2 December, 12:30-14:00 GMT
Thinking of children as literacy practitioners, rather than literacy learners, highlights the active and creative agency they bring to the classroom. This challenges literacy curricula based on assumptions about what children can’t do, rather than what they can. Such curricula often focuses on teaching skills and knowledge associated with print, yet children’s literacy practices arise from diverse experiences of their social worlds. In this talk, I draw on ethnographically principled studies of young children’s experiences of literacy in two London primary schools. Both studies demonstrate the children’s agentive literacy practices for managing adult-assigned literacy tasks.
Speaker: Dr Lucy Henning
Dr Henning is a lecturer in English Language and Applied Linguistics at the Open University with a professional background is learning and teaching literacy in UK primary schools. She researches young children’s experiences of language and literacy from a Literacy as a Social practice (LSP) perspective and also has a teaching interest in Peace Education in UK schools.