Rethinking Early Literacies

Reading and Rewriting Worlds

Mariana Souto-Manning, Haeny S. Yoon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317308645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Rethinking Early Literacies honors the identities of young children as they read, write, speak, and play across various spaces, in and out of pre/school. Despite narrow curricular mandates and policies, the book highlights the language resources and tools that children cultivate from families, communities, and peers. The chapters feature children's linguistic flexibility with multiple languages, creative appropriation of popular culture, participation in community literacy practices, and social negotiation in the context of play. Throughout the book, the authors critically reframe what it means to be literate in contemporary society, specifically discussing the role of educators in theorizing and rethinking language ideologies for practice. Issues influencing early childhood education in trans/national contexts are forefronted (e.g. racism, immigration rights, readiness) throughout the book, with a call to support and sustain communities of color.

PART I

Young Children as Literate Beings

Young children are literate beings. This is the assumption that undergirds this book. They read words and worlds. They are capable. They don’t enter schools without literacy or without language. They are sophisticated symbol readers and symbol weavers (Dyson 1990). Although the specific literacy practices in which they engage may not be immediately visible (or valued) by adults, young children are purposeful communicators who negotiate literacies in deliberate ways—through actions and interactions. To explain what we mean by the statement that young children are literate beings, in this book, we explore theoretical constructs through examples from a variety of sites involving diverse children from birth to eight years of age (the early childhood years).

In Chapter 1, we delve into issues of identity, culture, and agency. Chapter 1 portrays young children as communicatively and culturally competent long before they enter classroom spaces. In it, we explore the multiple contexts of children’s language development in their sociocultural worlds, emphasizing the rich resources and communicative repertoires that all children uniquely possess. We give an overview of theories that address identities as lived, produced, and conceptualized through activities in social contexts, through practice. These activities are inevitably situated in how children are positioned in their own communities, within social institutions (e.g., schools, churches), and within the larger society (Archer 2000, 2003; Carter and Goodwin 1994; Corsaro 2011; Dyson 1993; Freire 1970; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain 2001; James 2011; Tatum 1992). Drawing on the work of Hilliard (2009), we explore children’s literate identities, making visible how all children are gifted. We challenge the idea of the achievement gap, elucidating how there is no achievement gap at birth (Delpit 2012) and move to deconstruct the idea that children need to race to catch up (Genishi and Dyson 2012) or to master the so-called basics (Dyson 2013).

Chapter 2, Reading and Rewriting Worlds and Words, takes a sociopolitical approach toward definitions of literacy, arguing for broadened and expansive understandings of reading, writing, and speaking. Through examples from multiple settings, we advocate for the rethinking of literacies by repositioning texts, power, and identity centrally (Bauman and Briggs 2003; Collins and Blot 2003; Dyson 1990; Genishi and Dyson 2009; Gutiérrez, Martínez, and Morales 2009; Lewis, Enciso, and Moje 2007). At the same time, we deconstruct the idea of “readiness” (Graue 1992), reenvisioning it as a concept used to marginalize children whose language practices are misaligned with linguistic norms (Souto-Manning 2013a). Instead, we move away from traditional definitions of reading and writing by exploring the sophisticated communicative repertoires that children embody (Alim 2005; Dyson and Smitherman 2009; Heath 1983; Paris 2009; Razfar 2005).

Chapter 3 explores young children’s multiple social communicative contexts, recognizing that they are exposed to and develop language before entering school—in homes and communities, with peers, and across environments. Their language usage is a tool to engage with others in their immediate contexts—to interact with adults, to connect with other children, and to take part in sociocultural activities. That is, children develop identities through active participation in their social and cultural communities using language as a mediating tool. Thus, in Chapter 3, we explore the social, cultural, and political contexts that influence children’s language interactions, and move toward critically redefining what it means to be literate. Through examples from a variety of settings, we explain how being literate in one social context, especially in the digital, contemporary age, does not always translate into being literate in another context (Marsh 2005a)—and how meaning making is context-dependent. Young children often navigate within and across multiple social worlds (Gutiérrez 2008) that are organized by their own sets of rules, interactions, and social practices, and instead of complying they can engage in challenging and changing them (Vasquez 2014).

Starting with these three chapters, which make up Part I, we invite you to rethink children’s positionings in literacy—from consumers to producers; from passive recipients of knowledge to change agents. Through examples from a variety of early educational and community settings, we rethink literacies in expansive and inclusive ways, centrally accounting for issues of power and identity (Bauman and Briggs 2003; Collins and Blot 2003; Dyson 2013; Genishi 1992; Gutiérrez 2008; Martínez 2010; Orellana 2009). In doing so, we move away from traditional definitions of reading and writing as fully comprising literacy, using cultural historical activity theoretical tools to re-mediate literacy (Cole and Griffin 1983; Gutiérrez, Morales, and Martínez 2009). Throughout Part I, we trouble prevalent discourses in early literacy—such as readiness and basics (Dyson 2013; Graue 1992)—and invite readers to see children’s varied and sophisticated communicative repertoires.

1

IDENTITY, CULTURE, AND AGENCY

Lou: Look, I made a heart. [Lou turned his paper over and drew a box on the back of page 2. He made a shape that looked like a sideways heart.]

Jaquan: That’s no heart.

Lou [to Haeny]: Ain’t this a heart? Ain’t this a heart?

Tonea: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. A heart is like this. [She tries to draw one on Lou’s paper. He quickly snatches it out of her reach.]

Jaquan: A heart is like this. [He starts drawing a heart on his own paper.]

Tonea: I love my mommy.

Lou: You don’t love your mommy, and I know your mommy.

Tonea: Who is my mommy?

Lou: Your mom…. Your mom, she works … she works at a nursing home. Don’t your momma work at a nursing home? [Tonea does not respond.]

Jolene: Tonea is the best girl at this table.

Lou, Jaquan, Jolene, Tonea (and Jon, introduced later) were all kindergartners who occupied the same table at a school in the midwestern U.S. Lou, Tonea, and Jaquan were African American children who lived in the same neighborhood within a small urban community, making it likely that they knew each other outside of school. All three children received free or reduced-price lunch (a U.S. marker of low-/no-income). Although it was unclear whether or not Tonea’s mother worked at the nursing home, the conversations followed trajectories like the one above where one of the children tried to bring up people who others might know (e.g., an older sibling, an auntie, or a parent). They attempted to connect with each other using language varieties (e.g., “Ain’t this a heart?”), popular cultural artifacts, references to people and places within the neighborhood, and lessons on literacy. They taught each other how to write words and draw shapes, they incorporated different phrases that became group norms, they praised one another excessively, and they judged one another’s work harshly. Most importantly, they became a distinct social group that did not just exist in a physical space, they were “mobilized or otherwise ‘called into being’ … on the basis of shared representation and undertakings” (Collins and Blot 2003, 105). This particular group of storytellers held diverse ideas made visible in the company of one another; they expanded these ideas in conversation with each other, but at other times, they defended ideas in genuine conflict. In the background were texts featuring children’s literacy attempts (e.g., letters, shapes, drawings, and markings), constructed through the interplay of text and talk (Collins and Blot 2003).

Throughout the school year, the children were building a literacy repertoire through interactions like the one above, appropriating tools provided by the teacher and suggested by the curriculum as well as tools distinctive of the individual children in the group. The children in this classroom sat at rectangular tables assigned by Debbie White, their teacher. In the official classroom space, this grouping was arbitrarily named Table 1, because the table was physically arranged closest to the door. Over time, table numbers became “mini-communities,” a term insightfully coined by Debbie White as she joyfully watched ensuing social scenarios as well as the formation of unpredictable bonds. Children often referred to themselves by table numbers in order to make distinctions among themselves. For instance, the children described above would say from time to time, “This is Table 1,” or “Table 1 is the best table,” explaining their small group in relation to other tables. In a sense, table numbers became an emic term that children adopted to signify their group identity within the larger classroom context. Debbie carefully chose the configurations of these tables saying that she tried to mix up the table groups by abilities, interests, and relational connections. She looked beyond academic qualifiers, highlighting children who were attuned to helping, who thrived on verbal acuity, who were excessive rule followers, who were creatively subversive, and who typified a good role model.

Being a teacher for more than twenty years, Debbie White was amused by children’s divergent thinking and by how they created spaces for conversation and talk, even in regulated curricular boundaries where silence and independence were valued. In the first month of school, children were moved to different tables for various reasons (e.g., fighting, off-task behavior, reconfiguring of group dynamics), but by October many of the groups remained consistent for the year—a purposeful decision by Debbie to create smaller communities within the larger classroom community. She reminds us of the important role of teachers in facilitating the growth of social relationships by orchestrating the physical, intellectual, and contextual spaces for interactions to flourish. In other words, seemingly ordinary tasks like arranging seats, scheduling literacy events, choosing books, providing materials, and asking questions are much deeper ideological decisions. These decisions either open up children’s identities or force them to go undercover. In sharing the stories at Table 1, we seek to reveal the rich, literate practices children undertake when given the curricular flexibility to play out their identities in the company of their peers.

Tonea: Identities in Motion

For Tonea (an African American girl who was labeled below average in reading), moving to Table 1 at the end of September revealed a different side of her identity which had remained hidden prior to that time. At the beginning of the school year, Tonea seemed disengaged and disinterested in literate activities—it took her a while to complete activities, she often stared off into the distance seemingly lost in her own thoughts, and she relied on her tablemates to help her since all of them quickly “came to her rescue” even when she did not ask.

When she attempted writing, the boy sitting next to her teased her and discredited her authorial attempts:

Jeff: You know what you’re doing? You know what you’re doing? You’re writing scribble scrabble.

Tonea: Okay, don’t look at it. [She covers her whole paper with her arms and her head.]

Jeff: [giggles and tries to look at it] Writing scribble scrabble. Writing scribble scrab.

Debbie also noticed that Tonea was getting a lot of assistance from another girl at the table, who was trying to be helpful. Instead of allowing Tonea to be an equitable participant in the group, this positioned her (by no fault of the others) at the periphery of participation, as someone who needed help and was deemed incompetent (as Jeff’s comment alluded to). In a child’s world, “scribble scrabble” is viewed as an insult directed at those who cannot write.

For example, in the children’s book Scribble (Freedman 2007), the older sister criticizes the younger child’s “scribble kitty,” proclaiming that her illegible markings looked merely “like a scribble.” Early on, children begin to understand the types of communication deemed valuable and appropriate for the mainstream world: neatly formed drawings and letters. While Emma (the author of the scribble kitty) crafted a coherent storyline replete with active characters, her sister dismissed her efforts as messy. Therefore, both adults and other children impose and silence the written approximations of young children via curriculum, standards, benchmarks, and language ideologies. Missing from imposed benchmarks is the purpose of writing, to make connections with others, self, and the world. Consequently, Tonea struggled and became disconnected in the social groupings of this table, choosing not to connect with her peers. Like Emma in Scribbles, she pulled away from those who did not validate her communicative attempts. Unlike Emma, who reacted with anger, hurling insults at her sister (i.e., “You don’t know anything!”), Tonea withdrew, grew silent, and remained seemingly reclusive. She also was seen as struggling in school assessments, classroom performance measures, and Debbie’s initial observations. She was positioned—at her table, in her classroom, and by the school—as someone who needed help, from a deficit perspective.

Moving Tonea to Table 1 was an intentional, ethical choice made by Debbie White that moved beyond pedagogy, teaching, and curriculum. Tonea’s lack of participation was not lost on Debbie’s watchful and concerned gaze. As Holland and colleagues (2003) remind us, identities are shifting and fluid via interactions between social actors, the rules negotiated between members of a group, the practices that are taken up, and the ideas that are valued. Children appropriate these varying roles as they decide which practices are sustained, discarded, and transformed in collective participation (Holland et al. 2003; Wenger 1998). Therefore, Tonea’s move meant that Debbie believed that the contexts in which we sit (physically and metaphorically) potentially changes the way we see ourselves and position others. Tonea found her voice within this group dynamic, in the presence of a new group of children (not better or worse than her previous group), where everything “magically clicked,” as Debbie would say.

Figured Worlds: Building Practices in Figured Worlds

Beginning with the practice of the community at one table, we illustrate how identities are socially organized and “figured” (Holland et al. 2003) by the individuals who participate in that world. Within this social world, individuals are cast and recast in different positions. Simultaneously, they learn to build a set of shared practices and ways of responding that characterize that world. The conversation that opens up this chapter began with attempting to draw a heart to place on their texts. Jaquan and Tonea wanted to share with Lou how to draw a heart, making textual footprints on their own paper. However, these markings were the beginning of a larger story when they discussed love, mothers, and admiration. Hearts were the beginning of multiple ideas: Tonea’s love for her mom, Jolene’s declaration of Tonea as the “best girl,” criticism of drawing attempts, self-declarations of competence, and allusions of connections outside of school. The texts were peripheral to the ongoing social dramas that unfolded within the table group. In this case, texts refer to the construction of written artifacts, “situated by time and place, multimodal in scope, guided and facilitated by the available resources in the sociocultural world” (Yoon 2016, 3). Therefore, children’s stories or texts are not just words and drawings on paper, but indicators of the intentions and motivations surrounding their production. In fact, throughout this chapter, the texts are records or artifacts of the children’s personal relationships, but do not “do justice to the symbolics of monumental display” (Collins and Blot 2003, 21). In other words, children’s texts are representations of power and identity, stored on paper as remnants of their personal histories.

Therefore, identities are narrative constructions that are in process more than fixed or stable. The practices and behavior of children are outward manifestations of sociocultural tools (modes of communication, the symbolic tools, the available resources, and the practices used to mediate experience—reading, writing, talking, etc.) that children decide to take up (Marsh 2005b). However, we cannot deny that children, within varying degrees, are limited in their agency by the structures and boundaries set up by societies. Across the globe, images of childhood portray children in different ways ranging from adults-in-the-making to helpless victims. These portrayals influence public policies and organize institutional norms that privil...