International Handbook of Research on Children's Literacy, Learning and Culture

Kathy Hall, Teresa Cremin, Barbara Comber, Luis C. Moll

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118323304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Methods for Reading

The International Handbook of Research in Children's Literacy, Learning and Culture presents an authoritative distillation of current global knowledge related to the field of primary years literacy studies.

• Features chapters that conceptualize, interpret, and synthesize relevant research
• Critically reviews past and current research in order to influence future directions in the field of literacy
• Offers literacy scholars an international perspective that recognizes and anticipates increasing diversity in literacy practices and cultures

Part I

Society, Culture, and Community

Chapter 1

Literacies in Homes and Communities

Kate Pahl and Cathy Burnett

Introduction

This chapter explores how inter-disciplinary approaches support an understanding of new perspectives in relation to children and young people’s literacy practices in homes and communities. In particular it explores the significance of the ‘spatial turn’ in new literacies research and explores new perspectives drawing on material cultural studies. Conceptualizing home and community literacies involves entering the social spaces of the home. It also involves studying the various places that children inhabit such as faith settings, youth clubs, libraries – and schools. Such work is important in highlighting the varied and multiple literacies in which children engage. At the same time there is a need to problematize bounded or unitary conceptions of ‘home’ or ‘community.’ Communities may be fluid or transitory or experienced in different ways by different children and literacies may move within and across different locations. All this is complicated further by the varied ways in which local and global spaces intersect (Massey, 2005). Children grow up in a place and this structures their literacy practices (Comber, 2010; Mackey, 2010). However, their practices are patterned by texts and artifacts that originate in other times and places (Robinson and Turnball, 2004). They also engage with virtual spaces (Marsh, 2010, 2011; Wohlwend, 2010) that are both local and global. Time moreover has a part to play in the way literacy practices are experienced in home and community contexts (Compton-Lilly, 2010). Literacies are also multilingual (Kenner, 2004) and multimodal (Kress, 1997) with a variety of scripts and representations that challenge conventional concepts of what ‘counts’ as literacy. All this challenges unitary notions of the situatedness of literacy and suggests that we need to see literacy as multisited.

In this chapter, we argue that we need an interdisciplinary framework to investigate this multisitedness and explore the fluidity and hybridity of spaces for literacy. We begin by mapping the field of new literacies in homes and communities, and locate the disciplines that inform this field. We then focus on the way in which ‘context’ as a way into understanding literacy in homes and communities is conceptualized and describe methodologies that look at context. We focus on the concept of ‘situated literacies’ (Barton, Hamilton, and Ivanic, 2000), as well as the crossing of literacy practices across home, school, and communities. Next, we explore how perspectives from different fields – linked to multimodality, material culture, and cultural geography – can contribute to an understanding of spaces for literacy. We conclude by signaling new directions in the field and suggesting some methodological directions to aid our insights. In particular we signal the importance of ecological approaches to literacy research (Nichols, Nixon, and Rowsell, 2009). We argue for an approach that combines a focus on spatial justice with a new literacies perspective that accounts for the diversity of literacy practices (Soja, 2010).

Mapping the Field

The field of literacies in homes and communities has been characterized by a number of different, but related strands. The first, and the most established, is the field commonly known as the New Literacy Studies (NLS) (Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Street, 2000). NLS has been characterized by a series of ethnographic studies of home and community literacy and language practices by such scholars as Shirley Brice Heath (Heath, 1983); Brian Street (1984) and David Barton and Mary Hamilton (1998). While NLS has continued to be dominant, it has broadened in scope. For example, recent work on urban literacies, related to specific sites such as Harlem (Kinloch, 2010) and Los Angeles (Morrell, 2008) as well as a focus on rural literacies, for example by Brooke (2003), has shown how literacy practices are shaped by socio-cultural and geographical factors, enabling an understanding of literacy that is, literally, ‘from the feet up’ (Mackey, 2010).

The second strand is research that opened out the concept of literacy to a broader concept of communicative practices. Researchers conducting ethnographic research particularly in home settings were observing a diversity of meaning making practices that included writing, but also speech, drawing, gesture, and model making (e.g., Kenner, 2000; Lancaster 2003; Pahl, 2002). These studies used the framework of multimodality to describe the ways in which children quite naturally drew on a variety of modes to make meaning in home settings. Their work was inspired by the work of Gunther Kress, most notably his seminal work Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy (1997). Equally important in this strand was the highlighting of digital literacy practices together with popular cultural practices in homes and communities, particularly through the work of Jackie Marsh (2005, 2010, 2011) and Anne Haas Dyson (Dyson, 1993a, 2003). Dyson used the concept of ‘remix’ to describe how children drew on literate practices outside school and mixed them with in-school practices (Dyson, 2003). She used Bahktin’s theories of texts as being dialogic, to recognize the intertextual nature of children’s textual productions across sites (Dyson, 1993a). Dyson recognized the way in which children’s textual productions, despite being composed at school, seep outside into the worlds of home and community.

Finally, a related but broader area in this field emerges from studies of homes and communities from a number of disciplines including anthropology (e.g., Miller, 2008; Pink 2004) sociology (e.g., Hurdley, 2006), cultural studies and English (e.g., Steedman 1982; Willis 2000) and cultural and critical geography (Christiansen and O’Brien, 2003; Soja, 2010). These studies broaden an understanding of material culture, lived experience, cultural identities, and spatial insights to inform research on literacy in homes and communities. While literacy was not the focus of these studies, we consider them to be important in providing a framework for thinking about how children come to make meaning in home and community settings. For example, when investigating the meanings of writing in the home, understanding where writing is situated, that is, in textiles, on walls, and in different material objects, helps broaden and deepen an understanding of writing practices. An edited collection on The Anthropology of Writing (Barton and Papen, 2010) signals the need to describe, using social anthropology, everyday writing and make sense of the textually mediated nature of out-of-school writing practices.

What characterizes all of this research is a focus on literacy practices in relation to place and space, as well as an understanding of time, either through literacy practices as connected to contexts (NLS), or to the use of texts in specific ways (multimodality) or through an understanding of material and historical/socio-cultural practices in space (social anthropology/cultural geography/history). In what follows we consider what each field brings to the study of home and community literacies and then suggest ways that extending this focus on space and place may help us gain new insights.

Conceptualizing Context in Relation to Home and Community Literacies

Thinking about literacy practices in homes and communities requires attention to context. Duranti and Goodwin (1992, p. 4) argue that this process involves focusing on the relationships between the data and the much larger world of which they are a part. Street’s (1984) understanding of literacy practices as ideological, that is situated within relations of power, and therefore subject to analysis of their situated-ness, is also vital. School constructs literacy in relation to a set of skills, and sometimes the ‘ideological’ nature is lost in the detail of schooled literacy practices (Street and Street, 1991).

This perspective highlights how literacy relates to practice, and to identities and discourses in homes and communities. Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ highlights the concept of lived experience that is handed down over generations (Bourdieu, 1990). The timescales of a family’s interaction with literacy practices are important contextually. A study by Pahl (2008) of a Turkish child’s meaning making at home showed how the habitus was transformed across generations in the form of texts that were shaped by improvisations and cultural reworking. Bartlett and Holland (2002) describe identity as being about improvisation and fluidity, and highlight how an understanding of narratives and text making can uncover the transformation of the habitus across generations. For example, in a home of British Asian heritage, textiles played a part in the way in which writing was understood. A child was observed producing a piece of embroidery with her sister’s name on it. At the same time, her aunt observed in that:

The textile side of our heritage comes from the women in the family. We have older relatives that do appliqué, crochet, embroidery, sewing and knitting. From the girls’ mother’s side their grandmother’s sister and cousin and from their father side his two cousins who live close by. My younger sister loves craft type of activities and buys the girls a lot of resources to do sewing and fabric work especially on birthdays, Christmas and Eid. (Written text from the girls’ aunt, by email, August 2010: Pahl, 2012)

The comment from the girl’s aunt situates the embroidery the girl produced within a heritage that merged textiles with culturally rich forms of meaning making.

Gee (1996) has looked at how discourse patterns of children outside school settings significantly differ from those in school settings. His work has been developed, for example, in Rebecca Rogers’ study of the Treader Family (2003) and Catherine Compton-Lilly’s work on family literacy across generations (Compton-Lilly, 2010; Compton-Lilly and Greene, 2011). These studies have looked at the rich resources within families that have been defined in negative terms by policy makers as being ‘at risk.’ Both Compton-Lilly and Rogers argue for a more fluid and multiple conceptualization of literacies as multilingual, multiple, and multimodal to account for the diversity of literacy practices within families (Compton-Lilly, Rogers, and Lewis, 2012).

Research exploring discontinuities between literacies in home/community and school settings has demonstrated how certain literacies are privileged in educational contexts and highlighted the power relations they reflect and sustain (Hope, 2011; Levy, 2011). However, as Hull and Schultz (2002) argue, it is also important to study continuities. This means a different kind of methodology that traces the spaces children inhabit and highlights the ‘flows of meaning’ (Pahl and Rowsell, 2006, p. 2) that occur as practices, events, and texts across sites.

Considering such flows demands an attention to complex and fluid notions of context. Wohlwend (2009), for example, draws on Scollon’s work on geosemiotics (Scollon, 2001) in her analysis of children’s play in an early years setting. Highlighting the ‘nexus of practices’ circulating around this setting, she shows how home literacies may intersect with literacies associated with educational settings as children recruit new literacies to their play. Such work challenges binary distinctions between in/out of school and helps us understand how children’s literacies sit within broader ‘learning ecologies’ (Barron, 2006).

Incorporating an ecological perspective into the study of literacy involves recognizing the ‘Ariadne’s threads’ that extend outwards from texts to practices, while acknowledging the material reality of the text (Brandt and Clinton, 2002). Linking the threads together is partially the task of the ethnographer. These links can be between local and global contexts, or across home and school contexts. By drawing on an ecological understanding of literacy as nested within community contexts (see Neuman and Celano, 2001, 2006; Nichols, Nixon, and Rowsell, 2009) together with an ethnographic understanding of the home and home literacy practices (Pahl, 2002; Gregory, Long, and Volk, 2004) there emerges a complex picture of literacies across home and school, which flow in and out of context. This process is methodologically challenging as it requires an attention to the perspectives of the people within the research (Gregory and Ruby, 2011). Indeed, many of these studies, such as those carried out by Shirley Brice Heath, Brian Street, and Luis Moll, have relied upon ethnographic insights to enable ‘emic’ ways of conceptualizing literacy practices to be articulated; the ‘etic’ being the framing by the researcher and the ‘emic’ being the framing by the participants (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti, 2005, Heath and Street, 2008). This creates opportunities to use research tools that are congruent with everyday practices, such as film and photography (Pink, 2001, 2009). For example, in a recent study of literacy practices in a community library, Pahl and Allan (2011) asked the young people in their study about the research methodologies they wanted to use and developed the study with their methodological input.

Multimodalit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Reviewers
• Foreword
• Editors’ Introduction
• Part I: Society, Culture, and Community
• Part II: School, Culture, and Pedagogy
• Part III: Teachers, Culture, and Identity
• Index