Researching Young Children's Out-of-School Literacy Practices

Purposes for literacy in children's use of the online virtual world Club Penguin

“…However, the focus for this study was on the virtual world itself and it was clear that literacy was central to children's engagement with the site. As Spencer et al (in press) suggest, studies of children's out‐of‐school practices can serve to challenge assumptions that there is a lack of literacy in the lives of children living in low socioeconomic neighbourhoods. This study indicates that the children in this largely working‐class community were engaged in a wide range of online literacy practices in their use of virtual worlds.…”

“…It is important to document the range of literacy practices in which children, young people and adults engage beyond formal institutions such as schools and colleges in order to understand what skills, knowledge and understanding they may bring to sites of learning. Spencer, Knobel and Lankshear (in press), in a review of research in this f eld, suggest that the driving force behind many studies of out‐of‐school practices has been a desire to challenge school‐based assumptions that there is a lack of literacy in the lives of children living in low socioeconomic neighbourhoods. A further stimulus for the present study is the desire to identify the kinds of literacy practices in which children engage in online environments in order to determine how far they correlate with offline literacy practices.…”

Constructing Literacy Spaces in Low-Income Homes and Communities: A Study of Two Latino First Graders and Their Families

“…Drawing on my previous research using this theoretical approach (Volk & de Acosta, 2003; Volk & Long, 2005) and the research of others on Latino families (González, 2005; Valdés, 1996; Zentella, 2005), we focused on the strengths and resources of the children and their families, rather than their needs and alleged deficits as often described in the dominant discourse (Arzubiaga, Ceja, & Artiles, 2000). We knew that many Latino children had rich literacy lives—often invisible to teachers in urban schools or dismissed as irrelevant to school learning—and that they and their families possessed expertise and funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Long et al, 2007; Spencer et al, 2010) that could serve as the basis for a culturally relevant curriculum (Boardman et al, 2014; Gay, 2010)…”

“…Given the rich but small body of research literature investigating the literacy experiences of Latino children beyond the schools walls (Spencer, Knobel, & Lankshear, 2010) and the focus of most of this research on interactions in the home or a single community site (see, for example, Baird, Kibler, & Palacios, 2015; Baquedano-López, 2016; González, 2005; Valdés, 1996), our intent was (a) to broaden the scope of inquiry to include a range of urban locations the families visited in their daily lives as well as their two homes and (b) to move beyond generalizations about low-income urban neighborhoods and families toward a counter-narrative, focusing on Latino families. We planned to investigate both the places outside of school, in their homes and communities, where the two children and their families accessed literacy resources and the formal and informal literacy interactions that they constructed there.…”

Learning to read: A third perspective

“…All of these show a variety of literacy skills and knowledge gained by young children without official classroom teaching. Yet, paradoxically, Spencer, Knobel, and Lankshear (2013) claim that there ''remains a relative absence of ethnographic-type investigations of young children's everyday Learning to read: A third perspective 375 literacy practices'' (p. 134). Their words highlight my argument that existing theories of early-literacy learning are intrinsically situated in pedagogy, in classroom teaching rather than in children's home learning.…”