In the United States there is a host of ‘undocumented’ citizens, many of whom are hoping that, under the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act), they will be able to have an avenue through which to become citizens. In this book, Amy Wan examines how literacy is used to define and grant citizenship, and whether the DREAM Act is a path to citizenship beyond the legal definition of the term.

Wan begins by attempting to define what is considered as a citizen in both a legal and cultural sense and how they have interplayed over time in an attempt to ‘counteract… the ambient nature of the use of the term citizenship’ (p. 18), which she explains as the nebulous nature of what citizenship means. In the following chapters, she explores, within the context of a historical analysis, three pedagogical systems in the United States that were intended to aid students in becoming citizens: (i) The Americanization project strove to combat threats from foreign political views (p. 39) and was used to cultivate employer-friendly ideals. (ii) The labour education perspective aimed to produce citizens of an educational level that would ‘level the playing field’ (p. 73). The labour education movement hoped that a more educated participatory citizenship would actively play a role in labour reform, before the movement eventually tried to distance itself from the idea in order to address public anxieties about its political leanings. And (iii) the higher-education institutions were trying to adjust to a developing feeling in literacy teaching of the need to prove their usefulness within an increasing number and diversity of student enrolments nationwide, as well as trying to adjust classes to have a more practical impact on the future lives of the citizens they produce. The author during these investigations touches upon the anxieties of the ‘native born populations’ at the time and the impact on how these pedagogical spaces were shaped.

Through her timeline of the early 1900s to the present day, she explores the interplay of the goals of literacy learning as a tool to instill citizenship, drawing upon the immigrant crisis as an example of how the popular fears of those around can affect these goals. The author attempts to show the reader how literacy was used as a tool to shape citizens in response to the changes in society, putting the onus on the individual. She then examines how literacy training may strengthen exclusions based upon legal, cultural, and economic states in the present time. This is done by drawing upon the stories of people such as Jose Antonio Vargas as examples.

The work is both relevant and clear in the presentation of its subject matter and thus proves to be a splendid addition to the catalog of available works in the field.