Abstract
As the title implies, Mariana Souto-Manning and Haeny S Yoon’s Rethinking Early Literacies: Reading and Rewriting Worlds invites us to reconsider young children’s literacy practices in (pre)school classrooms. Throughout this book, Souto-Manning and Yoon challenge the traditional concept of literacy (e.g. emphasizing reading and writing skills) for young children, urging us to orchestrate diverse and different literacies in the third space by negotiating and interacting with teachers and children dialogically through sociocultural literacy practices. Because the authors have conducted a range of critical studies focusing on the language and literacy practices of children, families and communities of colour, they are in a favourable position to discuss the political and ideological nature of literacy and the subtle relationships between language, literacy, identity, power and culture.
Drawing on critical and sociocultural approaches to language and literacy (e.g. Paulo Freire and Mikhail Bakhtin), the authors unveil the hidden ideologies, social values and formal/hidden curricula associated with early literacy practices that are dynamically interconnected with our everyday lives. Through the application of critical literacy frameworks, they address literacy’s role as a political and colonial tool in maintaining and justifying the stratification of society and creating privilege. Moreover, the authors borrow Bakhtin’s idea of the dialogic to understand children’s situational, cultural and hybrid meanings in their playful literacy practices. Their theoretical consideration enables educators, parents, researchers and policymakers to interpret multiple facets of children’s literacies in their situated time and place (i.e. the situational nature of early literacy). Additionally, it allows for engagement in meaningful discussions about the personal, social, cultural and political issues and experiences surrounding equity and social justice in language and literacy practices. It is vital that social agreements reconsider the dominant literacy pedagogies in this age of globalization and neo-liberalism.
The authors’ argument is developed through three themes. In the first section, they challenge the concept of young children as passive and deficient learners, and verify that young children are capable literate beings. Then, in the second section, they display young children’s relational literacies as a social and cultural space to interact with their families, communities and peers. The authors illustrate that young children actively navigate their linguistic practices within or across their relationships and spaces of belonging. Lastly, in the third section, they examine the complexity of young children’s literate identities and explore the possibilities of a ‘permeable curriculum’ (Dyson, 1993) and practical interactions through empirical examples in classroom contexts.
After reading this book, I considered the paradoxical situation of early literacy in the educational and linguistic ecology. The original purpose of literacy education was to communicate with each other and to provide equal access to information. However, the monolingual perspective makes a single language a social power, a social rule and a powerful way of expressing one’s voice, leading to ignorance of children’s linguistic proficiency, diversity (e.g. race, class and home language), complexity and hybridity. In addition, as some previous discourses about and pedagogical approaches to early literacy (such as the claim that early childhood is a special period of development and school preparation) are very entrenched, they are difficult to change in practice.
In fact, the concept of young children as literate beings and the concept of ‘new literacy’ or ‘multiliteracy’ are not new. Following the New London Group (1996), numerous other studies focusing on children’s multiliteracies and new literacies have been conducted, yet educational practices have not changed dramatically. Why has the linguistic reality for children not changed dramatically? How can we access children’s complex and heterogeneous linguistic practices? In order to answer these questions, we should explore and take action for the praxis of multiple literacies. In this sense, this book offers a convincing critical argument and urges us to reconsider the role of educators by bridging theory and practice.
As ‘ways of making sense in and of the world’ (46), the book illustrates children’s linguistic flexibility and participation with multiple languages through their living spaces: families, communities and peer culture. In this regard, it highlights children’s multimodal creations. However, children’s traditional creations (e.g. writing, drawings and narratives) are mainly used as children’s creations in this book. I would suggest that if the book had dealt with children’s emerging multimodal texts and novel practices, it would have improved our understanding of contemporary multimodal literacy practices in children’s daily practices. One example that comes to mind is the possibility of contemporary children’s digital learning and new literacies in educational contexts (see Henward and Dong, 2019; Marsh, 2015). Exploring children’s distinctive and creative ways of using languages across a variety of digital and analogue platforms may prove valuable in our attempts to understand their emerging multiple literacies.
Personally, as someone who inhabits a different cultural context, this book demonstrates some possibilities for early literacy curricula. It also raises many questions. In different cultural contexts (e.g. non-English-speaking society), how can we open a pedagogical space for children’s multiple literacies? How do literacy possibilities and challenges differ based on the cultural context? How can we prepare for fluid, hybrid and complicated multilingual contexts? This is also our next step for children’s linguistic and cultural potentials.
In sum, this remarkable book provides a productive and creative space to rethink our views on early literacies and reminds us to view children’s playful and rich linguistic practices through an open, diverse, critical and contextualized lens. While reading this book, I had a meaningful opportunity to reconsider our current pedagogical practices and to develop my own perspective on early literacies by connecting to the past, present and future of our linguistic discourses. I believe that Rethinking Early Literacies will open our minds to the educational possibilities of multiple literacies and help us to value children’s linguistic complexity, flexibility, diversity, social participation and ways of life.
