Session Information
31 SES 06, Literacy - Dimensions and Growth
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper discusses the implications of teacher talk and classroom interaction on the literacy learning opportunities offered to young children and what it means to be ‘at-risk’ of literacy failure. The logic of current policy contexts across European education systems, and indeed more internationally in countries like Australia, conceptualise literacy as a problem of declining standards that result primarily from poor teaching and ill prepared students. The solutions offered to improve literacy by this logic will always focus on limiting the effect of individual teachers’ pedagogical choices through the introduction of highly defined curriculum options and increased testing and accountability, or on remediating the individual cognitions of children to better prepare them for the next phase of learning. Also, many teachers feel the pressure of assessing student’s literacy learning in a way that the creating of learning spaces for the same target might get lost. Such policy initiatives have the potential to result in our schools and educators losing sight of the importance of classroom interaction, teacher student relationships and teacher common sense assumptions and talk in how children learn literacy as well as the resources and experiences of literacy that they might bring to school. In this paper we aim to fore ground the implications of teachers’ assumptions about children, their families and communities. We consider the impact of deficit talk on children’s equitable access to quality literacy teaching and learning.
The paper draws on data collected within two different studies, and in two very different contexts. The first is a study conducted in an Australian primary school that tracked children and their teachers in the first three years of schooling, to consider what came to count as successful literacy learning and how this was linked to systemic policy, teacher’s understandings and classroom interaction. The second study was carried out in a Swedish elementary school where children were followed in a similar way and length of period. Our cases demonstrate the implications of teachers’ deficit talk about children, and the communities in which they live, on literacy learning and achievement.
Our work is informed by understandings of literacy as social practice in the tradition of the New Literacy Studies (see for example Street, 2003), We conceptualise school failure and school success as social constructions. This is not to suggest that there is not a cognitive element to how well children learn literacy– of course some children learn things easily, while others struggle to understand the same concepts or skills. But we believe there is also a social element to learning literacy and to how children are constructed as literacy learners (see for example Heath, 1983; Heller, 2008). We argue that patterns of access, mediated by location, social class, gender, race and language, cannot be ignored when we consider student literacy outcomes. Pedagogy and learning are socially, culturally, politically and historically constructed and mediated. Teachers’ common-sense knowledge, assumptions and perceptions work to represent some children as ‘at-risk’, some as 'failing' and others as ‘successful’. We bring this conceptual framework to an analysis of the lived experiences of two young children in the early years of schooling. The two case studies demonstrate that literacy success and failure are not straight forwardly a reflection of individual psychology or cognitive ability, but that they are also related to the social and institutional construction of school success and failure.
In this paper, we problematise the above, in order to draw key insights for literacy pedagogy in schools. We ask:
How are the concepts literacy, success and failure represented within the early years classrooms of these two schools? and
How do these representations position particular children as ‘failing’ to learn literacy?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Heath, Brice Shirley (1983): Ways with words. Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heller, Monica (2008): Bourdieu and literacy education. I James Albright, & Alan Luke, red: Pierre Bourdieu and literacy education, s. 50-67. New York: Routledge. Street, Brian V. (2003). "What's "new" in New Literacy Studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice". Current issues in comparative education 5 (2): 77–91.
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