Insights into the strategic ways in which two bilingual children in the early years seek to negotiate the competing demands on their identity in their home and school worlds

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of a small‐scale study into the ways in which two bilingual boys attempt to manage the discontinuities between their identities at home and as members of an early years class at a mainly white primary school in the UK. To do this, a number of semi‐structured interviews were undertaken with the boys and their parents. The results reveal that while the children generally attempt to assume the pupil identity options afforded them at school, the differences between these and those they take up in their home environment generally lead them to seek to keep the world of the home and of the school separate in ways that disrupt the school’s attempts to develop home/school partnership initiatives. We argue that a focus on identity management issues for children in the early years allows new and more critical understandings to emerge that can usefully inform the practices that educators can develop to enhance their learning experiences.