Reclaiming Early Childhood Literacies

Narratives of Hope, Power, and Vision

Richard J Meyer, Kathryn F. Whitmore, Richard J Meyer, Kathryn F. Whitmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317371731
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

At a time when literacy has become more of a political issue than a research or pedagogical one, this volume refocuses attention on work with young children that places them at the center of their literacy worlds. Drawing on robust and growing knowledge which is often marginalized because of political and legislative forces, it explores young children's literacies as inclusive, redefined, and broadened—encompassing technologies, the arts, multiple modalities, and teaching and learning for democracy, cultural sustainability and social justice. Highlighted themes include children's rights to grow through playful engagements with multiple literacies to interrogate their worlds; adults who expand and inspire children's consciousness and awareness of others and the world around them; the centrality of meaning making in all aspects of language and literacy development; a deep respect for diversities, including languages, cultures, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status and more; and an expansive understanding of the nature of texts.

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Reclaiming Early Childhood Literacies

Richard J. Meyer and Kathryn F. Whitmore

The image of a mother and child is saturated with ambiguities of past, present, and future. We might question or make assumptions about their genealogy, historical events, economic conditions, cultural issues, education, or the life stories that brought these two human beings together. We can wonder about where they live, the access they have to power and agency, and the web of relationships around them. We could, informed by some of these realities, engage in conjecture about the child’s future. In this book, our focus is on young children’s literacy lives, and how they are influenced by all of the issues or factors just mentioned. We use the idea of reclaiming because some important bodies of research and pedagogy have, for over 3 decades, been largely marginalized and under- or unsupported by government agencies, legislators, and policy makers. We want our work to be part of a growing body of teachers, researchers, families, and communities pushing back against this marginalization, informed by the past for a better future.

Young Children at the Center of Literacy

Young children’s literacies have become more of a political issue than a research or pedagogical one. Special interest groups and corporate profits either celebrate or protest one literacy issue or another (Common Core Standards, evaluation of students, evaluation of teachers, etc.) in state and national legislatures and educationpolicy-making forums, but robust and growing knowledge about young children’s literacies is often bracketed. This volume refocuses attention on work with young children that places them, once again, at the center of their literacy worlds. As editors, we aim to provide readers with the following exemplars of a view of young children’s literacy lives that has at its heart:

• children’s right to grow through playful engagements with multiple literacies;

• a deep respect for diversities, such as languages, cultures, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and more;

• opportunities for children to use multiple ways of knowing to interrogate their worlds in order to reflect, engage, and act;

• adults who nurture and care as they expand and inspire children’s consciousness and awareness of others and the world around them; and

• the centrality of meaning making in all aspects of language and literacy development.

Our intention is to add to the growing knowledge base about early literacy learning and teaching by exploring the possibilities of young children’s literacies in an age when “literacy” is pluralized and more inclusive, redefined, and broadened. Our approach to literacies includes technologies (Wang et al., 2010; Vasquez & Felderman, 2012; Wohlwend, 2010); the arts (McArdle & Boldt, 2013; Narey, 2009); multiple modalities for knowing, learning, and expressing (Dyson, 2015; Kress, 2003); and teaching and learning for social justice (Kuby, 2013).

The voices in this volume include teachers, children, researchers, and families that contributed as participants, seekers of justice, observers, scientists, artists, and members of a growing thought collective involved in making sense of the many ways in which meaning is made. Our work reminds us of the joy that exists in the lives of young children at school and at home, in their neighborhoods, and with their families; and in the lives of the adults who care for them and teach them, despite the reality that “joy” is not part of any formal objectives, official goals, or government standards that we can find. We view literacies as the many ways in which learners actively make meaning (Halliday, 1975; Wells, 2009), an idea to which the contributors return quite frequently.

This book is about young children’s literacy lives framed from the perspective of with. We work with children to understand their worlds and curiosities, needs and sensibilities, desires and dreams, and angsts and passions, especially as they play within the many literacy worlds in which they live presently, and will live in the future. Our focus on working with children demands that they act as informants (Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984), partners (Thomas & O’Kane, 1998), and active participants in research and pedagogy (Harcourt, Perry & Waller, 2011).

Our work resonates with the increasing number of researchers and teachers around the world and relies on The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989) and viewing young children’s literacy as a human right. Article 12 of the Convention serves as a good example of the tone and content of this book:

States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

Even more specific to the work of literacy teachers and researchers is Article 13, which states that:

[t]he child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.

According to the UNICEF website (http://www.unicef.org/crc/index_30229.html), only two countries have not ratified the Rights of the Child convention (which is the UN term for a treaty). Somalia has not done so because of a lack of a central government and structures that would allow it to do so. The second nonratifier is the United States. Although UNICEF suggests that the ratification of a convention is cumbersome in the United States, we argue that perhaps the document is too progressive and, therefore, too controversial for United States approval because of the freedoms it affords. Children and teachers are politicized to the point of cognitive and emotional restraint when they are denied these freedoms. Thus we hope to contribute to the work of reclaiming freedom.

Contexts of Young Children’s Literacies

Learning to be literate is a constant process of negotiation in which meanings and intentions flow into one another through participation in literacy events (Rowe, 2010). It is a process of transaction in which meaning makers work to understand others and make themselves sufficiently understood by others (Whitmore, Martens, Goodman, & Owocki, 2004). In the case of new babies, Piaget offers insight into this negotiative process when he suggests, “It is not so much that children don’t know how to talk; they try out many languages until they find one that their parents can understand” (in Rabinow, 1977/2007, pp. 167–168). Piaget underscores the power of the relationship between a young child and the world, and inherent in such relationships are the freedoms articulated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Literacy for young children begins when they first make their presence known in the womb and in the world. They act upon their world and their world responds; their world acts upon them and they respond. Their experiences in reading the world are mediated by those around them, and the meaning they make is a collaborative effort. One example of this is Tapahonso’s (1993) description of an event in which some Navajo families participate, when the dried umbilical cord of a baby falls off and is planted “near the house so the child will always return home and help the mother” (p. 17). Metaphorically, the relationships that are central to young children’s literacy lives get planted in multiple places for different purposes. Understanding the planting of an umbilical cord as a commitment to family is cultural, linguistic, and visceral because of its uniqueness to a cultural group, the language in which it is expressed, and the sensations within a body when one knows that part of their body is interred in an ancestral home for a particular reason. Such actions and knowledge predispose a young child to make meaning in certain ways, yet the reality is that we cannot predict the specific meaning that a given child might make and the ways in which that meaning might change over time.

The newborn pictured at the beginning of the chapter, like most children, will eventually move from the very home-centered context of her current literacy world into childcare and school settings where the literacy activities that occur may be vastly different from home or quite similar. Gee (2012) and others have argued that there may be significant differences because home settings have different parameters, rules, expectations, and uses of language and literacy than school. Gee also argued that the more school resembles home in these ways, the easier the transition is for children as they venture between two worlds. We tend to agree that if a new setting has many strange-to-the child attributes, a greater investment of energy is required to understand the differences, but we emphasize the greater responsibility of the school to accommodate all young learners and their families.

A dramatic example of how home and school, including the relationships within them, can vary is provided by Suina (2001) as he described moving from his young childhood experiences in an American Indian Pueblo in New Mexico to a public school that felt, smelled, looked, and sounded so very different from home. He moved from being the center of attention of his loving grandmother to being one of many in a large classroom. He moved from ceremonies, rituals, and other familiar structures of participation (Philips, 1983) to a place with different rules and norms. The transition from his elderly grandmother, “with beautiful brown skin and a colorful dress” to a teacher with “clothes [that] were of one color and drab” left him confused (p. 93). Specific to his teacher, Suina remembered that, “her pale and skinny form made me worry that she was very ill” (p. 93). When he wanted to communicate with his teacher, her response was, “Leave your Indian [language] at home!” (p. 94). The books that he used in school showed things he hadn’t seen, such as homes with pitched roofs and sidewalks. Suina knew, as he grew, that the tension between these two discourses had to be resolved for him to live in both worlds:

The [W]hite man’s [world] was flashy, less personal, but very comfortable. The Cochiti were both attracted and pushed toward these new ways, which they had little to say about. There was no choice left but to compete with the white man on his terms for survival. To do that I knew I had to give up part of my life.

p. 96

Many children still attend schools in which their home languages, cultures, and views of the world are dismissed as deficient, defective, and unimportant like Suina experienced. Critical race scholars describe these events as microaggressions: “subtle insults (verbal, nonverbal, and/or visual) directed toward people of color, often automatically or unconsciously” (Solórzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000, p. 60). Microaggressions occur because “one group believes itself to be superior” and has the power to “carry out racist behavior” (p. 61). Some young children experience microaggressions continuously over time (Compton-Lilly, 2015) so they become naturalized, leading to what Dyson (2015) calls “the erasure of childhoods” (p. 199).

Thankfully, there are counter examples of early school experiences like Suina’s. For example, we’ve known for decades, especially from research about funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2013), that all families and communities have intellectual resources that can drive curriculum development and build relationships around children’s languages and cultures. Reclaiming is a commitment to diversities of language, culture, race, ethnicity, gender, nationalities, socioeconomic states, and more with the ultimate goal of a more just world. Within the chapters of this book are the narratives of reclaiming relationships, knowledge, and consciousness currently forced into the margins by meritocratic, corporate, and legislative/policy demands placed upon schools. Rather than a divide, we argue for a contributive stance that relies upon the rich resources that exist across multiple settings in which children and teachers live and learn.

Meaning Making

We have known for some time that “children initiate and create language years before they come to school” (Goodman, 1978, p. 41) and that the roots of their literacies are planted within and nurtured by the functions for which literacies are used (Goodman, 1980). Such understanding occurs within and because of the many social settings in which they learn, within a productive and dynamic tension between individual invention and social convention (Goodman, 2014).

Young children are busy making meaning via drawing, drama, music, movement, construction, and many other modes that contribute to the meaning data pool (Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984) from which they draw, with each mode influencing the other. Rowe (2010), in suggesting new directions for early literacy research, reminds us of how important it is to think about literacy learning as collaborative, based in participation, tied to materials and space, and ideological. The political work of that ideology is the work to actively reclaim it. Young children’s meaning-making worlds are constituted of relationships as they learn language with others as part of their ongoing negotiation of meanings. Their learning is social and embodied and their literacy lives are wrapped inextricably within and around the literacy lives of others. They constantly put forth, test, and adjust hypotheses about their literacy learning.

As we work to reclaim early childhood literacies in this book, the contributors address questions such as the following:

• How can all of children’s strengths as literacy learners find places in early childhood classrooms?

• How do various relationships serve young children’s literacy learning?

• How do the many modalities to which young children have access influence the nature and content of their literacy lives?

• How can early literacies teachers work against the resurgence of damaging national and international mandates, standards, and policies?

Just two months prior to our initiating the writing of this introduction, Rick’s daughter, Zoe, gave birth to Hayden Lily (pictured at the start of this chapter), his first granddaughter. When Rick visited Hayden during the first few hours of her life, he viewed this remarkable infant as both a grandfather and a researcher. Hayden became a signifier of every young child as we considered the first moments of a child’s life as thick with literacy. Issues of languages, cultures, learning, and teaching swirled through our conversations as Hayden helped us co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Reclaiming Early Childhood Literacies
• PILLAR ONE: Learning
• PILLAR TWO: Teaching
• PILLAR THREE: Curriculum
• PILLAR FOUR: Language
• PILLAR FIVE: Sociocultural
• List of Contributors
• Index