Dinah Volk

‘Many Differing Ladders, Many Ways to Climb...’: Literacy Events in the Bilingual Classroom, Homes, and Community of Three Puerto Rican Kindergartners

In this article, we analyze aspects of the complex literacy lives of three Spanish dominant, mainland Puerto Rican kindergartners who were beginning readers at the time of the study. We investigate literacy as a social and cultural practice in the children’s bilingual classroom, homes, and churches, describing the people who supported their developing literacy, their beliefs about literacy, and the characteristics of literacy events that the children coconstructed with them. Our analysis is based on data collected with ethnographic methods, including participant observation, interviews, and audio recording. At home and in church, the children’s developing literacy was supported by a network of people, many of whom believed that reading was about combining sounds into words and that meaning was inherent in text. Literacy events were often social, collaborative interactions as the families created a syncretic literacy by drawing on the multiple resources in their lives, including their religion, their culture, and their knowledge of two languages as well as their experiences in school. Overall, we found both similarities anddifferences between literacy in school and literacy in the children’s homes and community rather than the matches ormismatches described in the literature.

Peer Teaching and Learning: Co-constructing Language in a Dual Language First Grade

This paper presents findings from a study of teaching and learning strategies co-constructed by peers in a Spanish/English dual language first grade classroom. Grounded in sociocultural theory and developed using ethnographic approaches to data collection and analysis, the study analyses the children’s mediation of their own and each other’s language learning within and across languages, focusing on strategies that support learning. The strategies are analysed within the context of teaching/learning interactions in a Dual Language Programme with attention given to the children’s ongoing negotiation of the linguistic roles of novice, expert, and dual language expert when working in mixed groups in the English and Spanish classrooms.

“The teaching and the enjoyment and being together…”: Sibling teaching in the family of a Puerto Rican kindergartner

This study describes and analyzes the strategies used by a group of older siblings in the family of a Puerto Rican kindergartner to teach school-related knowledge and skills at home. The strategies are compared with those used by the childs teacher in a bilingual kindergarten. Ethnographic and ethnomethodological approaches were used. Sociocultural theory and the concept of guided participation provided a framework for the analysis that emphasized the cultural embeddedness of teaching and learning. Findings show that the older siblings taught the kindergartner within a context of learning and togetherness established by the parents and grounded in Latino culture. They used a range of strategies that included the teacher-identified recitation script and they often shared responsibility for the interactions with the kindergartner. By blending teaching strategies from their school experiences and from their culture, the older siblings helped him bridge some home-school differences in the teaching/learning process. In the classroom, the teacher used the recitation script more consistently. She usually took responsibility for teaching interactions and the children played a less active role. Implications for research and teaching are discussed.

Language Ideology and the Mediation of Language Choice in Peer Interactions in a Dual-Language First Grade

In this article we explore some of the ways that language ideologies—shared beliefs about language forms and practices embedded in social conflicts over power—mediated the language choices of 4 girls in peer activities. These activities took place in the Spanish and English first-grade classrooms of a dual-language program that enrolled children whose home language was English and children whose home language was Spanish, all learning in both languages. Our analysis was grounded in sociocultural theory and ethnographic methods were used to collect data in the classrooms. We argue that these 2 classrooms were distinct language-learning contexts and that patterns in the childrens language choices to speak English or Spanish were influenced by these contexts and, more particularly, by the mediating role of a dominant language ideology that privileges English. We also highlight the childrens agency in relation to this ideology as they negotiated language choice in the multiple contexts in which their language interactions were embedded.

Collaboration in a Culturally Responsive Literacy Pedagogy: Educating Teachers and Latino Children

This article is an analysis of collaboration in a community center’s summer literacy tutoring program for 6–8 year old children, the majority of whom were Puerto Rican, Spanish–English bilinguals. The goal of the program was to increase the children’s motivation to read through engaging literacy activities with high quality, culturally relevant children’s literature. Reflecting a sociocultural perspective, the activities built on the children’s experiences at home with literacy as a collaborative practice. The program as a whole provided for multiple levels of collaboration among the participating adults and between the children and tutors, university students in a teacher preparation program. The focus of the article is on the ways the tutors collaborated and the benefits and challenges of that process. Implications for teacher education are shared, emphasizing the need for explicitly including collaboration as one important element of a literacy pedagogy for teachers of linguistically and culturally diverse children.

We’ve Been Doing It Your Way Long Enough: Syncretism as a Critical Process

This article takes a new look at issues of marginalization and equity in literacy practice by focusing on the concept of syncretism and teachers’ creation of opportunities for young children to draw on knowledge from multiple worlds as, together, they construct new texts, contexts and practices. Recognizing that the strengths and needs of too many students from minoritized communities are not being met, this piece draws attention to the importance of teachers’ appreciation of syncretism as a powerful learning process for challenging discriminatory and exclusionary practices. Drawing on theories of syncretism, and critical and culturally relevant pedagogies, the authors introduce critical syncretism as a process in which teachers and children privilege traditions and practices typically marginalized in schools for the purpose of supporting achievement and broadening worldviews. The article provides examples from two primary-grade classrooms illustrating ways that the teachers made specific moves to change classroom power structures. Whereas White, middle-class, Standard English ways of knowing had been privileged by the school district’s choice of instructional materials and recommendations for teaching practice, the teachers’ new practices opened up possibilities for syncretism by embracing knowledge, languages, traditions and practices from students’ homes, communities and African heritage, as well as from school.

Join us in a ‘space of dialogue and human action’

The field of Early Childhood Education, which in the United States typically includes children from 3 years of age to 7 or 81, is today rife with pressures, contradictions, challenges and resistance in the form of local organizing, grass-roots movements, transformational practices and critical analyses and projects. It is a time when destructive neoliberal policies, promising and problematic government legislation and the contested implementation of national curriculum standards have resulted in a panoply of standardized and other tests2 used to (mis)label young children and rate their teachers in order to determine their salaries in the name of ‘accountability’. It is a time when the historic failure to educate many children of Color, children from low-income communities and emergent bilinguals3 has inspired an outpouring of deficit rationales, parent-blaming and ... more testing as well as anti-racist projects and culturally relevant and bilingual curricula that foreground children’s strengths and prepare them for valued school literacies and beyond. Advocates for these disruptive projects and curricula point to discrimination as systemic and demand not only diversity but equity and justice. It is a time when calls for a renewal of play and developmentally appropriate practices have been, on the one hand, drowned out by an emphasis on ‘teaching to the test’ and ‘college and career readiness’ while, on the other, they have been critiqued as culturally situated and grounded in White, middle class, English-only norms that privilege such practices as ‘universal’. It is a time when the status quo is challenged by new technologies, new literacies, transformative and critical practices and perspectives and innovative programs for children and for teachers and teacher candidates that engage them with families, while teacher deprofessionalization, privatization and funding challenges consume energies. This special issue of Early Years is a small effort to generate conversations about what is happening in our field in the US, to analyze critically where we are and to help us chart where we might go and what we might do. It is also an opportunity to share some counternarratives to the dominant narratives promulgated by many politicians, education officials and so-called education reformers and accepted by some, convinced that narrow norms of appropriate practice, testing, accountability and the curtailed school achievement of children of Color, those from low-income communities and emergent bilinguals are just ‘common sense’. These counternarratives are shared in the articles collected in this issue, some about transformational analyses and projects that have created innovative perspectives and practices and some detailing critical analyses and projects that have gone beyond to explore issues of power,

Allocation and acknowledgment in young bilingual children's conversations

The purpose of this research was to describe one aspect of the communicative competence of 4-year-old Spanish/English bilingual children: the strategies they used in both languages for allocating turns and acknowledging them in peer conversations within a bilingual classroom context. Ethnographic techniques including participant observation, interviewing, and videotaping were used to collect languaguesed data. Allocating episodes were identified and described, frequencies calculated, and patterns interpreted in context. Within the episodes, three patterns of allocating and five patterns of acknowledging were identified. The children tended to use Spanish more often for the pattern that consisted of sets of allocators in one turn, while they used English more often for the pattern that consisted of sequences of allocators in a series of consecutive turns. Despite this difference, rates of acknowledgment were high and were almost the same in both languages. In this bilingual context, then, the children used different allocating strategies integrated with their two languages to communicate successfully.