Recipes as a Genre for Translingual Reading, Writing, and Play

• In Event: Supporting Children and Families in Early Childhood Education Contexts Through Translingual Practices and Pedagogies

Abstract

Objectives
This study investigated how preschool-age children engaged with recipes as a genre for translingual reading, writing and play. While cooking has long been recognized as an important component of early math learning, the potential of recipe reading and writing in fostering young children’s emergent (bi)literacy remains understudied.
Methodology and Context
This formative/design study was conducted over two years by a teacher-researcher partnership in a linguistically and socioeconomically diverse public early learning center in the Southwest. In this predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood and classroom, many students spoke both Spanish and English with their families.
In formative/design research, researchers and practitioners engage in a cyclical process of designing, testing, evaluating and reflecting (Design-Based Research Collective, 2003; Scott, Wenderoth, & Doherty, 2020). Through home engagements, the research team identified cooking as a site of everyday literacies in students’ homes, and designed a curricular innovation which built on these everyday literacy practices. This curricular innovation included reading, writing, and cooking recipes together, as well as incorporating related material objects into the kitchen play area.
Theoretical perspectives
In study design and analysis, we used two theories as tools. First, we drew on the notion of funds of knowledge. The key premise of this theory is “people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge,” (González & Moll, 2002, p.625). Such funds of knowledge often remain invisible to teachers, who are often told that students and families from low-income or nondominant communities are culturally impoverished (Valencia, 2010). However, teachers who are attuned to students’ funds of knowledge are able organize instruction to leverage and create generative convergences between everyday and school-based domains of knowledge.
We also drew on theories of the role and nature of play in early childhood education. One theory of why play is so valuable in early learning is the notion that play, like literacy, is deeply mediated by language and inherently symbolic. Play involves using language as a tool to appropriate, orchestrate, rework and deploy symbol systems (Dyson, 2007; Vygotsky, 1978; Yoon, 2014. Just as early literacy involves coming to understand and manipulate symbols (e.g., letters as representations of sounds), play involves imbuing objects with new meanings and potential (e.g., a stuffed animal becomes a baby in need of a bottle).
Findings
Home engagements revealed that cooking was a common practice in households, and often involved both the use of text (recipes) and the use of home languages. In response to the recipe-related curricular innovation, students took up invitations to incorporate literacy into their play, reading and writing recipes as they engaged in imaginative play related to cooking. These recipe-related activities also served to develop conventional literacy skills such as letter formation and name-writing. Finally, for some students, these recipe-related reading and writing experiences also involved relating in new ways to language, and in particular, taking steps towards biliteracy rather than just literacy in English.

Authors

• Leah Durán, University of Arizona
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Lopez, University of Arizona
  Presenting Author