Who’s the Boss in Your Classroom? Power Relations and Literacy Practices Among Young Children
Sadia Nasrin Banerjee, Canada
Sadia N. Banerjee is a PhD student in Applied Linguistics at York University in Canada. She is interested in Social Identity, Body & Language and Critical Literacy. She intends to work in the academia in future. E-mail: sadiabanerjee@gmail.com
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Introduction
Theoretical framework
Purpose of the review
Identity and literacy learning
Unequal power relations and children’s agency
Critical pedagogy in elementary classrooms
Conclusion and implications
References
Denny: Are you still drawing Hey Arnold?
Marcel: No, I’m drawing a person walking. They have strong muscles…. All I’m drawing is one person trying to get away.
(Dyson, 2003, p. 101)
In the above piece of conversation from The Brothers and Sisters Learn to Write, Dyson (2003) portrays a sign of tension among the first graders in Rita’s classroom at San Francisco Bay district regarding one of the kids, Marcel’s appropriation of popular media materials in his writing. Dyson, in her book, discusses how the children in her research appropriated and negotiated a variety of popular cultural resources in the process of their writing development. The interaction between the unofficial childhood practices and the official world of the classroom, as Dyson suggests, was a complex phenomenon that helped the children gradually understand the boundaries of the two worlds along with their advancement throughout the school year. The episode of Marcel and Denny’s talk is an example of such a progression that took place when Rita warned Marcel not to use football as his science topic. This created a tension in the classroom. Since some of the kids including Deny became concerned about Marcel’s drawing, which started taking a shape of a football player, Marcel was trying hard to explain that differently. Though Dyson points out that the conflict was not initiated from the teacher’s objection, it indicates that the children were growing a sense of the necessity of getting accepted by the dominant academic discourses. This is an example of power relations (Bourdieu, 1977) between the dominant and the subordinate cultures that take place in everyday classroom interactions. It is this unequal relationship of power among different discourses, materials, people and other components in a classroom that determines the existence of children’s cultural practices in literacy learning to a great extent. Thus, my aim in this paper is to learn what literature reveals about power relations and children’s identity and engagement in literacy practices in elementary education.
Poststructuralist approaches consider literacy learning as socially constructed, which should be investigated within and across different communities and in relation to learners’ access to the social, economic and political structures in those contexts (Norton, 2010). Among the poststructuralist theories, Gee’s (1989) work is significant that explains literacy as constitutive of political contents. Gee calls each of these contents a discourse. Gee discusses the complex and stratified relationship between the primary and secondary discourses; primary discourses are the home discourses that people are exposed to in their earlier life at and around home, whereas the secondary discourses are the discourses of institutions such as school. Gee’s work suggests how it is often difficult for learners to cope with the transition from home discourses to the dominant secondary discourses. Using Bourdieu’s (1977) metaphor of power relations and Gee’s (1989) idea of home and academic discourses, many researchers seek to understand how learners’ engagement in language and literacy learning is affected by their multiple identities in relation to classroom instructors, peers, course curriculum, materials, and other components of teaching (Duff, 2012; Norton, 2000; Toohey, 1998). This, in turn, may affect their present and future opportunities to access different learning environments (Duff, 2012).
Earlier works on identity, power relations and imagined community in literacy learning mostly focused on older children and young adults. Rita’s classroom in Dyson’s (2003) work indicates how a school’s vision of future communities for its children (Dagenais, 2003), which expects children to be able to get into the academic world, may affect even younger children’s identity and literacy practices. Therefore, I will draw implications from existing literature for young children’s’ participation/non-participation in literacy practices in relation to their identity constructed by unequal power relations around them. I will discuss the issue in three main sections: a) Identity and literacy learning; b) Unequal power relations and children’s agency; and, c) Critical pedagogy in elementary classrooms.
Norton Peirce (1995) explains identity as learners’ perception of who they are in relation to the social world. Poststructuralist theory of identity, as Norton notes, considers it as multiple, changing and a site of struggle, which constructs, and is constructed by, language. From this perspective, language and literacy learning connects learning to learners’ social identity, while learning is considered as a social practice. Dagenais, Day and Toohey (2006) conducted a two-year ethnographic research among elementary school children from low-income families who were attending a French Immersion program in Vancouver. Among the children, Sarah was observed in her grade five and six to understand how her identity as a student was constructed over the years. The study demonstrates how access to certain learning resources influenced Sarah’s identity as a student. While she was an active student in the previous grade, she became reluctant to participate in discussions and readings with the whole-class in the sixth grade. Her limited interaction with the teacher might be a result of the way she was positioned by her teachers.
Hawkins (2005) documented the ways in which two kindergarten children assumed their identities in relation to the classroom components including their peers in their classroom that affected their literacy practices. The children were from two different social and academic backgrounds. In spite of possessing a high social status and literacy resources, one of the children showed less improvement in his literacy practices compared to the other who came from a less resourceful family. The first kid assumed his identity as a good friend of other kids, while the second child envisioned himself as a learner, which made the difference. The study indicates how children’s views of themselves may construct or restrain their identities and literacy learning. Kissel, Hansen, Tower, and Lawrence’s (2011) study is significant in understanding how interaction among young children may challenge their identities as literacy learners. The longitudinal study was conducted among pre-K students in the USA. The children were involved in literacy practices that created opportunities to take part in conversation. The results show that interaction among the teacher and students created new opportunities for learning and challenged their identities to go forward.
Norton (2001) suggests that learners not only feel affiliation with the accessible society or community around them, but also envision their connection to imagined communities – a term coined by Anderson (as cited in Norton, 2010) – beyond the accessible ones that exist only in their imagination. This imagined relationship also affects their current participation in literacy learning. Kanno and Norton (2003), for example, show how a Japanese teenager and an adult second language learner constructed their identities based on their future imagined communities, which directly affected their participation in current learning. Rui, the Japanese teenage boy in the study, imagined his membership in an idealized Japan, different from the real Japan that made him maintain his proficiency in Japanese language and literacy. However, after discovering the real Japan, he withdrew his engagement from Japanese language.
Similarly, Norton and Kamal (2003) documented the ways in which Pakistani secondary school students responded to a literacy project they were involved in for community-building in Pakistan. The participants expressed in the interviews that they participated in the project because they thought that literacy was important for self and community development. The participants’ imagined community of Pakistan was that of a stable nation, which they thought would be possible to create only by accessing other communities through literacy in English. If we apply the theory to explain the imagined communities of Dyson’s (2003) children, it clarifies the reasons for their distinct choices of popular media. They had a strong affiliation with the media cultures – the famous sportsmen they never met, the songs that were actually targeted to teenagers and the animated creatures they would never see. Yet, those became the most prominent topics of their discussion that shaped their literacy practices. This indicates that children do not just randomly select and appropriate materials in their early writing practices, but these might be strongly connected to their future imagined communities.
Dagenais (2003) suggests that as children have their imagined communities, parents and educational institutions also have their imagined communities for their children. Her interviews with immigrant parents of elementary school students in Vancouver, BC suggest how the parents imagined their children’s participation in future communities, which influenced their choices of schools and language instructions for their children. However, Dagenais’s study implies, there is always a possibility that the children may develop affiliation with other communities beyond their parents’ choices that might interfere with the parents’ imagined communities. Kanno’s (2003) study among four bilingual elementary and secondary schools in Japan extends the view of Dagenais. The study highlights that the schools’ curricula were shaped by the imagined communities of the schools. Thus the schools’ visions of future Japan were completely different from each other to which they imagined the future access of their children. This affected the literacy activities in the schools. Both the above studies suggest that because of unequal relationships of power among different languages and diverse cultures in a society, schools and parents tend to follow the dominant language and cultural practices. This affects children’s literacy learning. The following section is an attempt to understand the relationship between unequal power relations and literacy learning among young children.
A classroom is a place of multiple discourses. How children position themselves related to the discourses in the classroom is important in their construction and/or constriction of identities and literacy practices. Hawkins (2005) says that children’s activities in a classroom are shaped by how they understand the discourses around them, and their responses to the discourses can be interpreted as their agency. This agency helps them to get into the new literacy practices or academic discourses. However, unequal power relationships may restrict the opportunities for children to use their agency in literacy practices.
Toohey (1998) examined, in a first grade classroom in Vancouver, BC, the effect of physical arrangements in the classroom on children’s identity construction. Toohey observed that the children were placed in a classroom in a way in which they could be monitored closely, which positioned them as students – someone who was less powerful than the teacher. The study also reveals that the notion of individualism, for example: i) having a specific seat; ii) using one’s own materials; and, iii) using one’s own language, may create community stratification in the classroom. These “everyday almost invisible practices” (p. 82) create unequal relationships of power between teachers and students, and also among students. Social stratification may also arise from interaction among students. For instance, one of the kids in the study was racially positioned by her peers that affected her engagement in learning. Li (2006) conducted a study among three bilingual/trilingual Chinese-Canadian children in Greater Vancouver to learn which factors influence the children’s selection of a language and literacy practices at home and school. The study suggests that the major influential factor to the differences in linguistic and literacy activities among the children were the parents’ perspectives on the languages and future imagined identities. The children were involved in literacy activities in specific language/s depending on the symbolic values their parents attributed to the languages. It is also important to note how the parents’ views to their first languages were shaped by the power relationships among the dominant and the subordinate languages in the society. This affected the children’s agency in choosing a language for communication and literacy practices. The study also indicates that if schools do not value the subordinate languages in the society, children may end up neglecting their first languages.
Norton’s (2003, 2010) study in an elementary school in Vancouver highlights the power relations between teachers and students regarding comic books as study materials. The student teachers, who participated in the study, said that comic books were not suitable for discussion in the classroom because of the contents and pictures in the books that might distract children’s attention from academic reading. Norton suggests that the reason why teachers did not recommend Archie comics for the classroom was related to their fear of losing control in the classroom. The study also implies that the participant children were aware of the power relations around them, which is why they drew a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate texts for classroom reading.
Norton’s study is also an example of children’s use of agency in literacy practices. If children do not feel an ownership of texts, they do not consider that as fun and interesting. The children in Norton’s study described Archie comics, which they thought would be a “waste of time” (p. 144) in the academic world, as fun unlike the chapter books they were required to read in the classroom. Similarly, Dyson’s (2003) children also used their agency to choose materials that they were interested in.
Children’s agency is largely shaped by their socio-cultural identities (Rowsell, & Pahl, 2010) that emerge even in pre-school years, and influence their play as well as academic literacy in those years (Neitzel et al., 2008). Rowe and Neitzel (2010) conducted a study among 11 2- to 3-year-old children to see how the children’s agency guides their writing activities in and outside a pre-school. The researchers collected data through participant and non-participant observation. Following grounded theory approach, they found in the research that all the children except one had a consistent pattern of interests in their writing activities. For example, among the four focal children, one child showed creative interests such as piling up erasers to make a sandwich, while another kid showed a pattern of socially oriented interests such as producing messages and reading them to others.
The studies in this section suggest that children need opportunities to use their agency to claim identities that will allow them to get access to literacy practices. It is also important to understand how children interpret their positioning in the classroom in relation to unequal power distribution.
Critical pedagogy talks about the inequalities in a society to bring social justice. Critical pedagogies are often followed in language and literacy education to aware students of the unequal power relations around them. It does not necessarily point at negative aspects, but encourages students to look at issues from different perspectives (Vasquez, 2007) to make them question the inequities. Some researchers (Vasquez, 2007; Souto-Manning, 2009) have worked with young children in their early school years to see how the children respond to critical pedagogy in literacy learning. Vasquez says that critical literacy is important for young children to help them make educated decisions. She worked with five 3- to 5-year-old children in a pre-school in Toronto, Canada. The children were involved in critical literacy activities using Fruity Peel-Outs Candies. One of the activities included talking and writing about whether they (or, their parents) would buy the candies and why. The study suggests how applying these simple activities, children learn to critically talk, such as asking questions, problematizing, interrogating, etc, about every-day spoken and written texts.
Dagenais, Moore, Lamarre, Sabatier, and Armand (2008); and, Dagenais, Walsh, Armand, and Maraillet (2008) wrote reports following a collaborative teacher-research project in elementary schools in Vancouver and Montreal. The main objective of the project was to involve the participant children in critical literacy activities to make them aware of the linguistic landscape – the power-relation between the dominant and the subordinate languages – around them. The fifth-grade children went out in groups with cameras, took photos of the monolingual and multilingual signs around them, and discussed about the relationship among the languages. The research influenced the children’s critical understanding of the multilingual realities in the society.
Souto-Manning’s (2009) study showed the impact of teaching critical literacy to first-grade children. The participants learned to question the social representations in their texts, and understood the diversity in people’s opinions. After they were exposed to critical literacy practices, they became aware of segregation and involved in changing a policy in the school. There was a program for gifted children that they could not access, and they felt segregated. After talking to the authority and the parents they convinced everyone to let them study together in the same classroom for one year. Similarly, Silvers, Shorey, and Crafton (2010) engaged some first-grade students in Chicago in a multi-literacy project called Hurricane Katrina to critically inquire about the hurricane. The researchers recorded the children’s interactions, reflections, writings, use of artifacts and field notes, and found that the project made the children active learners who used their agency in the learning process. The researchers suggest that critical literacy can be an integral part of any curricula even in early literacy education.
However, critical pedagogy has been criticized by poststructuralist theorists considering its binary positions such as oppressor-oppressed, black-white, etc. Learners often tend to identify themselves in a more complex way, which is why teaching pedagogies need to be more flexible that address the diversity in the society. Jones’ (2012) study is worth mentioning here. The critical ethnographic study, which was a part of a larger study, focused on some second-grade girls from working-class families. The study shows how power relations may offer young learners a fixed position within critical literacy contexts. The study indicates that teachers need to come out of the fixed notion of pedagogical practices to adjust them with learners’ backgrounds and needs.
In this paper, I reviewed literature on identity and power relations in early literacy classrooms and discussed how critical literacies can help young children critically understand the power relations around them. Children in their early literacy period might lose their agency because of the influence of power relations in the classroom. This might also be the reason for their non-participation in classroom learning, which often results in labeling some of the children as at risk or failing. Therefore, it is important to know how children position themselves in the classroom. Empowering children to make decisions about their literacy practices may help them construct new identities and imagined communities that will positively affect their literacy learning. In this regard, teachers need to ensure an equal distribution of power in the classroom so that children do not feel inferior in relation to teachers, peers or other classroom components.
The discussion in the above sections demonstrate that critical literacies in the elementary level can help create opportunities for learners to critically understand and question the power relations, which stimulate their agency to take part in learning. However, critical pedagogies have also limitations if the materials and activities do not match students’ backgrounds and learning needs. Further research need to be conducted to understand the experiences and responses of individual children from different linguistic and cultural background to critical literacy projects over a longer period of time. Parents and other adults such as grandparents and older children in the same school can be involved in collaborative projects to see its effects on children’s understandings of the social inequities, and their engagement in literacy activities.
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