The process of reading and writing is always linked to meaning making in terms of interpretation, understanding, exploring and configuration. The importance of recognition of multiple literacies and expressions are highlighted in this paper in order to meet future challenges both in literacy education and for social justice. Here we explore how the continuous process of children’s reading and writing during the middle school years can be studied in relation to meaning making. Using a hermeneutic point of departure together with a postcolonial perspective our aim is to develop a theoretical framework where children’s meaning making through literacy is linked to micro and macro levels . We argue that this has important implications for social justice and intercultural education.
Through existing resources children explore their own environments and make sense of the world. Within this creative application of existing resources, children participate with their own interest as the on-going force (Kress, 1997, 2000). Gadamer (1975) sees reading as participation of shared meaning. The interpretation in its turn opens up for a widening of horizons. Reading is, as Kress puts it, the making of new signs – which represent the world. To read the world means to participate in it. In this process meaning and understanding is created in an ongoing negotiation. When you relate experiences to social categories like ethnicity, age, social class, gender differences can emerge. Seeing literacy education from this angle increasingly brings the question about us in relation to ‘the other’ in focus. The theoretical space we want to use here is the open space between a hermeneutic and a postcolonial perspective. In hermeneutics the relation between the acquainted and the unacquainted is crucial. According to Gadamer the “space between” is a pre-condition for making new interpretations, which relates to Bhabha’s (1994) concept of a ‘third space’. Meaning making hence requires a co-existence, an interspace, between the acquainted and the unacquainted.The core of this transformation can be expressed in terms of mimesis; a process from a prefiguration, to a refiguration through a figuration, in terms of narratives (Ricoeur, 1984).
When talking about the necessity for children to participate and to relate to their own experiences, interpretations has to be seen in the light of difference. Through observations of literacy events Heath shows how children’s lingual, social and cultural capital differs. Hernandez-Zamora (2010) accentuates how Heath revealed the interdependence between language use and participation in different social worlds. What literacy is doing with children in different contexts is, we claim, as important as understanding what children are doing with literacy in and out of school. Heath’s (1983) study not only shows different lingual and cultural differences between groups in relation to class and ethnicity, it also captures a society in transformation regarding both regional and local levels. Our aim is to widen local ethnographies of literacy further to social, cultural, institutional, regional and global settings in relation to power.
