Abstract
I read this book while drinking coffee on the bus, in my kitchen next to unwashed mugs, and sitting outside sports centres waiting to collect my children. Why does any of this matter? It matters, because as Hackett explores from numerous starting points in this book, literacy is about more than words and meaning. The literacies discussed here are embodied, they are transitory, they are wriggly and difficult to put in a box and separate out from everything else. The meanings that we make through language and thought cannot be separated from our everyday experiences as bodies in the world. A key theme of the text is to trouble the notion that early childhood is a time during which young humans are guided and supported from non-literacy towards literacy, as if these two states were distinct and definable. Hackett asserts that this privileging of (a particularly narrowly defined notion of) literacy, linked to adulthood, maturity, logic and mastery over and above the supposed non-literacy of children, seen as lacking, undeveloped, untamed, creates a damaging hierarchical binary. But there are other ways of considering the literacies of childhood. Hackett presents a respectful, kind attention to the worlds of the children in her research, bringing a sense of openness and possibility.
The book is oriented around tiny moments drawn from Hackett’s work in micro communities with young children in settings in North England. These moments of feet in sand, of snacks under pushchairs, and worms on hands, are precisely situated in time and place. They are totally unique and therefore extraordinary. However, these moments are also mundane, and instantly recognisable to many who have spent time in similar settings, making them at the same time very ordinary. This familiarity is how we notice that the vignettes are not isolated events. They are enmeshed with all kinds of other tiny moments, our own memories, experiences, anxieties. These moments bear traces of particular ways of thinking about children in and of the world, while simultaneously resisting rigid categorisation. They help us to move from the individual to the global, while highlighting the fact that it is hard to determine where the individual stops and the rest of the world starts.
Hackett’s book uses this telescopic transitioning and playing with scale to invite us to rethink what matters through a focus on multifaceted views of childhood. Which moments, objects, and literacies are meaningful, to whom & why? And how might paying close attention to these everyday, fleeting moments of throwntogetherness (Massey, 2005) of time, space, bodies both human and non-human be a tool in resisting dominant harmful narratives that seek to keep us in our places? In the face of this challenge, Hackett’s book offers a gentle invitation that seeks to open possibilities rather than direct the reader to a conclusion. The text in no way takes a neutral stance, however, with a strong sense of community values and commitment to social justice present throughout.
The book is divided into three parts. Firstly, Hackett discusses the methodological approach taken in her research. The research is rooted in community places and spaces, focusing particularly on two community play groups and a day care centre in urban North England. She reflects on how her work differs from traditional ethnography in that rather than spending focused time alongside a community in order to understand it thoroughly, and become an expert about it, she is instead foregrounding the political positions we (re)inforce when we seek to pin down knowledge about ourselves and others into neat categories and descriptions. This is particularly relevant in the field of early childhood literacies, where, in affluent Western cultures, significant emphasis is placed on the need for children to develop this skill also. Children are encouraged from the earliest age to focus on naming and describing the world as a way to control it and to establish their autonomy in relationships with others. However, through vignettes and reflections Hackett demonstrates that this model can be resisted and infiltrated by children’s activities, by their unpredictability, and their silence.
Next the book proposes a conception of ‘wild literacy’ which goes beyond traditional notions of children’s language development to incorporate and consider literacies as ways of being in the more-than-human world. Hackett discusses provisional and conditional understandings of moments in her research thinking of literacy encounters as polylogues between bodies (both human and non-human), spaces, sound and movement. Reflecting on the need to notice and value these encounters as they are, rather than always trying to ascribe a meaning, a logic, an intention, or a possible future benefit (usually for the human agent in the encounter), Hackett makes space for the literacies of the children and families who struggle to fit into a narrow, individual development-focused understanding of early development.
In the conclusion, Hackett delves more deeply into the received notion that literacy development is a smooth linear journey from novice to expert. Rather, she highlights the potential for possibility, for nuance, and for attending, that becomes less relevant as children begin to use words to hold meaning in place – does becoming literate in one way mean leaving other kinds of literacies behind?
Overall, I found this book thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking. The wide range of theoretical frameworks drawn on were made relevant and comprehensible without skimping on nuance. The juxtaposition of vignettes and rich analysis of the world in which she is embedded, with some of the standard issue ‘tips for parents’ on how to develop young children’s literacies makes for stark contrasts and highlights how much we may lose, or ignore, if our focus is too narrow when thinking about what is happening in early childhood.
Previously, an understanding of early childhood development as a linear trajectory has been conceptualised as universal rather than an ideological choice. Those who fall outside this pathway can therefore be positioned as somehow deficient: poorly served by their communities, not engaged with appropriate services, activities and interventions, for example. Hackett’s book suggests that a refusal to follow the plan, to get with the programme, to keep the crayons in the mark making area, can instead be a mark of resistance, a political assertion of will and agency. Perhaps not necessarily planned or intentional, but ‘affective atmospheres catch people up in an unfolding moment, moving them to act.’ (p.64)
Some educators and early childhood campaigners may feel a sense of disconnect here. If particular approaches and ways of being with children have been shown to be effective in developing children’s literacy, is there not a moral imperative to ‘do the best for children’ by giving them the skills they need for success? Hackett’s book turns this idea on its head by asking what ideologies we are perpetuating if the pursuit of success and ‘the best’ is only perceived through a narrow lens of what being literate looks like. If early childhood literacy development is about no more than transforming children into a certain kind of adult then we are bound to maintain inequalities and injustices. However, this book is not a reprimand, any more than it is an instructional manual for ‘how to do early childhood’. Rather than regretting the fact that current definitions, interventions and pedagogies are ‘not enough’ to adequately account for the richness of early childhood literacies, Hackett celebrates the idea of ‘more than’. It is this broadening of scope, this stance of active inclusion and noticing that is a spur to thought and to action for the researchers and practitioners who will no doubt engage frequently with this book.
