Abstract
Background: One can argue that literacy practices work to produce forms of literacy knowledge and literate children in early childhood contexts. However, one needs to interrogate how these literacy practices create technologies of power that construct and normalise the school ready literate child.Aim: The ethnographic study employed in this article explored everyday literacy practices in early childhood contexts that were considered ‘usual’, the kinds of literate children these practices engendered and its normalising effects on children and teachers.Settings: The study was conducted in two early childhood centres with two early childhood teachers and teaching children between the ages of 3 and 4.Methods: The study was qualitative in nature and used participant observation. A genealogical analysis of literacy practices showed how technologies of power were embodied in different literacy practices that worked to construct and normalise the school ready child in different ways.Results: The findings revealed that everyday literacy practices were used to produce a literate child through disciplinary processes of observation, normalisation and examination. These literacy practices operated in covert ways where school readiness was tied to educational success. However, during this process of normalisation, children began to [re]position themselves within the literacy space, showing individual agency and self-regulation.Conclusion: Although the findings of this study are not generalisable, it has implications for how literacy and literacy practices are conceptualised in early childhood settings. This article advocates a reconceptualisation of school readiness by questioning embedded practices within the competence model of school readiness and calls for the early childhood field to dissect incisively what and who are advantaged and disadvantaged through early literacy practices.
Highlights
As early childhood care and education (ECCE) policy and reform initiatives begin to gain importance and momentum in South Africa, one questions how these initiatives construct and normalise the school ready literate child
A clear example of this is the claims that South African ECCE policymakers make that early childhood interventions can reduce poverty, mitigate social problems, prepare young children for formal schooling and later enable them to become active participants in the global economy (Atmore 2018)
The question that needs to be asked is: how do these reform initiatives play itself out in teachers early literacy practices? This article investigates the ways in which ECCE teachers’ literacy practices work to produce the literate child. It questions what it means to be literate in early childhood education by tracing how disciplinary power operates through everyday routinised literacy practices
Summary
One can argue that literacy practices work to produce forms of literacy knowledge and literate children in early childhood contexts. One needs to interrogate how these literacy practices create technologies of power that construct and normalise the school ready literate child. Aim: The ethnographic study employed in this article explored everyday literacy practices in early childhood contexts that were considered ‘usual’, the kinds of literate children these practices engendered and its normalising effects on children and teachers. Settings: The study was conducted in two early childhood centres with two early childhood teachers and teaching children between the ages of 3 and 4
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