‘I used to copy what the teachers at school would do’. Cross-cultural Fusion: The Role of Older Children in Community Literacy Practices

Abstract

This paper is derived from a wider study of literacy practice that examines and explores the role played by Qur’anic literacy in the lives of men, women and children in a UK Muslim community. It also draws on the significant body of theoretical work being developed by Gregory and others on the role of siblings and older children in literacy acquisition and practices, and reveals further exemplification of what Gregory terms ‘mediators’ of literacy practices from within multilingual communities (in this case a Muslim, Pakistani-heritage, Mirpuri-Punjabi speaking community in the north of England) who, in this case, although not always siblings, are elder, more knowledgeable, peers. It outlines a short-lived experiment that took place in a typical mosque school in a northern UK town when the mosque administration had difficulties finding a female teacher for the girls who were attending and describes how two older girls were asked to take over the teaching of young girls. We observe how the two older girls fuse the literacy and language practices from both schooled and Qur’anic literacies to provide an example of syncretic literacy practice.