Writing in Childhood Cultures

Dyson, Anne Haas; Dewayani, Sophie

doi:10.1002/9781118323342.ch19

Cited by 12 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…The focus on basic skills for low SES learners not only diminishes children's volitional engagement and enjoyment in reading, it also reduces opportunities for them to engage in creative and critical thinking through peer discussion [31,32]. Furthermore, when structured literacy routines and practices hold sway, and teachers' understandings of reading are dominated by notions of proficiency, literature tends to be used merely as a tool to teach the prescribed literacy skills [29,33]. Limited access to literature constrains children's intellectual, critical and affective engagement in reading and fails to be inclusive of wider social, cultural and political contexts.…”

Section: The Additive Triomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As she reflects on the intellectual dance and balancing act needed to teach skills and ensure deep understanding, she is beginning to be aware of the inclusive discursive practices needed to increase equitable student engagement potent literature [31,86]. By providing access to relevant quality children's literature, and teaching a broad literacy curriculum through interactive, dialogic pedagogies, teachers can interrupt autonomous literacy regimes [6,33].…”

Section: Pedagogic Insightmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Responsible Reading: Children’s Literature and Social Justice

Kohls

Cremin

2022

Education Sciences

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In high accountability cultures, primary phase literacy education tends to focus on improving children’s test scores. Driven by each country’s performance in international league tables, this results in narrow, predominantly skills-based programmes designed to address attainment gaps. While scores may have been enhanced in recent years, there is little evidence that policy directives have positioned literacy in the lives of learners in ways that have become meaningful for them or been transferred into ways of thinking that promote social equity. Indeed, teaching practices that exacerbate the challenges for those young people who are already disadvantaged by circumstance have become more prevalent. Teachers, therefore, have an ethical responsibility to redress this through their teaching. This paper argues that literature is core to more equitable literacy development. As not all reading practices are equal, developing literacy education for a more socially just society needs to challenge the dominant pedagogic hegemony. Literature has the potential to spark the kind of mindful disruption necessary to shift standardised paradigms of thought, so literacy education should have children’s literature at its heart. By examining the value of literature through a set of complementary lenses, this paper seeks to reveal its affordances in young people’s lives. Then, through commentary taken from a pair of vignettes drawn from professional learning contexts, we illuminate shifts in teacher perception gained through scaffolded introduction to reading literary texts. The insights teachers gained reveal reconceptualisation of reading and the role of literature in primary education. This has the potential to redirect their future classroom practice. Consequently, we propose that for teachers to be adept at improving literacy outcomes through productive adoption and use of literary texts, they need: an aesthetic appreciation and knowledge of children’s literature; personal experience with reading such literature as social practice; and pedagogic insight into how to use literature to teach literacy and develop volitional readers. We call this knowledge set the additive trio, noting that no ‘step’ or understanding is sufficient on its own, and that together they can enable the development of Reading Teachers who work with literature to advance the social justice agenda.

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Section: The Additive Triomentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Pedagogic Insightmentioning

confidence: 99%

Responsible Reading: Children’s Literature and Social Justice

Kohls

Cremin

2022

Education Sciences

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“…In many cases, children are developing skills in transformation through and across media; they have semiotic resources which can leave their adult teachers and carers behind. If some of the gaps are to be bridged between official and unofficial literacies, then adults need to allow children agency in their reading and writing practices and allow time and space for these to occur (Dyson and Dewayani, ), and find ways to recognise how children are understanding the worlds in which they are growing up in (Cremin et al, (). If the gaps are not bridged, then there is a danger that many of the assets children bring will be lost, particularly if the national curriculum leads some schools to feel unable to engage with children's social and cultural contexts (Bearne, ).…”

Section: Valuing Reading and Writing For Pleasurementioning

confidence: 99%

Readers in the round: children's holistic engagements with texts

Parry

Taylor

2018

Literacy

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In this paper, we demonstrate the relationship between reading and writing for pleasure. Children read a wide range of media as well as books for pleasure and develop strong affective bonds with the artefacts of literacy they encounter. What remains less well understood is the relationship between the array of texts children engage with and the texts they subsequently create. A focus on “Reading for Pleasure” has enabled us to think anew about the relationships between the texts children read, play and engage with and those they make, play and tell. Data from two doctoral research projects illuminate the ways children draw on cultural resources, moving skilfully across mode, medium and form. In doing so, they learn language conventions which enable them to engage in schooled literacies and learn to use conventional language techniques for their own purposes to transform and re‐imagine texts. Children's identities as readers, writers and storytellers are constructed holistically, and we explore the role of pleasure in reading and meaning making. In conclusion, we consider the potential for positioning reading for pleasure not in isolation, but as a strand in the complex fabric of literacy that needs to be nurtured in children.

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“…Both reading and writing are situated social practices (Street, 1995; Kalantzis and Cope, 2012) which are learned and developed in a range of social and cultural settings including the school, the home and the wider community. Where technical aspects of reading and writing are commonly taught in formal classroom settings, other communicative and collaborative aspects of literacy are experienced through relationships between children and adults, children and their peers and children, and the texts they encounter (Mackey, 2016; Dyson, 2003, 2010; Dyson and Dewayani, 2013). Through writing and reading, children cross boundaries between formal and informal contexts, between texts in different media and through different modes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

We read, we write: reconsidering reading–writing relationships in primary school children

Taylor

Clarke

2020

Literacy

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The extent to which children's reading experiences influence their writing production is not well understood. It is imperative that the connections between these literacy practices are elucidated in order to inform the development of stimulating curricula and to support children's development. This paper presents new data and key findings from a project investigating relationships between children's free choice reading and volitional writing in Key Stage 2 (9–10 years). The data were collected in two primary schools in northern England, using mixed methods. Quantitative data were collected using an online reading survey taken by 170 children, and qualitative data were provided through independent writing journals maintained by 38 participants. Through analysis of the data using a multiliteracies approach, we demonstrate that the writing that children choose to do is influenced by the texts they encounter as readers in terms of content, text type and linguistic style. The child readers in this project encountered texts in different media and created texts in a range of genres. By examining a sample of children's written texts from the data set, we show that children's interactions and transactions with texts as readers and writers are complex and multiple. Children creatively work across media, and in doing so the boundaries of traditional text genres and styles are redeveloped and redesigned. These findings highlight the importance of providing children with opportunities to freely choose and create texts and recognising the wide variety of text experiences that children bring to their classroom learning.

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Writing in Childhood Cultures

Cited by 12 publications

References 19 publications

Responsible Reading: Children’s Literature and Social Justice

Responsible Reading: Children’s Literature and Social Justice

Readers in the round: children's holistic engagements with texts

We read, we write: reconsidering reading–writing relationships in primary school children

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