Literacy within a Critical
Literacy Framework
Co-constructing Literacy Curricula with Parents
Pam Whitty, Pam Nason and Anne Hunt, UNB Early Childhood Centre
Our fundamental understanding of literacy at the UNB Early Childhood Centre is one championed by Paulo Friere an individual's reading of the printed word is intimately linked to their reading of the world at large and their place within that world. (Friere & Macedo, 1987) From our perspective this means that we come to understand how words, talk, pictures, icons, and print are used to shape, persuade, direct, divide and control us as well as coming to understand how we can control and put words, pictures and print to our own uses. (Nason & Homer, 1999, p.32) For children or adults critical literacy may mean the act of reading itself, as well as a way to question the authority of a variety of texts, verbal and written. In our work, then, we think of critical literacy as literacy that empowers, liberates, emancipates.
It was with this fundamental idea about literacy that
we responded when Lynda Homer of the New Brunswick Department of Health and
Community Services approached the Early Childhood Centre at University of New
Brunswick with her suggestion that we offer literacy training for Early Intervention
(EI) and Family Resource Centre (FRC) staff. Lynda had observed that EI and
FRC staff were increasingly taking on the role of literacy teachers with preschool
children and parents.She suggested that it would be beneficial to create professional
In this paper we focus upon our UNB Family Literacy Program. First, we give
you a sense of our theoretical framework and our approach, and then we examine
the emergence and co-construction of a particular topic. We have chosen phonics,
a literacyopic suggested by parents, to illustrate how we co-constructed literacy
curricula with parents.
Critical Literacy,
Conversation &
Curricular Co-Construction
Our aim in this family literacies project was to implement a critical literacy program through multiple conversations. We were operating on the fundamental premise that all voices, parents, children and educators must be heard. From this multi-voiced premise, we then co-constructed literacy curricula.
Feminist philosopher of education Jane Roland Martin writes, "A good conversation is neither a fight nor a contest. Circular in form, cooperative in manner and constructive in intent, it is an interchange of ideas by those who see themselves not as adversaries but as human beings come together to talk, and listen and learn from one another.” (1985,p.10) It was this spirit of "critical conversation” that we carried into our work.We listened to, participated in, documented and acted upon the content of many conversations. These actions allowed us to support and create literacy curricula for children, parents and ourselves - and strengthen connections between home and our program.
Program Structure
Our family literacy program ran across an eight month period, from January to October with a break in July and August. This extended period of time gave sets of parents, children and educators a chance to establish a sense of community and accomplishment - to know each other as people, to establish relationships in the context of a literacy focus.Our physical spaces consisted of an early childhood classroom and playground, and the faculty lounge in our Faculty of Education building. Parents and their pre-school children from the Fredericton Regional Family Resource Centre came to the university for two mornings each week, three hours per day.
Although we experienced initial anxiety over the appropriateness of a university site, this was our anxiety, for the parents reiterated to us on many occasions how much they loved "coming to university.” Thus, the project also served to open up the university to the community.
When we set up our family literacy program we knew from the research that successful family literacy programs included four components. (Brizuz & Foster,1993) These components included, a children's program with developmentally and culturally appropriate activities; a parent component that included literacy activities; a parent support group; and lastly , a component that brought parents and children together to listen, talk and read as well as to write, play, dance and sing.
Instead of four components, the UNB family literacy project had three components - a children’s component, a combined parent education and support component, and a parents and children’s session. We structured our mornings in three one hour segments; children’s arrival with parents and initial engagement in activities; the parents’ education and support group and, finally the parents’ and children’s component in the third hour. It was in this context that our critical literacy stance and our conversational approach were developed and refined.
Our Opening Hour
In the first hour when parents and children arrived at the university, they were greeted by experienced early childhood teacher, Anne Hunt, and newly graduated teacher education candidates, Stacey Stairs and Tara Green.3 The atmosphere they created was intended to be welcoming and homelike.
Our curricular work with children is informed by the social constructivist theories and practices of Anne Haas Dyson, and John Dewey, and contemporary educators, like Sue Fraser and Syliva Chard who are enacting and researching a Reggio Emilia approach in a North American context.
In our classroom, a variety of interest areas had been established and parents were encouraged to help their children select the area they wished to play in. Materials presented were those typically found in programs for young children. Literacy activities were embedded in the every day experience and on any given day a child might select from a wide range of activities including opportunities to explore properties of playdough or paint, prepare food for snack time or plant seeds. Or with the teacher's assistance a child might, for example, take attendance by reading name cards, a contextualized approach to word recognition.
Story and song were fundamental daily events in the classroom, and the UNB library played a key role as our main source of books and tapes. Dramatic play was an integral part of the program, a forum that allowed children to develop and demonstrate their interests and knowledge. Each day we ended the session outside where we found that in addition to physical challenges for learning, outdoor play gave the children and parents time for informal interaction with their peers before heading home.
One of the difficulties we faced in our opening hour was how to involve parents with their children in the range of literacy related activities that the teaching staff had made available. When the parents arrived first thing in the morning theywanted to catch up with each other socially.Also they assumed that the "teachers’ would be working with their children. Anne found that when she simply offered an open invitation to the parents, be it verbal or written, to enter an activity some parents chose to sit on the sidelines.
As a way of prompting parents to turn their attention to the children, Anne learned that "messy” activities like painting and those specifically requiring an adult for safety concerns, like preparing vegetables, readily engaged parents with their own children as well as with other children. Parent initiated activities such as the creation of personal books, and the sharing of family recipes and photos from home and photos taken within our program, also engaged parents with their children. After the parents had the opportunity to help their children settle into their activities, they made their way just around the corner to our faculty lounge, frequently carrying on conversations that had begun in the children's program thereby weaving a continuous thread of talk between the two spaces.
Parental Spaces
Literacy Education and Support
The second hour of the morning was specifically for the parent component of our programme. Pam Nason, a professor of early childhood education, generally led these sessions. In the first session, and throughout the time we spent with parents, we asked what literacy topics they would like to cover. These parent chosen topics and those selected by the early childhood staff were put up on an overhead projector. Then choices and priorities were made.The topics proposed were wide ranging and included: television, computer games, beginning reading and writing, phonics, day care transportation and much more. The criteria for choice of topic was dependent upon the principle of honouring diverse knowledge and experiences and recognising that we brought different strengths to the conversation.
Pam made extensive use of a mobile chalkboard, and found that recording key phrases had the effect of slowing down the conversation. This practice also allowed people to return to what had been said and pick up on points that other people had made. Quite intentionally parental and professional voices were authorised alongside each other, on our board, none privileged more than the other. However, Pam Nason admits to the irony of reaching for the chalk, that quintessential symbol of teacher authority, when she needed to re-establish some control as leader of the "conversation.” These sessions were documented by our research assistant Stacey Stairs, who moved with the parents - as a parent herself- from the children’s classroom to the parent session.
The furniture in our parent meeting room was informally arranged - couches and chairs faced each other and were quite comfortable. Fresh tea, coffee and juice were on hand. For each parent session or set of sessions children’s books were the focal and vocal points of our conversations. At any given session, there was a wide selection of children’s books within a particular genre available for parents to read and critique. These genres included alphabet books, predictable books, folk and fairy tales, and books for babies. We intended to convey the message that this was a place to relax, converse, and engage with books and each other.
Given our strengths as educators we had originally intended to focus the parent session on education rather than support. However, parents inevitably brought forward numerous "support” issues that we explored within the context of the parent session. On different occasions, they brought in print material from home, sometimes books, sometimes official documents such as handouts and letters from school staff, social workers and early intervention personnel.
We learned that in their efforts to ensure the best possible opportunities for their children, the parents in our program often found themselves unfavourably positioned in relation to official texts and authorities. For example, we dealt with the reading, writing and talk involved in registering a child for kindergarten, accessing funding for the day care of their choice, and meeting with teachers. Other parents in the program, who had themselves "been there” provided support and strategies for negotiating the system. They were instrumental in clarifying parents rights and articulating what is reasonable for parents to expect when they meet schoolteachers, principals, early intervention and social workers.
One example of how we worked with parents on this aspect of negotiating the system is exemplified through a role play activity. The role play was precipitated by a mother who had been asked to meet with staff regarding her child’s progress. Her son was not doing well at school and the meeting would include six other people, most of whom were unknown to her. The mom’s biggest fear was that she would alienate the teacher, and potentially harm her child, or that she would remain silent in the face of the professionals. A number of parents had had similar school related experiences. In our role play, we worked together to help the mom determine the support she would request for her child and the manner in which she would make this request. When she came back to our group the next week, she was elated and amazed at her own ability to speak out, leave with a plan and not alienate the teacher. She attributed her success to the role playing and support of the parent group. Through this activity and support, she was able to practice and enact her own agency and begin to change her place in the system.
These particular support discussions exemplify support in the context of “bureaucratic” texts.In other instances support was directly linked to “literary” texts that we were reading. Because books do evoke emotions and values, our reading and close examination of children’s stories sometimes created a conversational space to discuss what might otherwise be a difficult topic, for example the mothering-smothering discussion, as it came to be called. In Pam Nason’s words, “It was Paul Galdone’s The Gingerbread Boy which first provoked the conversation about parental protection and control, and children’s independence.” (Nason & Hunt, 1999a, p.12)
In the children’s programme, Anne had introduced The Gingerbread Boy and linked the text to a recipe for making gingerbread. (Nason & Hunt 1999b,p.14) In the parents group we looked at the book and responded to the question, "What’s this book about?” There was a mix of views. Was it a cautionary tale for wayward boys or did it demonstrate the need for a child to run away from the constraints of parental rules?
The discussion deepened as we applied our questions and theorising to other texts such as the Runaway Bunny and Mama, Do you Love Me? (Nason & Hunt 1999a, p.13)
Text and illustrations of The Runaway Bunny, a traditional favourite by Margaret Wise Brown, show the mother following her little bunny wherever he goes. Pam thought the story was about the enduring quality of mother love. Tony felt that the message was clearly, “You can run, but you can’t hide.” One parent took the perspective of mother and child. Yes, the mother is concerned, yet how frustrating for the child to never to be unable to find a private place. The question was raised: “How do we decide when to protect and when to let go?” Returning to the text, one person noticed that the bunny seems anxious to elude his mother. As the discussion continued, some saw the mother bunny as being concerned about the safety of her child, another saw it as a text of love. “If I leave, can I still come home?” Tony brought in a native tale called Mama do You Love Me, about testing the limits of a mother’s love. In this story, the mother helps the child understand the strength of love by speaking about loss.Whether we like The Runaway Bunny or not, we found that our conversations “…opened up an unexpected space for us to talk about love, independence and protection, and these conversations enabled us to articulate and revisit our own values. (p.14)
In other instances, the focus of the conversations shifted from "...the properties of the books themselves to fundamental moral issues.” (Nason & Hunt 1999b,p.5) For example, in our readings of and conversations about multiple versions of Cinderella, parents recalled their own childhood punishments, deceptions and discuss the place of forgiveness in all of our lives. As educators we came to interpret this blurring of the categories of education and support as characteristic of a critical literacy approach to family literacies; the pleasures and pains of texts and their illumination of our collective worlds through our words and stories woven with those of others.
Parent Initiated Literacy Topic
Phonics was first on the list of topics that the parents wanted to discuss, and nowhere in visible evidence on the educators’ list. Our educational perspective caused us to think of phonics as embedded in other literacy activities or events such as writing, environmental print and alphabet books. However, we learned very quickly that the parents had many strong beliefs on phonics. Their concerns and questions related to their children’s school success and failure and their strong sense that school achievement was linked to knowing your letters and sounds.
Pam Nason writes in Where Does Fonix Phit our initial "...conversation was loud, fast moving and wide-ranging. Some parents were angry about what they perceived as the schools’ failure to teach phonics, others saw teaching as a joint responsibility. . . and one parent thought developing a love of reading was more important than teaching phonics.” (p.2)
After this opening conversation, Pam focused one of the many phonics sessions with a series of questions, with the intent authorising everyone’s voice as they heard from each other about their phonics teaching at home. Accordingly, the first question was open-ended. "How do you teach your child phonics at home?” Secondary questions included: What role do you, as parent, play in that? Do you enjoy that? Does your child enjoy that. What do you think your child is learning? How does this help your child become more literate? As well, parents asked spontaneous questions of each other.
Pam felt overwhelmed by the intensity of the conversation and, at the same time, fascinated by the wealth of knowledge the parents brought to the topic. Academically, she disagreed with many of the parents’ views, however she was aware that voicing her view at this point might jeopardise the openness of the conversation. Her strategy, then, was to listen to what the parents were saying, ensure that each had equitable chance to speak, and to record the conversation visibly on the board.
Everyone’s contributions were recorded as faithfully as possible. The tone of the conversations was supportive. Because the ideas were in print, they could be returned to in more depth for further explanation, clarification and an examination of imilarities and differences. By telling each other what we did, without trying to come up with the single right way or the best way, we valued each others’ ideas and learned a lot about how parents articulate.
When the board notes and the documentation from the conversations were examined, we found that that parents taught their children phonics in a variety of ways. Very popular with our parents was the use of commercial materials such as workbooks. In the case of workbooks, two moms described how they used these texts to teach their daughters beginning letter sounds and letter formation. Another mom, who had less success with workbooks, wondered if it might be the one-on-one situation that the girls enjoyed. Parents also reported that they taught phonics through games they introduced to their children such as I Spy, or invented games that capitalised on alliterative sounds. Parents purchased letter puzzles, computer games and educational materials and played these with their children. In addition they capitalised on their child’s name, interests and other family member’s names as a meaningful way to focus on beginning sounds. Parents also made incidental reference to letter/sound relationship in other contexts such as print in the environment or books they were reading. And they took their cues from their children in everyday contexts. For example one mother was as excited as her child when he bit into a piece of bread and noticed he had made a D.(ibid,p4)
Like good early childhood educators, parents taught phonics embedded in pleasurable and meaningful texts of talk and action. Beginning as we did with parents knowledge of phonics, it proved to be an easy step to link parental knowledge and practice. In particular we were able to introduce parents to the current research on childrens writing and spelling.. Parent and educator both broadened their ideas of what it means for children to become literate. We had constructed, as Nason and Kershaw earlier named, a form of hybrid literacy.(1996)
Phonics
Children’s Writing & Spelling
At no time did we have more fun than when we explored the connections between phonics and correct spelling. Wanting to respectfully disturb the widespread belief amongst our parents that phonics was the panacea to all teaching ills, including spelling, Pam Nason suggested that we collectively spell hooked on phonics, phonetically. Humour carried the group through our phonetic spelling of electrocution to a much more respectful and insightful reading of a grade one child’s spelling of the same word and through a careful examination of other writing samples. The terms “invented spelling” and "conventional spelling” was new to the parents in our group. They quickly came to use them in raising questions such as "well when should we expect our children to move from invented spelling to more conventional spelling?” This initiated many discussions about reading to spell and learning the rules such as 'tion’ which as we discovered only worked sometimes.
In the accompanying shaded box, we have reprinted directly from Where Does Fonix Phit. It demonstrates what we all learned by looking at and discussing the text of children’s writings. (p. 10-11)
In closing, we speak directly to Jane Roland Martin.(1993). To your ‘3C’s’ of care, concern, and connection we bring our own ‘3C’s’, those of critical literacy, conversations, and co-constructed curricula.
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