Thrown Together: Incorporating Place and Sustainability into Early Literacy Education

Abstract

The development of language and literacy abilities of young multilingual children is important to their future educational engagement and success in school. In this study, the value of taking account of place and sustainability in early literacy education is considered. This research provides ideas for practice-based research on early literacy in multilingual and community-based contexts. In a case study with a Grade 1 classroom in Sweden, the researcher and the teacher implemented various literacy activities to bring children's own powerful knowledge about place into the classroom. This enabled young children to actively engage with language and literacy in authentic and meaningful ways. Early childhood teachers need to be aware of the importance of incorporating ideas about place and sustainability into early literacy education in order to avoid deficit discourses and instead build participatory practices and support democratic values. Bringing literacy and place together in education can address what is perhaps one of the most crucial questions of sustainability, namely how people within a community can live together while having different values, beliefs and dreams.Keywords Education for sustainable development (ESD) Á Childhood Á Early literacy education Á Place-based pedagogy Á Authentic literacy activities Résumé Le développement des habiletés des jeunes enfants multilingues en matière de langage et de littératie est important pour leur engagement éducationnel et leur réussite scolaire futurs. Cette étude porte sur l'importance de prendre en compte le lieu et le développement durable dans l'éducation des jeunes enfants à la littératie. Cette recherche donne des idées pour des études axées sur la pratique en éducation des jeunes enfants à la littératie, en contextes multilingues et Resumen El desarrollo de las habilidades lingüísticas y la competencia lectora/ expresión escrita de los alumnos multilingües es importante para su futuro éxito en la escuela. En este estudio consideramos el valor que tiene el contexto educativo y la sostenibilidad en las edades tempranas de la escolarización. Esta investigación proporciona ideas prácticas acerca de la competencia lectora y la expresión escrita en contextos multilingües y comunitarios. Específicamente, se muestra un estudio de caso en un aula de primer grado de primaria en Suecia, donde el investigador y el maestro implementaron varias actividades de comprensión lectora/expresión escrita para incentivar el conocimiento de los niños sobre el contexto escolar. Esto permitió a los niños pequeños participar activamente en la apropiación de las destrezas, de manera auténtica y significativa. Los maestros de la escuela primaria deben ser conscientes de la importancia de incorporar ideas sobre el medio y la sostenibilidad en la educación temprana para evitar discursos no auténticos, en lugar de construir prácticas participativas y apoyar el desarrollo de valores democráticos. Tratar de llevar de la mano la lectura y escritura con el medio en el proceso educati...

Enhancing children’s literacy and ecological literacy through critical place-based pedagogy

“…a spatial, visual and embodied 'text of place' that tells children and their teachers something that they can make meaning from in relational ways, with the aim of designing powerful classroom literacy practices. Schmidt (2017) affirms this in the following way:…”

“…Massey (2005) highlights the practising of place in which she states processes of negotiating are "forced upon us' ' (p. 154). In such processes of negotiation and communicative actions, children's own surrounding world can be drawn upon as a text to critically evaluate, question, reread and redesign (Comber and Nixon, 2004;Freire 2001;Schmidt 2017). Such place-based pedagogy can result in education drawing on both familiar and more unknown conditions in different places.…”

What about the Migrant Children? The State-Of-The-Art in Research Claiming Social Sustainability

“…The authors contended that there was much work to be done to extend the thinking and practice related to the education for sustainability beyond the environmental dimension, in order to embrace a more holistic perspective that also incorporates the social and cultural dimension. A greater focus on sociocultural issues like equality and justice and the negotiation of new approaches to link democratic values to issues of sustainability within education was called for [49,50,52,58,61,69,70].…”

“…The social dimension of Education for Sustainability was, to some extent, present in the vast majority of the articles, very often described within the explanation of the three interdependent dimensions of sustainability and conceptualized or emphasized in various ways. Recurring topics related to the understandings of the social dimension in the articles were democracy and democratic values, children's rights, citizenship, children as active citizens, and as participating agents of change [49,50,[52][53][54]61,62,66,70,71].…”

“…Issues of Education for Sustainability related to migrant children, multicultural aspects, or diversity were neither investigated nor outlined; however, the subject was identified as relevant in some of the articles [39,40,50,56,61,62,66,70,72]. Pramling Samuelsson and Park [50] considered that the diversity of cultural contexts in children's lives could be what sustainability might be all about.…”