Learning From Children, Even When Policies Don’t Want You To

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Researching Play, Language, and Literacy Practices to Interrupt Injustice and Unburden Early Education (Table 24)

Abstract

Over the last two decades there has been a pushdown of academic standards, an increase of developmentally inappropriate curricular practices (Genishi & Dyson, 2012) and dwindling opportunities for children to play in early childhood classrooms (Nicolopoulou, 2010). Shifts in educational policy around early literacy raise concerns around the research and science that is being drawn on (Milner IV, 2020), and more specifically, whose language and literacy practices are being privileged and whose are being marginalized (again). Together these two shifts are moving us farther away from early childhood practices that are inclusive of the diversity of language and literacy practices of young children, and that recognize the ways in which young children learn to use language and literacy within their families and communities.
As a teacher educator in the field of early childhood education, these shifts are concerning as policy is impacting teacher education and dictating which research we can draw on for our methods courses. As a scholar who draws on ethnographic methods to learn about the language and literacy practices of young emergent bilingual children, with a particular focus on children’s play, these policies are devastating as they represent a shift away from learning from children.
In this paper I grapple with the ways in which I draw from research with young children to support early childhood pre-service teachers in the current early literacy landscape. Sociocultural theory (Bruner, 1986; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain,1998; Vygotsky, 1978) grounds and frames my understanding of the social nature of children’s learning, the importance of social context, and the role of play in development.
Together, with my students (undergraduate pre-service teachers at a large public university), we explore the ways that children playfully engage with language and literacy practices. Through collection of artifacts, stories and pictures from our interactions with children we seek to understand what we can learn from and about children, their language and literacy practices, their identities, to then inform our work as teachers. We explore children’s work to understand the complex interrelationship among reading, writing, the social processes that surround these events and the meaning that is given to them by the participants (Heath & Street, 2008).
The findings of our work highlight the ways that children incorporate text and symbols into their play and play with symbols and language; we also note shifts in children’s practices over time, and how documenting these can provide important feedback to guide instruction. One of the striking findings for my students, who often come in with assumptions about the role of the teachers, is how much the children learn from each other, mimicking each other and collectively engaging in meaning-making, and how much children know about language(s) and literacy that doesn’t show up on traditional literacy assessments, that focus on discrete skills, such as alphabet names/sounds, phonemic awareness, concepts about print.
As my students navigate and negotiate curricular practices in their placements, disconnected from the ways that children are engaging with language and literacy, it is imperative that we discuss the role of ethnographic research in informing teacher education.

Author

• Ysaaca Axelrod, University of Massachusetts - Amherst