“Cute Books” and “Good Literature”: a comparative analysis of early literacy constructions

• In Event: Early childhood reading

Proposal

Early childhood education has emerged as a policy priority championed by international organizations (e.g. World Bank, 2013; OECD, 2018). Arguing that access to educational provision early in life shapes individuals’ later achievements, international organizations have urged governments to invest in early educational interventions. One area emphasized as particularly important is early literacy as it is believed to affect a child’s future reading achievement. Since family involvement in literacy activities has been identified as one important factor shaping children’s early literacy attainment (Bennett, Weigel, & Martin, 2002), many proposed interventions target families and caretakers. Yet intervention models implemented by international organizations or NGOs often fail to consider contextual and cultural factors that shape family involvement in early literacy development. Comparative ethnographic studies in early childhood education documented significant variation in constructions of childhood and appropriate education for young children (Tobin, Wu, & Davidson, 2009). Drawing on these insights, this paper explores cultural variations in families’ constructions of early literacy skills, specifically their notions of books and literature.
The paper draws on methodological approaches of netnography by identifying online communities and studying shared cultural practices of those communities. The focus of this project is the exploration of how members of these communities construct early literacy through their assessments and discussions of books for children ages 0 to 36 months old. Data sources for this research project come from online bookstores that sell books for young readers (Amazon for English language data and Labyrinth for Russian language data) and consider comments from customers, parents’ blogs on early reading, as well as sites that bring together parent communities to discuss issues of early reading. To facilitate data analysis, texts with parents’ review comments, blog posts with book recommendations, as well as community discussions of various reading resources were uploaded into NVivo. Inductive thematic coding was used to analyze different aspects of how different parent communities constructed early childhood literacy through their assessments and reviews of different materials.
Findings reveal that the focus of English-language reviews is predominantly on the brightness of illustrations or the ability of reading materials to keep a child’s attention. A great deal of attention is paid to the tactile operations that children can engage with as they interact with the book: touching, playing, feeling textured pages, putting fingers in cut-out holes, or manipulating different parts of the book. This construction of early literacy approaches books primarily as toys and children’s interactions with books as light play. Little consideration is given to literature as literature (Nodelman, 2002) or to the value of the narratives. Russian-speaking sources, on the other hand, tend to evaluate books based on the quality of stories or poetry, approximations of illustrations to real-life objects, book color schemes, as well as children’s interest in rereading the book. Of note is also parents’ reminiscence of the same books in their own childhoods, which suggests a continuity of engaging with books from generation to generation. While similar trends appear in the English-speaking data, their preponderance in Russian data suggests that reading as a family activity captures cultural continuity where parents seek to recreate for their children the magic and enchantment of their own first encounters with books. An additional trend in the Russian language data is the emphasis on quality of narration or illustrations as a gateway to developing the child’s “taste for good literature.” Thus, even with early readers, cultural scripts shaping parents’ assessments of books focus on reading as an aesthetic experience that is meant to continue throughout one’s life and be passed on to the next generations.
Parents’ pursuit of books for young children documented in this study occurs in the sociopolitical contexts where educational policies target early reading as a matter of intervention to ensure higher literacy rates among preschool children. Current early childhood policies that construct literature as an assessment tool are at odds with parents’ views and literature scholars’ views of engagement with literature as personal, cultural, and aesthetic experiences (Rosenblatt, 1995) and carry implications for reading motivation later in life (Hedges, 2010). This paper analyzes cultural variations in divergent family constructions of early literacy – an important dimension rarely attended to by large-scale studies or policy interventions. Approaching reading as play or aesthetic activity has implications not only for individual students’ success but also for state responses to promoting greater engagement with literature for families and communities.

Authors

• Bevin Roue, Michigan State University

• Elena Aydarova, Auburn University