Major Works in Family Literacy: Where We Have Been and Where We Are Going in Early Literacy

• In Event: Troubling Our Assumptions About Family Literacy: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?

Abstract

Data Sources: Based on a qualitative and comprehensive analysis of three hundred articles, reports, reviews, and chapters in edited volumes, we compiled 70 seminal works in a handbook for teachers, teacher educators, researchers, graduate students, and scholars. The handbook is divided into four volumes - Early Literacy in the home; Early literacy and interventions; Early Literacy and the socio-cultural turn; and Early Literacy and new directions - that identify major contributions to early literacy theory and research over the past decade.
Methods: To compile articles, we deliberately included diverse perspectives from psychology, cognitive science, and the voices of educators who work with special needs students, anthropologists, ethnographic researchers, and digital scholars to demonstrate the need to look across theoretical landscapes to understand early childhood literacy. Our coverage of the field of early literacy is by no means exhaustive. We lack a significant repository of research on arts-based education, and large-scale quantitative studies. We have necessarily focused on ‘telling cases’ of practice that illuminate wider theory (Mitchell, 1984) and articles that speak to the field, make sense of the field in new ways, and drive the field forward. This edited collection invites researchers to think with articles and use them as starting points and templates for further work.
We selected a range of articles that included some randomized control trials, case studies, intervention studies and critical and post-modern accounts of literacy practices and interventions. We acknowledge that methodological fissures exist in the field ranging from those that carry with them a realist epistemology and acknowledge the lived experiences and literacy lives of families and children, to those that adopt a more critical approach, arguing for fissures across home/school divides.
Results/Findings: We have created a typology to guide our understanding of the field, with a focus on two variables: one, the definition of literacy from relatively narrow (literacy = schooling and book reading) to relatively broad (literacy = multimodal, digital multilingual, gestural and oral). While there is a strong body of family literacy work that honours oral storytelling, multilingualism and visual literacy, exemplified by the work of Anderson and his colleagues (2005), the field lacks significant examples of practitioners reflecting on action research and designing literacy experiences that build on family literacy practices.
Significance: Surveying the field has revealed strong body of literature on family literacy intervention. There is an equally significant literature on literacy practices within families. We have found that new and emerging fields include children’s participation in virtual worlds and in new kinds of play that involve both online and off-line practices. Burnett (2010) has shown us that there is a need to survey and document children’s home online literacy practices to consider how these practices can be harnessed in school settings without diminishing their complexity. This paper analyzes the landscape of early childhood literacy identifying where we have been, gaps, and where we might go in relation to teaching, pedagogy, research, and policy.

Authors

• Jennifer Rowsell, Brock University

• Kate Heron Pahl, The University of Sheffield