Narratives of Deficit and Standardization and Other Ways for Us to Know Children: Children Learning Literacy

• In Event: Metaphors of Identity and Literacy: What Do They Say About the Questions We Ask?

Abstract

Purposes
I draw on two longitudinal case studies of young children to unpack how narratives of deficit and standardisation (Author 2009, 2020) work against rich literacy learning for children in schools, especially those growing up in communities of poverty. In the original studies, we considered how current policies, media and practice narratives enabled valued literate identities for some young children and constrained others. I revisit these data and the original analyses to consider how my critical narrative stance shaped how I thought about literacy and young literacy learners. I ask how my view of literacy shaped “meanings made about identity” (Moje & Luke, 2009) in the original studies.

Theoretical Framework
To theoretically illuminate identity as narrative (Moje & Luke, 2009) for young literacy learners, I first unpack a reciprocal framing of literacy learning as social practice, which represents and is represented by language use in stories and discursive practice. Accordingly, our identities are produced by, and produce, the texts we construct, and the stories we and others tell about ourselves and our lives. These stories bring together consistent or unidimensional identity for people, one that ignores the multiplicity of people’s lives in the current literate, sociomaterial worlds in which we live. In shifting to consider literacy as a sociomaterial practice, I ask whether I had constructed counter narratives equally as constraining of young children’s identities as the deficit narratives I critiqued.

Methods
Longitudinal case study design in two schools situated in communities of high poverty was the foundation for the two research projects. The focus was on teachers and children learning literacy in early years school contexts to document ethnographic narratives of literacy learning in current times. Case studies of two literacy learners across the first three years of schooling were extracted from the larger data corpus for the purposes of this paper.

Data sources
Data includes classroom observations, short video recordings, interviews, and artifacts of literacy learning including reports and assessments made of and about two children.

Results
This reflexive analysis provides evidence of fluid and multidimensional framings of identities that result when narrative thinking is positioned as critical research practice. Findings demonstrate that it is possible to conceptualize identity as narrative when analyzing young children’s literacy learning.

Significance
Constructing children and their lives as deficit cannot support access to high quality literacy education for young children from communities of high poverty and increasing diversity. This paper highlights the rich repertoires of literacy brought to school by young children as central, but not static, to their identities now and into the future. The paper creates spaces for reconsidering the research narratives we tell about young children over time and asks researchers to consider how we might draw on understandings of identity as narrative, while resisting the reification of complex lives and identities.

Author

• Annette Woods, Queensland University of Technology