Children, Literacy and Ethnicity

Reading Identities in the Primary School

Lexie Scherer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137537362
• eBook ISBN: 9781137537379
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores children's meaning making of the books they learn to read with, especially relating to the intersections of race, gender and class. Based on research using a participative, innovative design with young children, issues of identity, belonging and classroom hierarchies are explored in complex and poignant ways by the children.

1

Setting the Scene on Children’s Reading

‘We want to learn to read with books with white people, girls, inside.’

(Aliyah, seven-year-old British Pakistani girl.)

‘None at home don’t read wit me. Cos they’s can’t read. Mum and auntie don’t speaks English.’

(Dodi, six-year-old Kurdish boy.)

‘It is important for me to see myself – people like me in books I read. It is important to have people who do stuff like you, like pray and stuff in books.’

(Salman, 11-year-old Bangladeshi boy.)

Introduction

I wanted to begin this book with comments about reading through the eyes of Dodi, Salman and Aliyah in the excerpts above. I did not want to start with an anecdote, or perhaps a quote from another author, as is common in academic books such as this one. The reason for this is that this book starts with children’s perspectives as a way to focus on the topics of reading practices, ethnicity and identity at school. In the context of this book, these comments indicate the distinctiveness of young children’s perspectives on the processes and practices of reading. Dodi’s comment tells us how children connect home and school spaces for learning, and the barriers in this process when no-one speaks English at home, and where formal literacy practices are not part of the home culture. From Aliyah’s and Salman’s comments we gain conflicting knowledge about what children make of the people they encounter in the books they use when learning to read at school: Salman is building his subjectivity from and through books in a reflective way, and Aliyah desires whiteness, often a norm in picture books. From what the children say, we learn that what is significant to them can be quite distinct and distant from concerns with ‘failure’ and attainment focused upon by policy makers and politicians, the media and ultimately practitioners and teachers in the area of children learning to read. The way these children articulate and discuss strong, often negative emotions does not always make for the easiest reading. Starting with the children’s comments also focuses on what is an inspiration in this book: hearing what young children have to say about issues that are significant to them in relation to reading practices and their own identity work.

That said, this is not the easiest book to introduce, because of its interdisciplinarity. It spans political and academic interests and areas. Diverse groups inevitably have different starting points and agendas. Given this, I want to begin by telling the reader what they can expect in this book: to gain information about young children’s worlds and lives at school, and how their talk about this is often both complex and contentious. The data explore children’s very strong feelings about reading practices and learning to read, and also about their sense of who they are. I argue that it is important, and timely for what they have to say to get into the public sphere. In part, this is important because media and policy discourses present children’s reading as a national crisis: according to such narratives, it is black and African Caribbean children, white working-class children, and boys, who are ‘failing’ to learn to read. Since literacy in particular and school attainment more generally are seen as forces for social mobility, these failures are linked in dominant discourses to a lack of opportunities for social justice.

This book argues that the materiality of children’s books is a core component in the puzzle that animates the story of the child, the book and reading. Social science has not focused on reading as a social practice in the lives of children, starting with their perspectives, and this book fills a major gap in this area.

The research represents one of the only detailed studies to prioritise younger children’s experiences of learning to read at school. It not only shows, through the use of an innovative, participative research model, the complex meanings children make of reading in the constructions of their own subjectivities, but also that through consulting pupil voice it is possible to explore different issues around reading than those that circle incessantly in adult-led debates. Having introduced the research topic, the next part of this section focuses on the aims of the study and briefly introduces what the research involved, and the context in which it took place. The aims of the research were: (i) to explore minority children’s perspectives on picture books, and how picture books are employed in their social worlds; (ii) to consider how minority children construct their ethnic and racial identities and subjectivities as readers; (iii) to look at the taken-for-granted processes of children learning to read; and (iv), crucially, to put children’s voices and concerns at the centre of the debates.

The research is based on qualitative approaches and it presents data generated with young children aged 6–7 (Year Two) and 10–11 (Year Six) years old. It took place in a multi-ethnic, inner-city London primary school, which I have given the pseudonym ‘Three Chimneys’. Data are drawn from ethnographic fieldwork that took place over the duration of one school year with both year groups of children. Themes that emerged in the data are explored in the following chapters.

Three Chimneys was a school in crisis when I began my fieldwork there, at risk of being closed down because of substandard results over successive years. It was seen as failing according to the metrics used by Ofsted (the school inspection authority in England). In particular, the results for reading and writing were very poor. It is worth framing my interactions with the children and school authorities against this backdrop. Whether the children knew they attended a failing school was unclear; this was not something they ever spoke about. Having positioned the research in context, the next section considers research on children and reading more generally. The issue of reading failure is also considered. My personal reasons for approaching the project are then explored, along with a focus on the picture book as part of children’s reading practices. Why it is of interest to research the topic of reading is then discussed. The chapter ends by looking at the issue of race and ethnicity in research with children, and providing an outline of the book.

Researching children reading

The way the child and childhood are produced in the literature, as well as in legal, policy and practice terms suggests that older, not younger, children are more able to tell us about what they think. In this research, younger children are positioned as actors too. Such an approach involves confronting a number of vested interests. One example is Wilkins (2009), who established Black History Month in schools. She and others who represent minority group interests argue that minority children need to see characters that are identifiable and recognisable to them in schoolbooks that they use for learning to read. Financial restraint and commercial interests reveal the limitations on the processes of ensuring that relevant and appropriate books make their way into classrooms. An issue with such an approach is that it does not consult those for whom the policy is made: young children. Wilkins’ assumptions and the reflections the children have about these are discussed further in Chapter 5.

I argue that children’s perspectives can inform policy and theory if we can see and are willing to conduct research with children that is fundamentally dialogic (Bakhtin, 1981). Such an approach implies that we can learn from young children and enter into productive discussions with them about what they think is important. The research offers scope to listen, and to build theory, knowledge, methods and practice from what children know, and what they bring from their experiences.

This is important in the face of Piaget’s stage theory (1953), which continues to take a central position against providing space for children’s narratives about their lives across research and other public and policy forums. It implies that children develop, not only physically but also linguistically and socially and emotionally, at fixed ‘stages’ indexed to their age. Such an approach to children’s development remains thought of as ‘true’ in policy and educational training paradigms. As part of this thinking, children’s innocence pervades dominant Western narratives about childhood and underlies pedagogy and policy concerns (Renold, 2005).

Much theory on literacy, identity, race and racism has been generated and is theorised around social practices and empirical research in the world of adults. This book, however, is not primarily concerned with building theory on race or identity but rather with starting with what the children have to say about school and reading, and working with that towards understanding their underlying perspectives that relate to identity and reading. The use young children make of books for their identity formation is under-theorised and also under-studied empirically, but offers rich understandings.

In terms of thinking further about the children’s identity formation around race, it is important that I refer to the children at Three Chimneys as ‘minority children’ rather than ‘ethnic minority children’, though of course ethnicity is important. Only some have ethnic minority status. Another suitable referent could be ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘marginalised’, but I reject these terms as problematic and also because they imply that the children are in deficit. The children’s combined socio-economic, religious, refugee and special educational needs nevertheless intersect in different ways so that some of the children fit all these categories, others only one. Different factors create a range of forms of marginalisation.

I also seek to avoid the use of the category ‘migrant’ children, as some (Tyler, 2012, Jayasinha, 2012) argue that ‘migrant’ has the potential to be a negative label for minorities since it flattens out and homogenises people’s identities. The other issue with the word ‘migrant’ is that families, for example, that have lived in England for three generations may still be referred to as Bangladeshi, which begs the question of when they can ‘stop’ being migrants. Reynolds (2008) suggests that children who have migrant status are not positioned as such by schools, and that far from being a negative label for minority children, it is a useful one. This, however, fails to consider the important issue of ways in which ‘migrants’ position themselves (Gardner, 1995).The word ‘migrant’ also connotes the current geopolitical ‘migrant crisis’ in Europe and ‘the Mediterranean’, where individuals broadly from the ‘global south’ follow trajectories of migration to the ‘global north’, particularly Britain and other northern European countries. The children at Three Chimneys are not part of this specific ‘wave’ of migration as they and their families had been living in London since sometime before 2010–2011 when the research was carried out, though their reasons for living in Britain, as we see in Chapter 6, share some similarities as their families have moved for economic and domestic safety reasons. The next section considers reading through the lens with which it is most often seen: that of the failure of individuals or groups of children.

Reading and failure

My personal experiences of children reading picture books are framed through the tensions between what I observed in my role as a primary school teacher (that is, in another school before I came to undertake this research), and media and policy discourses that present children’s reading as a ‘problem’. I was working with a Year Two class of 30 boys and girls who spoke 17 different languages, and on World Book Day I observed a range of very different skills among the children in the class. At the time (this was some while before I ever went into Three Chimneys) I was considering applying for a PhD, and therefore thought to make notes that day:

It was a rare ‘off curriculum’ day, so we could take as long as we liked to read Lauren Child’s version of the fairy tale ‘The Princess and the Pea’. As I read, I explained to the children that they could stop me and comment or ask questions about the book. An hour later, the children still leant forward and begged me not to turn the page, saying they had ‘seen something else’ and ‘noticed something’. I reflected afterwards on reading in this way – with time and where the children’s concerns were allowed to be paramount and flow freely – about what I learnt of their perspectives, and how they built on each other’s ideas in complex ways.

How the children interacted with and read this book, and the feelings this incident evoked are one of the key experiences that motivated me to undertake this research. The ‘literacy event’ (Brice-Heath, 1983, p. 3) I describe in the excerpt above was an important incident in my long-running interest in researching children and reading. I gained insight into how time and space for children’s talk could facilitate positive interactions with reading.

In stark contrast, there is a moral concern about the poor child reader expressed through narratives such as the National Literacy Trust’s which argues that ‘children’s reading performance is declining’ (2015). Campaigns run by the charity make clear connections between poverty and poor reading: ‘rates of low literacy are highest in disadvantaged communities’ (National Literacy Trust, 2015). This links deficit and notions of cultural and social ‘capital’ together with literacy. Here the reading child is classed, as well as being positioned as less able. In other such discourses, like the ‘Get London Reading’ campaign (2011), which ran at the time my fieldwork took place, the poor reader is both placed and raced. The campaign suggested that ‘one in four children leave London’s primary schools unable to read properly’ (Grieg, 2010, p. 1). Images of black children – wearing spick-and span school uniform and sitting in an orderly manner in a school library – graced the pages of the London Evening Standard, the newspaper that ran the story. These children were described as ‘betrayed’ (p. 1) because reading is a foundational skill that they were not acquiring – presumably the implication was that the children were being ‘betrayed’ both by their schools and their families in the work of supporting their reading. By calling in volunteers there is also the suggestion that schools are unable to ‘cope’ with teaching these children to read. Reading failure is therefore classed, raced and geographically placed through these discourses.

While I believe literacy can have transformative potential, the way children’s reading failure is positioned in such discourses does not consult their opinions on an issue that affects their lives. In Britain today, reading is at the very core of school success; it is at the heart of being a ‘successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’ pupil. Current policy tracks children’s reading through age-related ‘standards’ (see DfES, 2014), and reading attainment has enormous implications for individual children’s achievement. The next section considers personal aspects to the way I approached this book, that is, it frames the origins of the research and my personal connection to the topic.

Excavating personal stories

Hunt (1989) argued that we can usefully harness our own inner emotional worlds as researchers to better understand the issues we work on if we excavate our reasons for being drawn to a particular topic. Whilst conducting fieldwork, I realised how my own story interwove with the stories the children told about their identities and selves-as-readers. The children initially asked, ‘Where are you from?’ I replied that I was born in Brighton and had grown up there; at the time the fieldwork took place, I lived in London. ‘No, but where are you from?’ they said. Thinking they did not know where Brighton was, I would draw maps and explain that it was not far away. But they asked again; the answer was not adequate.

I turned the question back to the children who had asked me: their answers were much more complex and revealed intersecting layers of multi-placed identity; they wanted to know my family histories. I was told stories of family from Russia, Kosovo, Angola; often some family members had left, others remained in the country they called ‘mine’. This is, of course, particularly topical in the media and given the current policy attention to ‘migrants’, which I have already mentioned (although I have only flagged up the issues with the term itself in relation to the children in this research). It was only through the children repeatedly asking me where I was from, and also asking where my parents were from that I reflected upon my own storied self (Morrice, 2011). I found myself explaining my family trajectories that paralleled the children’s: generations that had moved, settled and resettled, and were linked to wider international emergency and the Second World War. Migration and personal family narratives entwined. This connected clearly with issues in the children’s lives and home countries such as Kurdistan, Iraq and Bangladesh. The connections between reasons for people migrating are no accident, as these are key reasons for the movement of peoples around the globe highlighted in the transnationalism literature (Vertovec, 2001, Faist, 2010).

I shared my story of a generation of 12 siblings who left Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, wanting a better life in America and to escape war; they settled on the East Coast and then moved West in the Great Depression, followed by my father moving back to Europe to study. On the other side of the family, colonial economic relations intertwined with migration narratives as family left Ireland in order to work in the tin mines in Cornwall and then moved to the North East of England for employment in the coal mines. Then my mother’s generation moved again, they became dispersed around the country and abroad and were the first in the family to attend university. In this story, my family were not ‘from Brighton’ at all.

I also talked with the children about how I liked reading and had been good at it at school, but hated maths and found failure in it. These stories became starting points for talk on issues of schooling, belonging, identity and reading, which were significant to the children. I also felt it was important that I answered the questions the children had for me, after the tradition of research such as Oakley’s (1981). When she interviewed mothers, she also talked about her own experiences of motherhood when asked, as part of the research process. On undertaking research in a school I was aware of many things I needed to think about and know about, such as getting access, or ethics, and getting along with teachers and children in a school setting; what had not occurred to me was that the experience would mirror any of my own personal story.

Owning my role in the research is important as part of the ethnographic and qualitative research tradition, as far back as Mead’s work on women in Samoa (1928) but also because it helps flag up my own position. It is interesting that rarely in daily life do I engage with or reflect upon my own family history, but the Three Chimneys children quickly began to explore it with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• A Note on Interview Transcripts
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Setting the Scene on Children’s Reading
• 2 Children and Reading: Mapping Literacy
• 3 Research and Fieldwork at Three Chimneys School
• 4 The Child and Reading: Narratives of Literacy Competence
• 5 The Materiality of the Book
• 6 A Politics of Identity: Narratives of Migration, Place and Faith
• 7 Race and the Embodiment of Difference
• 8 A Reflection on Children, Reading and Identity
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index