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Maternal Literacies Action-Research Project (Pam Nason)
Excerpted from Innovative Teacher Education Projects in Early Childhood Education
Pam Whitty, Pam Nason, Anne Hunt
Prague, Czech Republic, September 1998

Background

The Maternal Literacies project was directly linked to the establishment of the Early Childhood Centre. We needed a major research project to establish our credibility as a centre of research and development. In addition we were highly motivated to seek additional funding recognizing that Initiative 91 funding was assured for only eight years. In1993 Pam Nason and Lissa Paul were awarded a research grant from Social Sciences Humanities Research Council, a national funding agency. Feminist and collaborative action research framed our theoretical stance. The fundamental idea of the project was the need to honour and support parents as teachers and to connect informal/home based learning with formal schooling in the early years.

Conception

The purpose of our study was to facilitate the inclusion of maternal literacies into schooled literacies. As a group of teachers, professors, mothers, and curriculum developers, we re- thought the complex relational dynamic between women, especially mothers and early childhood educators, and children and what this dynamic means in the development of a literate community. As Anne noted about kindergarten teachers with whom she has worked over an eight year period, the topic of home-school transition is a recurring one. Our aim was to demonstrate the value of the subjective observations and interactions of mothers in relation to the literacy growth of children. Mothers and primary school teachers at two rural sites were invited to participate with us in a two year action research experience to develop home-school literacy interchanges at each particular site, Our role, as researchers, was to facilitate conversations between mothers and teachers - to document their voices. As well we made explicit the implicit theories of teaching and learning which guided mothers and teachers so that we could explore how these theories were congruent and /or complementary and further to determine how their efforts might be better recognized. Rural sites were chosen because we believed that they offered the greatest possibilities for discontinuity between maternal and schooled literacies, and of institutional barriers to maternal participation in schools. Rural life is often less reflected in the school curriculum, distance in rural areas often inhibits parents from greater school participation and because of primary industry jobs, people in rural areas generally have less formal years of schooling than those in urban areas. For these reasons, rural schools represented the biggest challenge for the development of policies which might effectively validate the mothers' contribution to school literacy and ensure the mothers as partners in the institution.

Innovative Features

Our work took place in schools. We worked intensively in three schools where it was recognized that we were all learners and teachers - the graduate students, the professors, the teachers, the mothers and children. On the school site, we came to an intimate understanding of each others work. In re-searching our practise and planning for future practise we did so on a conversational tone. We talked with each other as opposed to at each other. The conversational tone was supported by a revolving chair in an effort to guard against hierarchical status which could be reinscribed through the position of the chair. Also, to ensure that our conversation was grounded in classroom practise, when we met with the teachers, they spoke first. Then, when the teachers met with mothers they asked them what they wanted to do to become more involved with schooling, to consider what they thought maternal literacies were and how they might be brought to the classroom. We wanted to pursue questions that teachers and parents were raising rather than academics. The work was really about deconstructing hierarchical relations in educational institutions. Our relationships with the teachers were affected by theirs with their parents and children. We were all conscious that we were working in an historical and social context where hierarchical relations existed. We were intent on deconstructing and valuing all voices equally. This was difficult at first as everyone was "looking up" for direction.

Strengths

We were all immeasurably enriched by the research experience and permanently changed by it. This speaks to the fact that we were all learning. Everyone - mothers, teachers, graduate students, professors - felt that the knowledge they had was honoured by others while at the same time the knowledge was being enhanced by the others. We could no longer construct the others as other. Another strength was evidence in the ways in which, and by whom "academic" knowledge was disseminated. Knowledge was disseminated to academic and professional audiences by parents and teachers as well as academics via : polyphonic pieces in professional journals, and mothers and teachers presenting with us at academic conference, and without us. We used part of our funding to send mothers out of the province to present at conference. For these particular mothers it was the first time they had travelled out of the province. Their families and communities were enriched by their travel and the academic community was enriched by having the researcher/subject positions deconstructed, in their face, as it were with living, breathing people as opposed to paper people.

Lessons Learned for Teacher Education

Deconstructing hierarchies is not easy but it is worth it. I learned much I would not have learned if I had chosen to occupy my professorial position in the education hierarchy and act as authority in teacher/parent education. Knowledge about what parents really do and why they do it is very thin on the ground of professional and academic consciousness. As academics we tend to structure what we ask from parents rather than enter into equitable conversation with them about the how and what of "domestic literacies." As I came to understand the complexity of the nature of the relational dynamic between mothers and teaches and home and schooled pedagogies, I also began to realize how stereotypic and divisive much of the research on parent professional relations and literacies of the home is. Personally and professionally, I emerged from this research with a convictions that if we are to have a hope of providing home /school continuity for all children we must engage teachers, teacher educators , parents especially mothers in face to face conversation which is structured so as to disallow 'normal practices of teachers telling parents , of both groups being told by academics. I also learned that as a teacher educator I can play an important role as a catalyst in helping teaches and parents understand each others lifeworlds and the complementary of their work.

Publications

Nason, Pam (1997) Why Make Teachers' Work More Visible to Parents? Young Children, July, Volume 52, Number 5. Co-author with Peter Gorham. (p. 22-26).

Nason, Pam (1997)Telling Tales Out of School: The Construction of Parental Literacy in School Culture. School Leadership and Management. Vol. 17, No. 1, (pp. 117-124).

Nason, Pam (1996) Nurturing Chick and Child: Maternal Thought and Practice in the School Curriculum, Early Childhood Centre Newsletter, June. (p. 1-4)

Nason, Pam (1995) The Pig's Tale: exploring maternal literacies, Primary Teaching Studies, University of North London Press, Volume 9, Number 2 . Co-author with Frankie Blake, Maria Christine, Winifred Fulton, Peter Gorham, Marilyn Graham, Janet Kershaw, Midge Leavitt and Lissa Paul. (p. 2-9)

Nason, Pam (1996) "Our Growing Experience: cultivating new hybrid literacies" at Partnership in Progress, First National Congress on Rural Education, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, March 14, 1996. (With Janet Kershaw)