Pedagogy for reading for pleasure in low socio‐economic primary schools: beyond ‘pedagogy of poverty’?

Abstract

New research findings are presented in this paper, responding to a significant knowledge gap about the role of pedagogy in tackling persistent educational inequalities. The paper examines the potential of reading for pleasure (RfP) pedagogy to disrupt ‘pedagogy of poverty’ in low socio‐economic (SES) schools and to enable children to reap the cognitive, well‐being and social benefits of RfP. Children's volition and social interaction as readers are central to RfP and have been found to be particularly constrained by pedagogy common in low SES schools in the United States, Australia and England. The research examined how pedagogy for RfP was instantiated in four low SES English primary schools to understand how this potential might be realised and its effects on children's engagement with RfP. The schools were selected because they had invested in RfP, yet the study found their RfP pedagogies did not in practice support children's volition and engagement because teachers' understandings of reading focused upon proficiency. Such teachers need to reconceptualise reading as social and volitional to underpin RfP pedagogies. The paper provides new insight into the challenges of developing genuine RfP pedagogy and other pedagogies that profile volition and active engagement with learning in low SES schools.

Disrupting the 'boys don't read' discourse: Primary school boys wholovereading fiction

“…Social class interacts and plays an important part in masculinities and experiences with literacy, as middle-class boys are more likely to be successfully literate than working-class boys (Skelton & Francis, 2011). This disparity is often attributed to a lack of books at home (Evans et al, 2010) and related experiences (Mol & Bus, 2011), along with impoverished pedagogical approaches and limiting teacher beliefs related to boys from low-income homes (Hempel-Jorgensen et al, 2018). Negative stereotypes about boys and reading have been particularly visible in economically marginalised schools, where resistance to anything coded as feminine (reading) has provided working-class boys with a means of affirming their place in society (Mac an Ghaill, 1994;Connolly, 2004).…”

“…As students are sorted and categorised as (non)readers through classroom practices, providing limited positions, particularly for economically marginalised boys (Moss, 2012), the significance of different attitudes towards reading and preferences is often overlooked. The perverse effects of such accountability regimes are more likely to have an adverse impact on the experiences of boys and students from disadvantaged backgrounds (Lupton, 2006;Hempel-Jorgensen et al, 2018;Jerrim & Moss, 2019). The combination of factors described above create tensions in boys' experiences of 'school reading' and their emerging 'personal reading' identities.…”

“…Adding complexity, the high value placed on testing within the international community has shifted the focus to developing reading skills over supporting emerging identities and the associated will to read (Comber & Nixon, 2009, 2011Moss, 2012;Hempel-Jorgensen et al, 2018), thereby dictating what reading looks like in schools. As we discuss below, this is highly problematic for boys who would rather not read in class if they do not have access to their preferred choices and the books they love to read.…”

School Librarians as Literacy Educators Within a Complex Role

“…A comprehensive analysis of how teacher librarians support all kinds of literacy would not be possible to achieve within the limits of a journal article, and this article primarily focusses on a view of literacy that is centrally concerned with the fostering of reading engagement, while not suggesting that other frames of literacy are not valid or valuable, or that this is the only literacy that school librarians support. This article explores how librarians may foster literature engagement and reading for pleasure (Hempel-Jorgensen et al, 2018), which confers benefits as time spent reading is associated with improvement across an array of literacy skills (Mol & Bus, 2011;Samuels & Wu, 2001), and is also positively associated with academic performance in other subject areas (e.g. Sullivan & Brown, 2015).…”

Listening to the voices of children: an illuminative evaluation of the teaching of early reading in the light of the phonics screening check

“…There is little disagreement about the importance of developing children as skilled readers who are able to read for purpose and pleasure. Voices from a variety of research and policy perspectives agree that being a reader is an indicator of future socio‐economic success and that the motivated reader is more likely to be a higher attaining reader (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, ) and one that reaps a wide range of other benefits (Hempel‐Jorgensen et al, ). Whilst there is a consensus about the value of being a reader, this is not reflected in agreement on the best approaches to its teaching and assessment.…”