Many Pathways to Literacy

Young Children Learning with Siblings, Grandparents, Peers and Communities

Eve Gregory, Susi Long, Dinah Volk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134402397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This unique and visionary text is a compilation of fascinating studies conducted in a variety of cross-cultural settings where children learn language and literacy with siblings, grandparents, peers and community members. Focusing on the knowledge and skills of children often invisible to educators, these illuminating studies highlight how children skilfully draw from their varied cultural and linguistic worlds to make sense of new experiences.

The vastly experienced team of contributors provide powerful demonstrations of the generative activity of young children and their mediating partners - family members, peers, and community members - as they syncretise languages, literacies and cultural practices from varied contexts.

Through studies grounded in home, school, community school, nursery and church settings, we see how children create for themselves radical forms of teaching and learning in ways that are not typically recognised, understood or valued in schools.

This book will be invaluable reading for teachers, teacher educators, researchers and policy-makers who seek to understand the many pathways to literacy and use that knowledge to affect real change in schools.

Chapter 1

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A sociocultural approach to learning

Gregory Eve, Long Susi and Volk Dinah

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We come to every situation with stories, patterns and sequences of childhood experiences which are built into us. Our learning happens within the experience of what important others did.

(Bateson 1979: 13)

What are these stories and where and why do they originate? Who are ‘important others’ and what role might they play in our learning? How do we express these stories to ourselves and to other people? In this chapter, we outline a sociocultural approach to literacy and learning and the theoretical framework it provides to respond to each of these questions.

A sociocultural approach draws from and synthesizes insights from two traditionally very different disciplines: psychology and anthropology. Cole (1985) summarizes these polarities neatly in Table 1.1.

In western societies, children’s learning was historically the domain of psychologists. Focus was on children’s individuali6y as well as the universality of learning and learning practices across cultures. Cognitive development was viewed as largely independent from the different influences of particular social and cultural environments (Piaget 1926). In contrast, work by Soviet psychologists and particularly by Vygotsky (1962, 1978, 1981) argued that all thinking and learning was social and historical in origin:

Table 1.1 Psychology and anthropology: conceptual polarities

Anthropology	Psychology
Culture	Cognition
Higher functions	Elementary functions
Products	Process
Content	Process
Group	Individual
Independent variable	Dependent variable
Observation	Experimentation
Field	Laboratory
Holistic	Analytic
Description	Explanation

Source: Cole 1985: 147. Reprinted with permission from Cambridge University Press.

Any function in the child’s cultural development appears twice, or on two planes. First, it appears on the social plane and then on the psychological plane. First it appears between people as an interpsychological (interpersonal) activity and then within the child as an intrapsychological (intrapersonal) activity. This is equally true with regard to voluntary attention, logical memory, the formation of concepts and the development of volition.

(Vygotsky 1981: 163)

Studies taking a sociocultural approach integrate the fields of developmental, cognitive and cross-cultural psychology with those of cultural, social and cognitive anthropology. Additionally, work from linguistics, cultural history and philosophy can also share the same approach. Indeed, a sociocultural approach transcends academic disciplines and focuses on the inextricable link between culture and cognition through engagement in activities, tasks or events.

What do sociocultural studies across academic disciplines share? Basically, all ‘put culture in the middle’ (Cole 1996: 116). All tackle the complex relationship between culture and cognition, believing mind to be interiorized culture and culture exteriorized mind. The anthropologist Geertz (1973: 5) refers to culture as the ‘webs of significance’ humans have themselves spun and describes the location of culture as being in the minds and hearts of people who are at the same time actors and creators of social interactions. As a cultural historian, philosopher and literary scholar, Bakhtin (1981) argues for the dialogicality of the utterance as the real unit of communication. Bruner’s (1986) work in social psychology examines the nature of a joint culture creation between teacher and child and, in linguistics, Nelson (1981) shows ways in which knowledge of the culture might be revealed through children’s shared schema (knowledge structure) and scripts (ways in which shared knowledge is expressed). Longitudinal ethnographic studies of families and classrooms in both the US and Britain provided finely tuned studies on the nature of the culture—cognition link in everyday life. Young children in both contexts are shown to possess a wealth of language and literacy knowledge that can be very different from the knowledge demanded by the school (Heath 1983; Gregory 1996).

Within a sociocultural framework, young children learn as apprentices alongside a more experienced member of the culture. Crucial to a sociocultural approach, therefore, is the role of the mediator (a teacher, adult, more knowledgeable sibling or peer) in initiating children into new cultural practices or guiding them in the learning of new skills. Vygotsky (1978: 86) uses the term ‘the zone of proximal development’ to describe ‘the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’.

While agreeing that mediators are essential to children’s learning, the extent to which the child also takes control has been viewed in different ways. Early studies concurred with Vygotsky’s focus on the adult or more experienced member of the culture in scaffolding a child’s expertise, gradually removing the structure as the novice grows more competent (Wood et al. 1976; Bruner 1981). More recently, this focus has shifted more towards viewing children as playing an active role in their own learning. In ‘guided participation’ (Rogoff 1990; Stone 1993) children actively participate with others —‘more skilled partners and their challenging and exploring peers’ (Rogoff 1990: 8) — who serve as both guides and collaborators. Together they draw on cultural resources and build on what children know and can do to co-construct learning. Throughout this process, children take on and are given more responsibility and ‘appropriate an increasingly advanced understanding of and skill in managing the intellectual problems of their community’ (Rogoff 1990: 8). Still other research on reciprocal teaching and learning between siblings describes a synergy taking place in which children play active, complementary and more balanced roles in building on what they both know and in fostering their mutual learning, not just the learning of the one who may be a novice (Gregory 2001).

The research on young children’s play conducted from a sociocultural perspective suggests that it is a context in which children are the active creators of their own development, that is, they provide their own scaffolding (Berk and Winsler 1995; Bodrova and Leong 1996). Vygotsky (cited in Berk and Winsler 1995: 52) argued that ‘play creates a zone of proximal development in the child’, providing the opportunity for imaginative work that is rule governed. There is no universal form of play; it is a culturally mediated activity that has universal as well as developmental elements (Goncu et al. 1999; Haight et al. 1999). Within the context of play, children often create rich, syncretic worlds, drawing on the many resources in their lives (Long et al. 2001).

Although the studies presented in this volume are very different in content and context, all work within a sociocultural approach to literacy learning. Within this frame, they adhere to three key principles summarized below:

• Recognizing that culture and cognition create each other: authors aim to uncover the language and literacy knowledge and practices as well as ways of learning held by people in their communities and how these may contrast or complement those which count in formal schooling.

• Acknowledging that a joint culture creation between teacher and child in classrooms is crucial for learning: authors aim to document the role of important mediators of language and literacies in different contexts and how this takes place.

• Giving a voice to those whose voices would otherwise not have been heard: authors aim to celebrate participants’ voices as well as recognizing their own voice as events are interpreted.

Ultimately, then, ‘a sociocultural approach concerns the ways in which human action, including mental action (e.g. reasoning, remembering), is inherently linked to the cultural, institutional and historical settings in which it occurs’ (Wertsch 1994: 203). Authors in this volume begin to uncover both the multitude of different settings in which children learn as well as the complexity with which they interpret these settings to themselves. In the sections following, we unpick different strands important to understanding Syncretic Literacy Studies within a sociocultural framework. First, we outline ways in which we see young children as active members of communities of learners working and playing in the context of meaningful activities with others. We show the importance of recognizing prolepsis and funds of knowledge as inherent within intergenerational learning processes. We then focus more specifically upon early literacy learning, investigating literacy as a social and cultural practice, emergent literacy and critical literacies within our framework of interpretation. Finally, we show how ethnography can be used as a research approach to investigate and analyze interaction within a syncretic literacy framework.

Learning communities

In the field of education, the focus of attention traditionally has been on the mind of the individual learner and his/her accumulation of the valued information and abilities transmitted by a teaching adult. As noted earlier, research and practice grounded in sociocultural theory (Wells et al. 1990; Lave and Wenger 1991; Rogoff et al. 1996) shift and broaden that focus to the learner’s active appropriation of valued cultural practices and knowledge within a social context. Learning, from this perspective, occurs in coparticipation and is mediated by others. It is embedded in social relationships and is constructed by and distributed across members of learning groups. Research on communities has much to contribute to an understanding of this perspective on learning.

Lave and Wenger (1991) propose the concept of communities off practice, ‘a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice’ (p. 98). A community is defined by more than just relevant skills and knowledge, but is understood to consist of both cultural practices and ‘the interpretive support necessary for making sense of its heritage’ (p. 98). Learning ‘is a process of social participation’ (Wenger 1998: i) in the community as a newcomer engages in and helps construct cultural practice with peers as well as masters. As learning develops, the newcomer moves from ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger 1991: 29) to ‘full participation’ (p. 37) in ways defined by the organization of the community.

Brown (1994; Brown and Campione 1994) developed the concept of a community of learners as part of an effort to describe and advocate practice in classrooms in which children and teachers engage in joint inquiry and generate group understanding. This concept is interpreted and implemented by Rogoff et al. (2001) within the specific context of formal and informal interactions in a school for young children. For these teachers and researchers, learning is grounded in an understanding of the ways that children in many cultures learn in the context of meaningful and productive activity with others. As a consequence, they define learning as ‘a community process of transformation of participation in sociocultural activities’ (Rogoff et al. 1996: 388). In their school, children, parents and teachers explicitly collaborated, ‘transforming their understanding, roles, and responsibilities as they participate [d]’ in significant, joint activities (Rogoff et al. 1996: 390). While adults were recognized as more knowledgeable in many ways and as the primary guides, all participants were learners and took leadership in the ongoing reinvention of their practice.

Research on communities continues to work to balance a broader perspective on the group with an in-depth view of individual learning interactions (Toohey 2000; Linehan and McCarthy 2001) and to reject the reification and essentializing of the communities studied (Guerra 1998; Moje 2000). Individuals are under-stood as community members and communities are described as inherently dynamic and heterogeneous, characterized by change, differences and conflict as well as stability, commonalities and consent.

While there has been a great deal of research on children as individuals learning from parents or teachers in either homes or schools, there has been little on young children as learners in communities or networks that include people in their schools, neighbourhoods and extended families. The chapters in this book begin to fill the need for work that illuminates this community-centred view of literacy (Willett and Bloome 1993; Rogoff et al. 2001; Compton-Lilly 2003) by taking as their starting point the child as a member of many interwoven communities.

Prolepsis and funds of knowledge

Within communities, the process ofprolepsis represents one kind of intergenerational link. The concept has evolved over the years, as has the meaning of the word itself. In the 1970s, prolepsis was taken up by Rommetveit, a psycholinguist, to refer ‘to a communicative move in which the speaker presupposes some as yet unprovided information’ (Stone 1993: 171). This initiating move, if it works, sets in motion a process in which the listener recreates the speaker’s presuppositions. In the 1990s, the meaning of prolepsis was further explored by researchers using a socio-cultural perspective to analyze scaffolding in the zone of proximal development (Stone 1993) and intersubjectivity (Goncu 1998). In both cases, the focus was on the dynamics of communication, as the speaker looks forward with certain presuppositions, the listener works at recreating them and the two are drawn together in a creative process of joint meaning making.

Cole (1996), in a sociocultural explanation of the cultural mediation of development, further elaborates our understanding of prolepsis as ‘the cultural mechanism that brings “the end into the beginning”’ (p. 183). The adult — the mother in Cole’s example — brings her idealized memory of her cultural past and her assumption of cultural continuity in the future to actual interactions with the child in the present. In this nonlinear process, the child’s experience is both energized and constrained by what adults remember of their own pasts and imagine what the child’s future will be. Cole’s conceptualization of the adult—child relationship is further expanded by researchers (Goncu 1998; Long 1998a) looking at children’s play in which the roles of expert and novice can be exchanged. In cross-cultural play interactions, either the cultural insider or the newcomer may project a future that they must construct together.

The concept of funds of knowledge was developed by Moll and his colleagues (Moll and Greenberg 1990; Moll 1992; Moll and Gonzalez 1994) during a research project with teachers that included ethnographic analyzes of the working-class, Mexican American communities of the children in their classes. As is widely known, the team of researchers and teachers identified many ‘material an...