New Adventures in the Politics of Literacy: an Introduction

Abstract

In what ways are childhood and literacy political? The identification and categorization of the ‘child’ as a distinctive kind of human subject coincided with the formation of the European nation state, the proliferation of mercantile economies and calls for mass literacy and secular schooling (Luke, 1989). There is a longstanding and powerful connection between ‘childhood’ as an ontological and cultural category and what Benedict Anderson (1991) called ‘print capitalism’. Over several centuries, then, schools, churches, families and industries have been charged with the promotion of particular literate traditions and the construction of distinctive kinds of text practising children. It is precisely these very educational institutions and linguistic monocultures built around practices with the written word that appear to be teetering on some kind of an historical brink. For according to discussions of Canadian and Australian, UK and US schooling in this edition of JECL, the teaching of initial print literacy is struggling to adapt to heteroglossic, multilingual student bodies, new communications technologies and modalities of representation, and the tenacious forms of social inequality that run with globalized economies. The political formation of early childhood literacy follows discernable and durable patterns, detailed in these articles.We can speak of early childhood literacy education as ‘political’ across three connected strata: • AS IDEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION – Literacy education is a mode of ideological representation. That is, it is an introduction to particular social and political ideologies, cultural values and beliefs which are selections from possible sociocultural positions and class interests. The first two articles here by Larson and Gatto and Comber and Nichols question how policy foci on basic skills narrow and constrain ideational and curricular diversity of early literacy instruction. Apart from these overt ideological implications, several recent discussions of No Child Left Behind have suggested this narrowing of literacy as curriculum sets the grounds for cross-curricular achievement slumps in mid and upper primary years (e.g. Calfee, 2002).