As teachers seek to reflect children’s diverse experience in the subject matter they present and in the questions they explore, they must also embrace children’s multifaceted ways of knowing. Their major pedagogical challenge is to help children transform what they know into modes of representation that allow for a full range of human experience. In their lives outside of school, children ‘naturally move between art, music, movement, mathematics, drama, and language as ways to think about the world [...]. It is only in schools that students are restricted to using one sign system at a time.’ (Shortet al., 2000: 160). This study uses young children’s drawings about reading and writing as an innovative way of investigating their perceptions and understandings of literacy across the broad contexts of their lives. The study challenges the politics of classroom practices that privilege language-dependent modes of representation over other modes.
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