Children, Literacy and Ethnicity: Reading Identities in the Primary School By LexieScherer. UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016 ISBN 978‐1‐137‐53736‐2, 189 pp, £89.99 (hb)

Abstract

This book presents a challenging child-eye view of what it means to be a ‘poor reader’. It specifically provides the views of linguistically diverse and minority ethnic children such as Nicole from Angola, Rahim from Bangladesh, Zora from Morocco, Malik from Iraq, Arvitas from Kosovo and many other children. These pupils range from new arrivals in the UK to those in long-settled communities. For educators and policy-makers, the takeaway learning is that we should listen to the children whom we teach and consider classroom reading from their perspectives. Working in a participative research framework, Lexie Scherer interviewed young children in a super-diverse urban UK primary school. Data illustrate the understandings that the children apply to their school reading, in complex weavings of race, religion, culture, language and ethnicity. The research focus is on picture books and how children ‘read their own concerns into the page’ (p. 106) in terms of images and characters that they consider to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and why. It can be uncomfortable for the reader — and for the author/researcher — to hear some children articulate prejudices in response to multicultural picture books, and Scherer reflects honestly on whether some of the children's apparently racist comments mean that they are actually racist children. Beyond the texts, the children are acutely aware of classroom reading hierarchies and peers who are better skilled, ‘more intelligent’ readers. The study reveals how young children from a variety of minority ethnic and linguistic backgrounds respond to the demands put on them by school reading instruction and assessment. It explores how they make sense of what they are given to read in relation to their understanding of themselves and the wider world, and how they self-manage school evaluations of themselves as readers. The book aims to examine the ‘taken for granted’ processes of learning to read, and these processes mainly appear to be the assessment and benchmarking systems. In this sense, Scherer explicitly shows how learning to read in school is an unspoken social, cultural and political process that makes a significant impact on children. The author controversially critiques campaigns and organisations such as the National Literacy Trust and Get London Reading for discourses that ‘race and place’ children, positioning minority status as a causal deficit marker of literacy underachievement, rather than consulting children about their experiences of learning to read. Scherer proposes a ‘Super 7’ set of classroom reading routines which include long-held effective practices such as reading aloud, silent reading, oral storytelling and cultural reading (everything from environmental print to analysing TV programmes and advertising). But there are two standout items in the ‘Super 7’: faith literacy and bilingual reading. Both items receive insufficient attention in primary schools. Most classroom teachers have little or no training in effective support for bilingual children's literacy learning, or how to engage with faith beyond the statutory syllabus and the antiterrorism ‘Prevent’ agenda. The ‘how to’ of the Super 7 is not articulated. Readers must look to programmes such as CLPE's ‘The Power of Reading’, or the ‘Teachers as Readers/Building Communities of Readers’ projects, for ideas on how to improve literacy pedagogy and inclusion in multilingual, multi-ethnic classrooms. Scherer acknowledges ‘informal chats’ with teaching staff and school leaders, but she is committed to foregrounding the voices of children. Her focus makes the salient point that debates about reading are adult-led. The research illustrates, often glaringly, that children in schools cannot alter how reading is taught. They can only succeed or fail within the assessment regime. This study provides, above all, irrefutable evidence that the children of the world are the norm in UK primary schools today. It calls on educators and schools to listen carefully to these children.