All Flourishing is Mutual: Cultivating a Gift Economy of Literacy

by Lindsey Lush and Melissa Kurtz

The April morning dawned slightly overcast with a threat of rain. Undeterred, approximately 200 parents, siblings, grandparents, and guardians attended our Poetry Picnic. Spread out over the school grounds, on blankets, pillows, and chairs, our community gathered to share “Where I’m From” poems in multiple languages. Poems were written on paper and on sidewalks, saved in pockets, and read aloud. Kindergarten classes read their class poems to families gathered in a circle, each student contributing a sentence to the whole. Older students read poems aloud to their families and friends who then wrote their own poems on templates provided in multiple languages. Families laughed, shared flan and other homemade dishes, and played games together on the green grass. It was a day of joyful abundance, reciprocity, and gratitude, exceeding expectations of attendance and participation. A celebration of literacy.

In this paper, we (re)conceive early literacy education—as a wider, more complex interrelationship of reading, writing, community, place, bodies, and language—with a currency of relationships that flow with abundance, gratitude, and reciprocity through a gift economy. We explore how putting this model in motion at our school cultivated literacy, life, and love in a shared poetry writing project and community engagement event.

We are early literacy scholars working in the field as an instructional coach and a kindergarten intervention teacher. We argue that the current policies and practices attributed to the Science of Reading (SOR) are constructed with the logic of a market economy, shaped by concepts of scarcity, competition, and individualism. We explore the harms inflicted upon teachers’ and students’ bodies and beings through the reading practices required by the Georgia Early Literacy Act 1 (GELA, 2023-2024) and implemented in the public elementary school in northeast Georgia 2 where we worked in Spring 2025. We contrast what these harms produce with the Poetry Picnic we orchestrated at our school, which we consider an enactment of Kimmerer’s description of a gift economy.