Making us proud: young children engaging with schooled literacy discourses

ABSTRACT

This article takes a Literacy as a Social Practice approach to explore the ways in which a class of five- to six-year-old children in a London primary school accounted for the operation of schooled discourses of literacy. It presents data from an ethnographic study which suggests that the children made demonstrations of practices expected by schooling to teaching adults in the classroom, but placed less emphasis on demonstrating other practices that, whilst helpful, did not align with schooled expectations for how children should practise literacy. This suggests that the children worked within the constraints of schooled literacy, whilst maintaining their own beliefs about how best to engage with schooled literacy tasks. An implication here is that the emphasis of schooling on ensuring children meet adult expectations may restrict educators’ view of the complexity of young children’s in-school literacy practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Interpretive reproduction
• literacy as a social practice
• Foucault
• primary education

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr Mili, Dr Sarah Leonard, and the University of Roehampton School of Education writing support group for their help in preparing this paper. She is especially grateful to Roxy Harris and Brian Street for their support throughout the PhD study upon which this manuscript draws.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.