Restricting Diversity to Promote Democracy: Community Literacies and Playing Across Spaces

Samantha Owen

doi:10.5334/csci.121

Abstract

Abstract In 2018 a teacher in a Montessori school captured on camera two children in her special education classroom using a touchscreen tablet to interact. To her it was significant: these pre-verbal children had found a way to independently share aspects of their lives. In 1965 a Nigerian mother commented that volunteering on a care rota in a playgroup in a housing estate in west London gave her the confidence to greet her neighbours when she saw them on the street. To Ilys Booker, the community development worker assigned to the area, this was also a marker of significant change and an indication of success. Using these two instances as starting points, this article explores the links between play/space/city and literacy/civic/citizenship by drawing together two case studies: Notting Dale, London, 1964–1969 and River Montessori School, Australia, 2018. In both case studies, the institutional concern is over how the target groups are educated to become literate as citizens, with a focus on exhibited values and virtues. Working from a historical perspective this paper asks: what are the historical conditions which determine our current understandings of participatory culture? How do these enable and/or limit the possibilities of Open Literacy? How do communities form in a liberal democracy and what roles do institutions play?

Highlights

Sitting in a classroom in Australia, two pre-verbal children – one seven years old and one almost five years old – are teaching each other about their families and their lives
We proposed that a shared language could be used to resolve the internal contradiction in the school attitude to Digital Technologies use
Unlike Glover, and River Montessori, her response to moral panic and to fears about invasion and cultural loss was not to shut down communication but to open it up. In doing so she sought to build a participatory culture through expressions of agency, understanding that to be the only pathway to democracy

Summary

Introduction

Sitting in a classroom in Australia, two pre-verbal children – one seven years old and one almost five years old – are teaching each other about their families and their lives. At the end of her time in Menfi, Booker assessed the value of the project and she concluded that it was introduced prematurely, it was a success in some ways as they attracted a good reputation – beyond kind, helpful and free As she took her daily walk and passed a woman on her doorstep, the woman engaged Booker in conversation: ‘all the mothers say that your school wakes the children up’. In direct response to the 1958 race riots, and as a measure to avoid the moral panic Thatcher’s discourse would later invoke, social researcher Pearl Jephcott was asked by the City Parochial Fund to run the the North Kensington Project This was a Family Study that she and her team carried out to assess what could be done in the area to create cohesion and community, with a focus on self-help schemes (Jephcott 1964). Booker’s view was that the measure of success was if agency was expressed and if a sense of community emerged

Result of the Nottingwood Group

Conclusion