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We describe a collaborative project in which university researchers, teachers and Grade 4–5 English language learners (ELLs) investigated the sociohistorical contexts and practices in which the ELLs participate, through a ‘community scan’. Many observers have argued that schools and teachers have such minimal knowledge of the outside- school lives of their multilingual and multicultural students that they are unable to build upon the ‘funds of knowledge’ that students and other members of their communities have. In particular, a large body of recent literature argues that school literacy education should be linked to literacies that children develop in their homes and communities. We present here a study centred on a public school located in a Canadian Punjabi-Sikh community. For our scan we collected census and other demographic representations of the community, as well as media reports and academic literature concerned with Punjabi-Sikh immigration. In addition, our scan included interviews with teachers, principals, parents and community leaders. Students’ investigations and representations of the community and of out-of-school multiliteracies were also collected. The authors argue that such information is crucial in the development of pedagogy that values and promotes the reworking of the practices, images, texts and symbols that children already use.
In this chapter, issues relating to the digital literacy practices of girls aged from three to eight in both home and school contexts are explored. Since the late 1990s, there have been persistent concerns about boys' achieve- ment in literacy. Here, I argue that these concerns have overshadowed matters that should be considered by educationalists who are committed to gender equity in their classrooms. In this first section of the chapter, the nature of the anxieties expressed about boys and literacy are investigated before data from a number of projects that have focused on children's use of new technologies and related literacy practices are discussed. Three key issues are the focus for reflection. First, I suggest that girls' experiences of literacy across homes and early years settings are not as seamless as is often assumed and that girls as well as boys experience dissonance across these domains. Second, I suggest that there is a need to pay attention to the reductive gendered discourses that are embedded in many of the home literacy practices of girls in order to inform the development of critical literacy curricula. Finally, I consider the way in which initiatives designed to motivate boys through the incorporation of popular culture into the lit- eracy curriculum can reinforce gendered stereotypes and marginalize the out-of-school experiences of girls. This discussion is undertaken within a context in which it is acknowledged that there is a need to move beyond a simplistic binary which fuels the see-sawing debate regarding the achieve- ments of one gender at the expense of the other (Jackson 1998). I would suggest, as do many others, that such a position is an over-simplification of the issues and that we should address the needs of all pupils (Skelton and Francis 2003). However, in this chapter I have chosen to focus on an investigation into the experiences of young girls in the early years because this is where it is often erroneously assumed that literacy transitions from home to school are relatively seamless.
This essay argues for a paradigm shift in what counts as learning and literacy education for youth. Two related constructs are emphasized: collective Third Space and sociocritical literacy. The construct of a collective Third Space builds on an existing body of research and can be viewed as a particular kind of zone of proximal development. The perspective taken here challenges some current definitions of the zone of proximal development. A sociocritical literacy historicizes everyday and institutional literacy practices and texts and reframes them as powerful tools oriented toward critical social thought. The theoretical constructs described in this article derive from an empirical case study of the Migrant Student Leadership Institute (MSLI) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Within the learning ecology of the MSLI, a collective Third Space is interactional^ constituted, in which traditional conceptions of academic literacy and
instruction for students from nondominant communities are contested and replaced with forms of literacy that privilege and are contingent upon students' sociohistorical lives, both proximally and distally. Within the MSLI, hybrid language practices; the conscious use of social theory, play, and imagination; and historicizing literacy practices link the past, the present, and an imagined future.
Grandparents play a significant role in childcare and one activity that frequently occurs within this context is story-reading. However, relatively little attention has been given to the potential part that grandparents can play in terms of language and literacy development of young children.This article reports on work investigating the interlingual and intercultural exchanges occurring in a home setting in East London. In particular, it focuses on how the traditional heritage pattern of story and rhyme reading by a grandmother of Bengali origin is fused with practices experienced by her six-year old grandchild.The data reveal not only the multiple worlds inhabited by the grandchild during story-reading but also the syncretism of these worlds on a number of levels.This article contributes to the small but growing body of investigation into the reading styles occurring within families from different cultural backgrounds.