All Flourishing is Mutual: Cultivating a Gift Economy of Literacy

Authors

• Lindsey Lush, Augusta UniversityFollow
• Melissa Kurtz, University of GeorgiaFollow

Abstract

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.

Author Biography

Lindsey Lush



Lindsey Lush is a teacher-researcher with 20 years of experience teaching in Georgia public elementary schools and is currently an assistant professor in the College of Education and Human Development at Augusta University. In research and practice, Lindsey explores critical feminisms, posthumanisms, social and environmental justice, emergent learning theory and practice, social studies education, reading, writing, and embodied literacies. Her current work involves considerations for developing capacities for attending to the body in literacy research and education.

Melissa Kurtz



Melissa Kurtz is a Georgia educator with over 20 years of experience as a teacher, bilingual family and community engagement coordinator, and instructional coach. She completed her doctorate at the University of Georgia in Educational Theory and Practice, focusing on Teacher Education and Early Childhood Education. Her research and practice explore educational policy development and implementation using feminist poststructural and posthuman philosophies. Her current work interrogates taken-for-granted discourses and structures operating in educational policy and practice, deconstructing them to open possibilities for the new in pedagogy and elementary education.

Recommended Citation

Lush, L., & Kurtz, M. (2026). All flourishing is mutual: Cultivating a gift economy of literacy. Occasional Paper Series, (55). DOI: https://doi.org/10.58295/2375-3668.1577