Kindergarten," comparing the classroom literacy learning of two children, and showing that children's responses to a teacher's pedagogical approach result from literacy orientations they had constructed at home; (5)"Tensions in Children's Kindergarten Literacy Learning," focusing on sources of tension in children's literacy learning and in the teacher's choices as related to gender and work issues; (6) "Beyond Stereotypes: The Complexity of Negotiating Gender and Work Relations in Literacy Learning," considering how structuring processes in the family and classroom related to work and gender affect individual literacy learning; (7) "Continuity and Change in First and Second Grade," examining continuity and change in four children's orientations toward literacy; and (8) "Reflections on the Journey," offering final observations on literacy, gender, and work, and arguing that theoretical perspectives that allow fuller and more complex understandings of emergent literacy are needed. An appendix summarizes the data collected on the children. Contains over 200 references. (TM)