Young children as cultural, spiritual and global beings: Counter narratives of early childhood literacies in culturally diverse homes in a northern English town

Abstract

This paper describes an ethnographic study of home literacy practices of families with children aged under 4 years in a northern English town. We critically engage with the tendency of dominant approaches to early childhood education in England to work from a Eurocentric, developmental and thus, often, deficit perspective. In response, our research seeks to explicitly recentre the value of culturally diverse home literacies and the ways of knowing that sit within communities and families by asking, what can we learn about culturally diverse early childhood literacies by starting with everyday life in communities? Our findings stand as a counter story to the dominant figure of the young (emerging literate) child as individually autonomous, innocent and apolitical. In particular, we identify how home literacy practices produced and affirmed children as cultural, spiritual and global beings, deeply involved in the ongoing-ness of family life and global religious communities. The implications of our findings are that colonial narratives of childhood literacies as bracketed off from politics, religion and inequalities only serve to recentre whiteness of childhood (innocence) as well as erasing the heterogeneity of experiences of early childhood and parenting within communities in England.