This book explores children's meaning making of the books they learn to read with, especially relating to the intersections of race, gender and class. Based on research using a participative, innovative design with young children, issues of identity, belonging and classroom hierarchies are explored in complex and poignant ways by the children.

The book aims to examine the 'taken for granted' processes of learning to read, and these processes mainly appear to be the assessment and benchmarking systems. In this sense, Scherer explicitly shows how learning to read in school is an unspoken social, cultural and political process that makes a significant impact on children. (Kimberly Safford, Children & Society, Vol. 33 (2), 2019)

Autorentext

Alexandra Scherer is Lecturer in Childhood Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Her research focuses on exploring children's literacies, their identity work and their agency.

Klappentext

Mainstream narratives suggest Black and African Caribbean children, white working class children, and boys, are 'failing' to learn to read. This book investigates intersections between race, class and gender in the picture of the 'poor reader', starting with young children's voices. What is the place of home learning in the story of children learning- or failing to learn to read? What do we learn about children's identity formation as they engage with books? Social science has not focused on reading as a social practice in the lives of children, starting with their perspectives, and this book fills a major gap. Policy and teachers' discourses are well represented in the literature; children's experiences of reading are not. This book not only shows the complex meanings children make of reading, but also that through consulting pupil voice it is possible to explore different issues around reading than those in adult-led debates.

Inhalt

1. Setting the Scene on Children's Reading

2. Children and Reading: Mapping Literacy

3. Research and Fieldwork at Three Chimneys School

4. The Child and Reading: Narratives of Literacy Competence

5. The Materiality of the Book

6. A Politics of Identity: Narratives of Migration, Place and Faith

7. Race, and the Embodiment of Difference

8. A Reflection on Children, Reading and Identity