The study of children’s household and community contexts as the base for an intercultural and bilingual early literacy program in Argentina

• In Event: Family and intergenerational learning and literacy: International perspectives from Argentina, Egypt, Jamaica, and Turkey

Proposal

This presentation reports on a project in Argentina that articulates language research and educational intervention actions aimed to ensure inclusive and high-quality education for children. The participants include Spanish monolingual children living in extreme poverty in the city and suburbs of Buenos Aires and Spanish-Qom bilingual children from Indigenous, semi-rural and rural communities in the Chaco province in Northern Argentina. Beyond the cultural and linguistic differences between the two groups, it is the structural impoverishment and precarious living conditions for both groups of children and their families that create a situation of extreme vulnerability and inequity, which is reflected particularly in education.

This collaborative project includes families, communities, and teachers, and aims to promote children’s learning. The project seeks to bridge the gap between schooling and communities and contributes to creating literacy situations in the participating households. The development of an early literacy program that considers linguistic and sociocultural differences between the participating communities made it necessary to examine the characteristics of the activity systems that shape children's daily lives in each community (Cole and Engeström, 2007). Therefore, the project involved the collection of an important empirical corpus of audio and video recordings of natural daily interactions in which children participate in their households and communities. The documentation of the activities, funds of knowledge, learning strategies, interactional patterns, and language variants and uses in which these children are socialized, as well as the analysis of the quantity and quality of the linguistic input to which they are exposed early in life, are used as the starting point for designing educational actions and materials aimed to improve children’s vocabulary and discourse development and literacy learning.

The presentation describes the cultural and linguistic features that characterize children’s experiences and how they were used in the intercultural and bilingual early literacy program to build an anchor to enhance children’s linguistic development and literacy acquisition and to broaden their knowledge. Since the project’s initiation, 6,240 children and their families have participated directly in the educational activities. Additionally, approximately 60,000 children whose daycare and kindergarten teachers participated in the children’s language development and family literacy training workshops indirectly received the benefits of the program.

Furthermore, the presentation describes the collaborative work with the community members and the Spanish and Qom native teachers involved in this process, and who contributed to the production of a series of intercultural and bilingual educational materials: the ethnographic storybooks En la casa de Oscarcito, En la comunidad Daviaxaiqui, Dany, and Dany na’aqtaguec, na’qaatqa, relatos, tolhomtes, as well as the software application “Huo’o na cuentos”, aimed to promote the acquisition of Spanish and Qom as first or second languages. Finally, the presentation illustrates how these educational materials are used in teaching and learning situations in children’s households and community daycare centers.

Author

• Celia Renata Rosemberg, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas-CONICET- (National Council of Scientific