Hymns, prayers and Bible stories: the role of religious literacy practices in children’s literacy learning

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the role of religious literacy practices such as hymns, prayers and Bible stories in the context of literacy teaching in primary schools in England. Drawing on data collected through a classroom ethnography of a year 1 class (five and six-year-olds) conducted in a Catholic primary school in 2013 and 2014, I suggest that religious literacy practices contribute to children’s literacy learning in various ways. They focus children’s attention on a text’s meaning, not on decoding, as other literacy lessons do. They do not privilege rational thinking but afford more emotional and bodily experiences of meaning-making. These practices also offer opportunities for collaborative engagements with literacy, supporting learning through participation. My findings suggest that educators, researchers and policy-makers should pay greater attention to the range of literacy practices children engage with and how they contribute to their literacy learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Literacy practices
• classroom ethnography
• Catholic religion
• religious literacies
• literacy learning primary school

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the school, the teachers and teaching assistants as well as the children for supporting my research and sharing their practices and ideas with me. I would also like to thank my colleague Mary Hamilton and the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.