A bridge between home and school
Jane Sahi
The idea of ‘a third space’ or an in-between space provides one way of imagining how aspects of home, community and school can creatively converge to support children’s literacy learning. “Third Space Theory” has been applied in a number of contexts but here it has been used to think how the different forms of literacy children experience can be mutually enriching.1 School is, therefore, not considered to be the only domain for children to learn literacy. It comes from recognizing that each and every home is characterized by its stories, memories, languages and distinctive cultural resources and that these can enrich a child’s literacy learning at school.
When children start school they bring a wealth of knowledge about language, relationships and the environment but so often these young ‘knowers’ are treated as empty vessels waiting to be filled or alternatively full vessels that need to be emptied. How can schools bridge the transition from home to school so that children can be supported to build on what they know? Can children generate their own texts to learn literacy? Can the children’s knowledge of their own homes, food, health and clothing be a starting point to further explore the world? Can children’s observations of the natural world be the basis for expanding their knowledge about animal and plant life? Can an understanding of history begin with a sense of the child’s own roots and connections in the primary world of home and family? It is not just a one way passage because the other challenge is to think about how children can take literacy and ways of looking and learning from school to home?
By the age of three or four, children become adept apprentices at a number of ways of representing their own experiences and interpreting others’. Children soon learn how to make meaning from sensory experience and “read” faces, pictures, moods and patterns in nature. These multimodal forms – spoken words, images, gestures and make-believe play need to be integrated as they learn how to express themselves through the written word.
For some children there is a comfortable alignment between the culture and language of home and that of the school but for many children stepping into school is an alienating experience. Ways of using language may be unfamiliar, the forms and pronunciation of language used at home may not be acceptable in the school setting and increasingly the language itself may be very different, as more children are enrolled in English medium schools. All children need to be enabled to master standard forms of language but it is important that teachers accept the child’s home language as a vital form of his or her identity and find ways of valuing it. Further, teachers need to understand that the shift from home language to standard language or another language is a gradual one and excessive demands for correctness can be disempowering.
In addition the information provided by a textbook may not be relevant to the child’s experience or concerns. In the 1930s Sylvia Ashton Warner was a pioneer in developing ways of teaching literacy that came out of children’s own particular lives.2 The prescribed texts used in New Zealand at that time had little meaning for the Maori children that Sylvia Ashton Warner was teaching. The texts reflected a middle-class, Euro-centric, urban life style and culture that was totally alien for the indigenous people of New Zealand. In response Ashton Warner evolved what she called Organic Reading and Writing programmes. It was called organic because it grew naturally from what the children know and wanted to know. For example, she would ask each child to choose a word that they wanted to write and these were shared in the class. This was the beginning of children writing their own texts for each other to read. The texts were in the words that the children spoke and the stories were about the things that were closest to the children’s fears and hopes, delights and troubles. These were very different texts from the sanitized, colourless stories of an idealized privileged conventional family.
Many schools encourage children to share news verbally and this can lead to keeping individual diaries through pictures and words. Another possibility is to support children to make a wall newspaper where significant or memorable local happenings can be shared.
Examples of a diary and a newspaper
As children grow they are expected to produce longer compositions but very often these are on topics that are of scant interest to their aspirations. Teachers need to give children opportunities to write about what matters to them and not standardized accounts of events that have little personal significance. The children’s work can be one of the valuable resources to support their peers or younger children’s reading.
Further children can draw on the multimodal, multilingual and multicultural resources and diverse forms of communication from home and community that are often invisible in the school setting. Each one has “cultural capital” that needs to be valued and these may be linked to a family or community’s fund of stories, memories and particular ways of using or playing with languages such as rhymes, jokes and proverbs.
If we think of our homes there will be many objects that may be inscribed with writing or a message of some kind: photographs, invitations, prayer books, embroidered texts, T Shirts and certificates. Artifacts often embody a family’s identity and history and can provide a sense of continuity if they can be brought – either as objects or photographs – from the home to the classroom. Such personal objects can open up some of the different worlds that children are coming from. An old lamp, a bangle, a particular book or a toy might spark memories or connections that have not been recognized or articulated. They can often provide rich talking points and lead to other forms of sharing and expression.
Children might begin with a study of the history and geography of their own neighbourhood as a way of critically understanding change. There are often resources that are unnoticed such as a ruined building, inscriptions on a hero stone, or a new apartment block that could be investigated to understand links between the past, present and future. Other topics might include looking at why people shift their location or think about the factors that contribute to transforming the landscape. These complex subjects can begin to be discussed meaningfully because such things are within the child’s experience.
Pictures of history and geography of the village
Can families become more a part of the school and not visit only to collect marks cards or to hear or to voice complaints? For example, in some schools a “Grandparents Day” is celebrated and grandmothers and grandfathers are invited and children ask questions about their lives. This can bring history alive and give an understanding of how changes in expectations, communication, mobility, ways of justice and entertainment have impacted people’s lives. The extended family can be a wonderful, vibrant source of songs, different ways of telling stories and knowledge of diverse languages and dialects.
Popular culture with its new forms of media and communication play a powerful role in many children’s lives. Yet so often it seems that these new forms of literacy are given little place in the school despite the fact that they give children a lot of energy and motivation to engage. One example is the periodic craze for playing with WWF cards that carry all kinds of information from the measurement of an individual wrestler’s biceps to the number of fights they have won! We seem to carry on with a textbook culture as though nothing has changed.
How can technology and digital media be used judiciously so that it is empowering? There are challenges to discern when it is supportive to learning and when it is a distraction but if these issues are not addressed in school then children grow up vulnerable to being exploited and uncritical in the world beyond the classroom in the face of digital technology.
The Small Science series of books first published by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education preferred to design a resource book for teachers rather than textbooks for classes I and II. Children are encouraged to carry out activities in their locality as opposed to giving decontextualized information and reduce active learning to memorizing generalizations and often random facts. The resource book for classes I and II is a treasure-house of suggestions and ideas for teachers to work with children to explore the locality. It is problematic to create a single appropriate textbook that includes relevant information about different localities from the Himalayas to coastal regions. At the early stages children need to observe and think about their immediate surroundings before opening up topics related to unfamiliar, unknown settings. An example of an activity is as follows:
Look at the stem of a shrub, creeper or climber and the trunk of a tree. Are they similar or different? Touch each stem or trunk and describe it: what is its colour? Is it smooth or rough? Soft or hard? The stem of a creeper may look weak. Do you think it may break easily? Do you see any juice or gum on the stem? Any insects on it?3
The challenge of bringing home experience into the school domain is one aspect but equally important is the way children can take literacy from school to home. Schools often give children access to books and this is something that children might carry home to share with the family. However, books are not necessarily part of many home cultures and the notion of reading aloud to children or hearing children read is not a part of many families’ tradition. Giving homework tasks that draw on knowledge from home may give a connection for children to break boundaries between home and school knowledge. Such activities might include the making of family trees, drawing maps of the journey from school to home, interviewing family members about their own memories of childhood and living styles, finding out sources of water and measuring water consumption in the house etc. Another aspect is to encourage children to explore things they have learnt at school in the freer and less pressured space of home in the form of drawings, writing, making scrapbooks and documenting events with videos and photos.
The suggestions above are just some of the ways that a space can be created where re-contextualization can happen and literacy practices at home and school can merge. This means that there is continuity between home and school. There is a danger of a rupture of discontinuity if ways of meaning-making at home and school are kept apart.
References
- There is an extensive discussion on this in the book, “Literacy and Education” (2011. Sage Publications) written by Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell.
- Warner S.A. (1963) Teacher. See www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/Teacher.pdf
- Small Science Teacher’s Book: Class I
The author has taught in an alternative school for many years and has written a number of books about how children can be encouraged to write and draw their experiences both inside and outside the school contexts. She is presently engaged in working with children and teachers within the mainstream. She can be reached at janehelensahi@gmail.com.