NOTES:
Introduction:
• How a father, a grandmother, and an aunt consciously scaffold for each child what counts as good reading practices.
• Each adult uses the practice of literacy to develop the girl’s ‘navigational capacities,’ their capacities to self-regulate, to map nodes and pathways of access in relation to aspirations and possible futures.
• The different ways the adults shape and reshape the ‘stuff’ of literacy has deep effects on the children’s orientations to the future both as readers and as subjects.
Background to the Study
• Ethnographic-style study of Children’s Early Literacy Learning (CELL) in the Gauteng and Limpopo Province of South Africa in 2000-2001.
New Literacy Studies and Multimodal Semiotics
• Literacy events and literacy practices: each literacy event is a multimodal communicative event in which adults and girl children are co-participants in activities that involve multiple modes of communication including writing, speech, image, and body in performance.
Classification and Framing
• Classification describes the apparent outer limits or boundaries of a practice or context.
• Framing refers to the degree of control that subjects have over the selection and regulation of contents, and over what counts as appropriate interpretations, methods or techniques, and forms and styles of communication.
• When framing is strong, there is a strong, visible pedagogy. When framing is weak, an invisible is pedagogy operative.
• Weak framing may get in the way of a particular discourse or practice, but it may create conditions of possibility for stronger socialization or more creativity.
Case Study 1: Dineo and Her Father
• Dineo is 9 and lives with her mother, father, brother and sister.
• Exposure to both worlds: traditional African religion and Christianity; also in language practices Sesotho, Isizulu, and English. Different status in each. English is seen as ‘grooming for the world beyond.’
• Value in English is shaped by parents’ past experience as learners.
• Event: a multimodal, multi-layer combination of spoken and written language, sound, image, gesture, body, and space. It is a whole family performance: father, mother, and brother are co-participants in the development of Dineo’s literacy. It is a form of ritual. Concerned with how text sounds—inflection and intonation, pitch and volume. This demonstrates the criteria for appropriateness. Dineo asserts her visual literacy skills by pointing to the rock image and inserting the discourse of school in the home to support her parent’s understanding. Father demonstrates that the text consists of units of meaning that are integrated into a textual whole. This activity is strongly framed—there is a right way and the meaning must be received and reproduced, not transformed. Emphasizes the importance of bilingual literacy in grooming her for the future.
• All three children were being sent to a family in the country because there was no food or money. =(
Case Study 2: Puleng and her Grandmother
• Puleng is 8 and lives with her grandparents, her mother is studying at a technical college. Her parents are both employed.
• Puleng’s safety is a constant concern for her grandmother, her primary caregiver. Her grandmother doesn’t trust their neighborhood.
• Puleng takes a taxi to school. At school she learns English as a first language, Afrikaans as a second language, and Sesotho will be taught in 5th grade. Sesotho is her home language. In everyday language, she switches between Sesotho, Setswana, and English.
• Core values are multilingualism and ubuntu
• Event: storytelling and story reading at bedtime, a nightly ritual. Multimodal, encompassing written and spoken language, image, gesture and performance. Grandmother offers language and commentary about images and writing, and she makes clear connections to images by pointing. Grandmother constantly tries to focus attention on text and acts as a literacy mediator. Textual practice models the metacognitive strategies used by experience readers. Similar focus on uncovering the meaning in the text. In the text, she shifts half way through the reading to focus on morals and draws connections between text world and real world. She asks yes/no, teacher questions. In storytelling, the grandmother focuses on the moral lessons of the story. There is a right way, particularly concerning Sesotho. Models family and community values.
Case Study 3: Margot and Her Aunt
• Margot is 6 and lives in with her parents and brother in an English speaking middle class family. She loves listening to stories and is an accomplished conversationalist with peers and adults. She prefers fantasy games with her neighbor Sara over computer games.
• Event: at the kitchen table with Margot, her mother, her brother, her aunt, and Sara (4 years old). Looking at a newspaper classifieds for a house. They use the image to make confident, unshakeable judgments of a stupid or nice or okay house. Parents do not lead this activity; the children lead it. Aunt plays a pedagogical role by pointing out features of a house for sale advertisements and playfully scaffolds the interaction by arousing interest in looking for features, i.e. price. She is a resource for textual knowledge, not an authority with the last word. There is a seamless switch from reading text and image to producing it. Writing is just scribble, but the aunt asks about and discusses it, communicating the message that the girls’ writing is meaningful. The aunt develops ‘navigational capacities’ for future home owning. Another shift when imagination takes over. In this event, classification and framing are weakest; there is an invisible pedagogy operation. Huge element of pleasure and play. “Literacy is as much about playing games and inventing worlds as it is about getting information about how to function in the ‘real’ world” (143).
Concluding Remarks
• The practice of literacy is not neutral but imbued with values, aspirations and attitudes around what textual practices count, for whim, and for what ends.
• Each family member uses the practice of literacy to develop each girl’s navigational capacities in relation to possible futures.
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