Primary ideas: Literacies, histories and practices

Abstract

Every classroom story has a foreground and a background ‐ an immediate past and one that reaches further back. In the foreground stand the children and the teacher, working with practices and ideas from traditions that go back a long way and relate not only to shifts in literacy practices, but also to developments within primary education itself. In many cases these are practices which have come to be taken for granted; they fall under the loose description of ‘good primary practice’ and are reproduced through the discourses of classrooms, training institutions and Inservice courses. They are persuasive and have been tremendously important for my thinking but they do need to he used for critical thinking, ‘for thinking with., rather than under’ (Williams, 1981 p. 185). The intention of this paper is to provide an overview of some of these ideas. Starting from a critical look at the concept of a ‘literacy event’, I move through a historical background to current literacy practices in which I identify particular routines and texts themselves as crucial. I will then discuss some powerful critiques of primary education itself, which bring discourse to the foreground as a useful and critical concept with which to proceed.