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Reading, Homes and Families: From Postmodern to Modern?Victoria Carrington & Allan Luke, University of Queensland
In A. van Kleeck, S. A Stahl, & E. B. Bauer (Eds). On reading to children: Parents and Teachers. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Homes and Families: From Postmodern to Modern?
READING, HOMES AND FAMILIES: FROM POSTMODERN TO MODERN? New economic, social and cultural conditions have begun to alter the patterns of home/school transitions in two ways: first, by shifting the normative definitions of family in postindustrial communities and economies; and second, by shifting the basis of preschool linguistic and literate socialization from longstanding print culture to emergent, complex blendings of multiliteracies that engage digital and media texts. Our claim here is that for many children the normative site for storybook reading–the family–is changing, that the texts and discourses of home and community-based literacy practices are changing, and therefore, that the background knowledge, expertise, and habitus that children bring from home to school are also in transition. The cases we describe model new patterns of identity and practice at work in the early childhood classroom–patterns for which a generation of print-trained and acculturated teachers have limited explanatory schemata other than those related to "deficit." The chapters in this volume focus largely on the implications of storybook reading for the teaching and learning of literacy in schools. Since the prototypical case studies by Shirley Heath (1982) on "what no bedtime story means" for working- and middle-class American families, and the contemporaneous work by Gordon Wells (1986) and his colleagues in the Bristol Language Study, there has been a concerted focus on the significance of printed text in home/school transitions. Not surprisingly, the historical backdrop behind Wells’ and Heath’s work was the "class, codes and control" premise developed by Basil Bernstein (1976) and colleagues–including Ruqaiya Hasan and Jenny Cook-Gumperz–in the 1970s. This premise was concerned with the constitutive effects of class-based early language socialization on later literacy development, overall educational achievement and social and economic reproduction more generally. While the postwar U.K. and European debate pivoted on social class stratification, more recent U.K. research has documented the increased complexity and challenges for early childhood education raised by culturally heterogeneous societies and communities (Gregory, 1997; Gregory & Williams, 2000). Hence, much of the "new" research in family literacy has been an attempt, based on sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication, to come to grips with the shift from normative ‘White’ cultures (Frankenberg, 1993) to blended and resituated ethnic, migrant, indigenous and non-English speaking cultures. Particularly given the current policy enthusiasm for early intervention (Luke & Luke, 2001), it is not surprising that the home/school transition remains the Gordian knot of language education. Yet our understanding of the complex interplay between family, early literacy experience in the home and community, and preschool language socialization mediate children’s encounters with mainstream schooling remains modernist in its assumptions about both the family and the traditional print medium. The debates over language deficits and ameliorative activities and programs persist in our research and, perhaps more importantly, in the pedagogical imaginations of teachers who face increasingly diverse "at-risk" student populations in Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. More specifically, researchers have focused on two related issues: differences in students’ home/school transitions, and the practices of what has come to be called "family literacy." There is, of course, heated debate over the efficacy of various ways that families textual practices help their children become "schooled before schooling," to cite Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1990) term for the class-based inculcation of habitus among middle- and upper-class French children. Regardless of where we stand on the desirability of parents reading to children, or on genre selection and the ideological content of such practices, dominant views of family literacy are premised on a particular normative view of the family–generally the Anglo-European nuclear family. Such a family stereotypically has one working parent, is heterosexual, relatively demographically stable, and possessed of sufficient surplus income, education, and leisure time to engage in print-rich socialization and English—as a first language verbal play. The problem facing literacy researchers is thus as much sociological as it is psychological or cognitive. While reading to children appears to have effects that are transferable to early school-based literacy development, the underlying question, as raised by Heath almost two decades ago, is whether it is the normative interactional and disciplinary structures of middle-class child rearing which generate the schooling effects that have historically been masked as cognitive ability, or whether early reading per se actually has sustainable educational effects on student achievement. As Scribner and Cole’s (1981) work has illustrated, disaggregation of the two factors is a difficult task. In modern Western mythology, the form and function of the nuclear family are taken as moral and cultural ideals. A century and a half of family research, from Engels to the post-war structural-functionalist analyses by Talcott Parsons’ post-war structural-functionalist analyses, to contemporary psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic models have contributed to this construction (Carrington, in press). The family in question is presumed to be a monocultural, heterosexual, white nuclear social unit. Such a theorization in turn affects the way we theorize community: less in terms of networks, synergies of "learning communities," the structuralist kinship relations of "tribal groups," and more in terms of the similar, loosely-coupled though essentially isolated nuclear units that characterize postindustrial capitalist economies. This outdated model still guides schools’ and principals’ strategies on how to "manage" school/community relationships. It entails direct communication between schools and nuclear families through parents’ and citizens’ groups, newsletters, social and fundraising events, parent/teacher nights, and so forth–practices which can be problematic to communities with different cultural traditions around family structure, pedagogy, authority, governmentality, and learning (Gregory, 1997). The effects of narrow normative models of the family are magnified by the rapid dissemination of mass media. The daily life of the nuclear family has been modeled on television, in children’s books, in magazines and films from the Brady Bunch and the Cosbys to, of course, the new stereotypical postmodern anti-family, the Simpsons. In this way, the textual representations of "family" encountered by children normalize a set of family images and practices, which are supposed to mirror the family where the reading and viewing takes place (Baker & Freebody, 1987)–just as the images of Dick and Sally reading and "doing school" in basal readers represent, sanction, and reproduce the very pedagogical acts and literacy events of these books’ uptake (Luke, 1988). Taken together, these representations contribute to the pedagogic production of behavioral and role-based norms around the nuclear family–whether through the public pedagogy of mass media or the institutionalized instruction of readers of and storybooks. Adult males are the primary wage-earners and disciplinarians, while adult females, regardless of whether they are homemakers or employees, are assigned responsibility for early nurturing, socialization and education of children–who themselves are represented and "imaged" in particular ways. The feminization of childcare, early childhood education, nursing, and primary school teaching continues, post-feminism, with relatively unaltered employment patterns across the past fifty years. The link between particular versions of family, literacy instruction in schools, and the emergence of particular family theories cannot be understood outside these broader political, ideological, and economic contexts. In the same way that monocultural social policy attempts to fit culturally- and racially-diverse individuals and groups into existing frameworks without attempting to reconceptualize nation, race, culture, ethnicity or identity, family literacy research blithely attempts to ignore issues of individual and family hybridity, fluidity of identity, and power and access. Given the shape of new economies and the rapid evolution of non-print textual forms, such an approach ultimately returns us, as sociologists, to the same old arguments about who gets literacy, knowledge, and power, not to mention how, in what forms, to what ends, and in whose interests. The following chapter outlines key aspects of the traditional home-literacy transition, showing how these are based on modernist presumptions about family and literacy. Second, we offer descriptive case studies of two young Australian school-age children making the transition from home to school. We take these children’s paths as indicative of the need for a complete rethinking of family literacy literature and views on the home/school transition. We conclude with a consideration of the implications of these shifts for school literacy instruction.
The metaphor of globalization is, at best, a metaphor, rather than a powerful, fully-articulated explanatory framework for explaining the changed social, cultural, and material conditions in which we, our students and communities find ourselves. We deliberately use the passive form here, for one of the emergent patterns in a sociology of globalization is the degree to which communities whose life pathways, livelihoods, and institutions have changed rapidly and in unprecedented ways have difficulty connecting these changes with their actions or, at times, even those of their governments (Castells, 1996). Given the prominent role of communications technologies in economic globalization, it is surprising that studies of literacy teaching and learning have in fact tended to become more national, focusing increasingly on the local and the parochial (Luke & Carrington, in press). Whether in urban center or rural diaspora, among middle class or migrants, patterns and practices of daily life are shifting in relation to economic and technological change, although not at regular and generalizable rates. In this new technological, social and cultural environment, information, commodities, and people move with formerly unimaginable speed, effectively transforming the world. These processes encompass shifts in the economic system, in the ways in which we understand the world and our place in it and, as a result, they have an impact upon identities and social practices. The consequences are changes in everyday uses and experiences of space and time, the emergence of new work practices and skills, patterns of leisure, habits of consumption of goods, images and discourses, and the emergence of hybridized and blended forms of identity and human expression. This shift is not a transient glitch in an otherwise modernist world. Mobility, diversity, and hybridity are markers of a new socioeconomic system: a post-Fordist world where the unstated rules of social and economic success have changed significantly in the space of a generation. These changes have been sustained by the emergence of new forms of information, and communications technologies such as computers, the Internet, email, VCRs, mobile phones, and cable television. In response to changing times and changing economic requirements, an emergent literature is describing the training of a new citizen-worker–a worker who is mobile, flexible and multi-skilled (Gee, Hull & Lankshear, 1998). Those educational systems that have begun to implement curriculum reform based on the idea of "knowledge nations," "smart states," and "learning communities" (e.g., Singapore, Ireland, Queensland), are increasingly focusing not on basic skills and minimum competencies, but on critical and analytical skills, multimodal literacies, and new forms of intercultural and multilingual communication. In response to these needs and the prevalence of multimodal texts, new literacies are emerging, not just in multinational workplaces and advanced capitalist educational systems, but also in homes, shopping malls and community centers. The key issue now facing curriculum planners, teacher educators, and policy bureaucrats is how and to what extent print-based education systems–which are still tied up with the socialization and reproduction patterns of postwar industrial economics and national politics–can "cope" with these developments. Put simply, the response of most school systems has been to track and anticipate the needs of new workers through curriculum reform in middle school, high school, and vocational education. The early primary years have generally been seen as a domain not for future-oriented reform, but rather for the reinstallation, renewal and reinforcement of traditional testing-based orientations to basic skills instruction (Gee, 2001). The discourses of "early intervention" have not attempted to deal with new economies, identities, or families with anything other than an ideological attempt at "restoration" of a print-based order on childhood, development and schooling (Luke & Luke, 2001).
Underlying research into home-school literacy transitions and relationships is the desire to explain persistent disparities in school literacy achievement among various groups. Much of the research, whether based on developmental or cognitive views of literacy, has, over the last 30 years, identified some sort of deficit as a key factor. For instance, there is an extensive body of research arguing that lower-SES children are more at risk of school literacy failure than higher-SES children, because their families do not read enough or lack book knowledge, that they do not value literacy or model it effectively (e.g., Cairney & Ruge 1998; Mason & Allen, 1986; White, 1982). That is, families in low-SES circumstances do not foster "implicit knowledge of the intentionality of print, story structure and the linguistic register of written language which is dependent upon extensive exposure to written language in many different forms during the pre-school years" (Purcell-Gates, 1986, p. 19). Families operating in poor and working-class contexts are therefore defined as deficient in their preparation of children for school literacies. More recently, the case has been made that single-parent families put their children at risk of school failure (Zill, 1996), and the ongoing debate over brain development has posited longitudinal neuropsychological effects of verbal neglect. In contrast, working from a Hymsian, ethnographic approach to communication, Heath (1982) argued that working-class families clearly understand the importance of literacy to their children, undertaking home-based language socialization, often providing versions of what they thought might "count" as literacy education. What Heath’s work made clear was that the literacy activities and oral language socialization taking place in such homes were mismatched to those of school, and therefore acted to disadvantage these children. Middle-class, educated and professional parents, on the other hand, mobilized a powerful hidden curriculum of socialization into classroom-like interactional norms and sociolinguistic registers. These twin strands of American research–cognitive/psychological and ethnographic/sociolinguistic–tend to place responsibility for emergent literacy failure on family literacy practices or the lack thereof, or on the inability of school literacy instruction–including storybook reading–to recognize and utilize culture and community-specific background knowledge, sociolinguistic practice, and interactional competence. The latter position has spawned ambitious interventions that aim to engage both teachers and students in the analysis of community knowledges, cultural and linguistic resources. This is exemplified in Luis Moll (1992) and colleagues’ efforts to assess the Arizona Hispanic community’s "stocks of knowledge" both to inform and adjust educational interventions in the school. The KEEP literacy program developed by Kathy Au was a deliberate attempt to alter the sociolinguistic norms of the mainstream classroom to accommodate the cultural practices of Hawaiian children (Au, 1980; Au & Mason, 1983). And in the U.K. and Australia, "critical language awareness" approaches deliberately make community language use an object of classroom study, as part of a larger critical analysis of who uses language, where, and with what consequential power (e.g., Fairclough, 1993; Comber & Simpson, 2001). The use of training programs to remediate early experiential deficits rested upon a view of literacy as emergent and developmental (Mason & Allen 1986; Teale 1986; Clay 1972, 1991). Therefore, the problem was viewed principally in intrapsychological terms, with a focus on making the home more school-like. At-riskness is attributed to single-parent, working-class and underclass families, NESB (non-English-speaking background) families, and so forth, which ostensibly lack the will or resources to provide school-like socialization. By this account, responsibility resides in the family’s capacity to take on middle-class attitudes and practices in a nuclear-family model of interaction. Implicit in this agenda has been a concern to make parents more "teacher-like." In Australia and elsewhere it has spawned school-based training programs to show parents how to read storybooks to their children (e.g., the Canberra-based Parental Involvement Program in the 1980s, and the 1997 public campaigns by Queensland curriculum authorities to encourage parents to read to children in bed and, quite literally, in the bath with waterproofed materials). The aim here was to make home more like school by training parents to act and question around printed text in the same ways as classroom teachers. The programs range from parental training courses to the kind of popular "read-aloud" advocacy literature that abounds in retail bookstores and airport newsagents (e.g., Trelease, 2001; Fox, 2001). The equation of "teacher-like" behavior with mainstream, middle-class practices and values is based on differential valuations of various kinds of family and home settings. That schools and early literacy programs might be failing students and their families quickly falls out of this equation. In Australia, early childhood classroom literacy practices responded to these shifts with a "whole language" approach aimed at building "print-rich" environments, and establishing child-centered and middle-class interactional patterns of home literacy events in the classroom (Butler & Turbill 1984). The processes, skills and knowledge involved in early literacy learning were to be encapsulated "naturally" within the social context, rather than through explicit, direct instruction models. It was assumed by many teachers, teacher educators, and researchers that this was the kind of enabling literate background that children needed in order to become literate. The focus was on shared reading and group discussion of printed texts (particularly picture books); on literary experience, on interpretation and comprehension, and on the modelling of "appropriate" literacy events and relationships. By the 1990s, Australian research around literacy education was focusing much more strongly on sociocultural analyses of literacy practices, with a specific view that cultural and class difference was a key factor in children’s ability to translate home literacy practices into successful school literacies. This perspective argues that literacy is socially constructed (Cook-Gumperz, 1986), and can only be understood in context, within institutions, communities, workplaces and other social fields–all of which have differing and at times overtly conflicting interactional patterns, values, language ideologies, and rules of exchange. School-based literacy becomes, then, one of many literacies that individuals and/or groups may develop and use. In a significant move, sociocultural approaches argue against the notion of individual deficit, focusing instead on the difficult transitions of children from culture-, community-, and family-specific registers, discourses and practices to the specialized and normative interactional "language game" of early literacy instruction. In the largest Australian empirical study of home/school transitions, Freebody, Ludwig and Gunn (1995) argued that Australian entry-level literacy instruction had become child-centered and progressivist in tenor and practice, but was ineffectual because of its class-based assumptions about preferred patterns of interaction and, indeed, childhood identity. In detailed discourse analyses of home and classroom events, the group concluded that the shape of Australian early literacy instruction systematically selects in favor not only of those middle and upper-class children who know how to interact around books, but also in favor of intellectually and culturally vacuous childhood identities and practices that had little connection to the out-of-school worlds of children and teachers (cf. Baker & Freebody, 1987). This kind of work is cognizant of the power of cultural and linguistic match or mismatch to decide an individual’s ability to succeed in particular social fields (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). Individual success, therefore, often pivots around the closeness of match between the cultural capital of each individual (and by extension, their family) and that of the school and its representatives. In their New South Wales study of family literacy, Cairney and Munsey (1992, p. 4) noted: "The reality is that schools staffed by middle-class teachers reflect middle-class, culturally defined views of what literacy is and how it is best developed." This is a restatement of the mismatch hypothesis, albeit an augmentation of Heath’s work with a stronger, Bourdieuian definition of capital. Freebody, Ludwig and Gunn (1995) made a significant addition to this field with their finding that there is no compelling cognitive, linguistic, or educational rationale for many of the "school literacy" practices that cancel, ignore, and attempt to "uplift" the alleged home literacy "deficit." Simply put, many Australian school practices are not introductions into powerful mainstream "ways with words," but rather into specialized, highly selective and irrelevant ways of interacting around texts–patterns of text handling that, as Baker and Freebody (1987) argued over a decade ago, have more to do with maintaining the social order of the school (and the social and cultural "comfort zone" of middle-class teachers) than the teaching and learning of literacy per se. While earlier views of schooling and literacy education were premised upon the idea that student failure was due to some inherent individual flaw, the sociocultural perspective held that the cultural, economic, and social capital of individuals and groups mediated their relative success or failure. Individual ability is but one small aspect of these larger cultural wars. Influenced by this shift, Delgado-Gaitan’s (1990) study of Hispanic families in the Santa Barbara area showed that part of the problem was the inaccessibility of necessary knowledge about the cultural practices and expectations of schooling, however mainstream and arbitrary these might be. Looking at the home/school transitions of indigenous Torres Strait Islander children in Australian schools, Luke and Kale (1997) noted the different cultural uses of language in non-white Australian homes and the inability of classroom teachers to accept non-mainstream discourses. The response of many Australian schools was to implement a genre-based approach to literacy, wherein students were explicitly and directly taught how mainstream academic and cultural texts worked and how to reproduce school-like versions of them (Cope & Kalantzis, 1995). This was a significant departure from the implicit approach of the whole language approach; however, in many cases the choice of text types remained instructionally unlinked to local context or students’ lives outside the classroom. In the last decade, "family literacy" has emerged as a significant field of study. There has been a recognition that there are a range of valuable literacies practiced at home (Barton, 1994; Rivalland, 2000), and increasing pressure to connect children’s early classroom literacy experiences to those of their home(Cairney & Ruge, 1998; Moll, 1992). As Solsken (1993) notes, interest in family literacy has remained focused on identifying the practices that are most like or unlike school practices. The child’s ability to transition seamlessly into a pre-existing classroom context remains a core concern. Yet in most mainstream school systems, the normative patterns for "doing school" and "doing school literacy" remain constant–a kind of pedagogical default mode, in the face of what many teachers view as an increasingly diverse, difficult to understand, and "deficit" student body (Luke, Freebody & Land, 2000). When viewed as a whole, the home/school transition research makes a number of problematic assumptions. It assumes particular types of family and cultural categories and not others; it assumes deficit in relation to school literacy; and it is premised on the continuing canonicity of the printed text in early childhood. Up to this point there has been little scope for discussions of hybridity, new literacies, and new economies. What does this mean for children undertaking what can be a perilous transition from home through the initial years of school literacy instruction in new times? We now turn to sketch two cases from different social, class, and geographic backgrounds. Our aim here is to suggest that culture and language still matter, but perhaps not as discrete categories of "difference," independent of the economic reconfiguration of family and the emergence of multimediated, digitalized childhood.
Eve (see footnote 1) is about to turn six and has just lost her first front tooth. She is a middle-class child of Anglo-Australian descent. Her parents are well-educated and relatively well-paid: her father is a secondary school teacher and the mother a university lecturer. Eve lives in a pleasant suburban house, with a computer and a Playstation in the living room, cable TV, a small stereo system in her room, a bike, and roller blades. She is opinionated and articulate about her own needs. Her greatest aspiration at the moment is to have her own mobile phone one day soon. But this is not a typical family. Her parents are divorced, reflecting Australia’s estimated 40% divorce rate. Like a significant number of Australian children, she lives with her father rather than her mother. Eve spends large chunks of her leisure time interacting with CD-ROMs and surfing the web. She has her favorite web pages bookmarked (nick.com, barbie.com, disney.com). She writes e-mails to her mother on a daily basis and creates and prints her own illustrated stories using word-processing and clipart programs. Given the hectic nature of life in a single-parent family, there is little "bedtime" reading or other conscious parental contact around printed texts. In fact, there is limited use or production of traditional printed text in the house. In some respects, Eve’s father’s busy schedule has created what several decades ago was construed as a "displacement" situation, in which she spends a great deal of time immersed in electronic media. The 1960s "displacement hypothesis" attributed failure with print to time spent watching television (C. Luke, 1989). But while the classical displacement model assumed that televiewing generated a print literacy deficit, it is clear that Eve’s engagement with new technologies is generating complex authoring, composition, and reading skills. Here are some examples of Eve’s emails (complete with her own spelling and grammatical idiosyncracies):
It is important to view these e-mails in the context of family relations. They are not one-off notes or letters, or even stories, in the traditional sense described by family literacy research or by the genres listed in Eve’s teachers’ literacy teaching plans. They are their own genre, with their own purpose and style. Each e-mail is part of an electronic turn-taking sequence, an exchange structure that constitutes in both field and tenor Eve’s continuing affective relationship with her mother. That is, the e-mails lexically represent Eve’s world (a world of "monkey bars," "emails" and "phone things") and while also playing out the social relationships of a mother/daughter relationship (the recurrent use of affective verbs like "hope"; the pronominals "I" and "you"; the unmarked interrogative "Do you like work"; salutations, addresses and, of course, "XXXXX…"). This is an evolving use and understanding of "writing" and "reading" unavailable to her in the classroom. In psychomotor terms, Eve shows a developing mastery of keyboarding skills. This in itself is significant. Not many years ago it was assumed that children came to school with many years of handwriting-friendly fine motor skills, acquired through play and a well-developed familiarity with some aspects of the manual technology of printing. However, new generations of children such as Eve spend large chunks of developmental time at keyboards and mouse pads, rather than with pencils. The fine motor skills of scrolling and clicking developed through the use of this technology are not necessarily the same as those required for handwriting in classrooms–but neither can they be construed simply as "deficit." As we can clearly see by the style and layout, Eve is quite aware of the potential of the space bar for creating meaning. Her attempts at spelling out words are obvious, as is her ability to backspace in order to erase/correct as she goes. She uses both capitalization and spacing for emphasis and has incorporated the use of symbols. She clearly follows a standard email format–"Dear Mummy," "bye for now signed by Eve"–and has also personalized the format, using for example, "lots of kisses for mummy" as an endnote to accompany her lines of "X"-kisses and a smiley face. In the first e-mail, there also is evidence that she recognizes that letters and e-mails are distinct genres, in her inquiry about whether her "letter" has arrived. In other e-mails she creates faces and substitutes her own symbols for hugs. While she is reproducing and blending known genres, she is also creating and integrating new symbolic forms to construct and convey personal meaning. Eve’s production of each turn is based on a presumption of the interactive fidelity that typifies conversational exchange: the assumption that there will be rapid and felicitous response. In this regard, the e-mail genre is far more interactive and exchange-based than the static print text that she will encounter in school–and certainly from the relatively static narratives about animals and community life that she is learning to read with in shared book experience. She has mastered the use of the e-mail medium to produce, edit, and immediately send her messages to places and people beyond her physical location. The texts she produces do not sit in an isolated classroom, nor do they disappear into a workbook to be read only by her teacher and returned with grades or comments a week or more later. Eve is independently creating electronic texts and sending them off into the real world to do work on her behalf. This power to communicate via writing–a digital and on-line multiliteracy–was inaccessible to earlier generations of children. At school Eve is an average student. She attends a middle-class school in a large Australian provincial city, where she studies in an instructional program focused around shared book experience, with some direct instruction in phonemic awareness and print knowledge. In the classroom, she and other children learn how to participate in orchestrated IRE discussions ostensibly focused on textual meaning, but in reality also focused on the expression of particular middle-class forms of identity and expression (Freebody et al., 1995). Even though she is an articulate child, she is not confident of her ability to read school texts. She does not seem to be able to make a direct connection between her own production of text at home and the decoding of other, more foreign genres at school. In school, Eve experiences moments of great sadness, particularly when class stories emphasize mother-daughter relationships (as they often do) and the "naturalness" of the nuclear family. Her ability to articulate her sadness about the end of her parents’ marriage and her subsequent separation from her mother was viewed as distress and emotional turmoil by her teachers. She initially struggled with school and classroom participation, and is now a slightly below-average reader on state standardized tests. Her teachers attributed her difficulties to the recent divorce and the pressures placed on a father left to care for his young children by himself. Her teachers have commented that they are worried about her concentration, her focus and, in turn, her long-term achievement. She has some difficulty decoding printed text and handwriting, and just as importantly, lacks the narrative knowledge that comes from bedtime stories and home literacy activities. Eve’s less-developed handwriting skills are the result of home-based keyboarding. Her apparent decoding deficits are attributed by teachers to the lack of a permanent mother in her life. Interestingly, however, Eve’s teachers did not balance their concerns about her handwriting against her love of and talent for coloring, nor against her ability to negotiate web pages, load and play games, or create and send e-mails. This is important. There are, in fact, fundamental differences between the reading of linear texts and the of the multimodal texts which Eve is mastering at home. Many children’s initial literacy knowledge and skills are now being shaped through Internet access and CD-ROMs. Children often learn to "read" these texts without direct parental mediation. As Eve’s experiences suggest, these are not necessarily the same skills and knowledges that support the decoding of linear, print-based texts. Unlike print-based texts, multimodal practices involve the rapid and integrated coordination of aural, visual, and textual cues in an environment which requires interaction between reader and text, independent of the powerful mediating adult presence that has traditionally operated with linear textual forms. Yet at the same time Eve understands that her e-mail messages to her mother are instant and interactive. These virtual textual exchanges are highly interactive, even though they lack the face-to-face scaffolding of bedtime storybook readings. Once an assessment of risk was made, the usual print-text deficit programs were brought into play around Eve. Her teachers’ response to her perceived classroom difficulty has been to increase the amount of "basic" decoding practice. This intervention has taken a number of forms, reflecting ideas of what is "appropriate "within this early literacy instructional context. Efforts have included allocation of a "buddy" from Year 7 who meets with her once or twice a week to read to each other from classroom texts, and small-group withdrawal sessions with an aide/parent to practice and reinforce basic literacy skills. This second activity involves the completion of repetitive worksheets and purpose-made activities under direct adult supervision. Eve’s father was called to the school to be informed of the teachers’ concerns about Eve’s emotional and academic well-being. Ostensibly, and by all conventional criteria, Eve is a privileged middle-class child, the least at risk of being caught in the state’s Year Two Diagnostic Net or Year Three Benchmark Test, both of which assess early reading development. On the other hand, her life does not revolve around what are still considered to be the prerequisite skills for literacy success–bedtime stories, handwritten stories, home-based oral traditions of nursery rhymes and, crucially, the implicit assumption that she spends large amounts of time with her mother doing these things. It is assumed in the early literacy literature that mothers provide early nurturing and guide developmental activities. Early classroom literacy instruction continues this same presumption. What do Eve’s experiences tell us? How does a child living outside of the "normal" family structure, without the physically close mother-daughter relationship assumed in early literacy research, deal with early literacy instruction and school? Eve does not fit into any of the traditional literacy "risk" categories: she is not male, she is not indigenous or from a marginalized socio-economic group, she is not the child of recent immigrants, nor is she is living in an isolated, rural area. However, she is still at risk. Her teachers have identified her as a child at risk of early literacy failure–in terms of her capacity to use school literacies. Unfortunately, this assessment does not take into account her skills in other textual forms; consequently, there is no direct opportunity for conversion of these skills into the conventional literacy program, however child-centred or progressive it might be. Unfortunately for Eve, and perhaps for many other children, the gap between her digital, virtualized family and the traditional print, nuclear family is not as easily bridged as we have tended to assume. It may even be that being middle class is an insufficient condition to ensure success in school. The middle class on which school is based is not the middle class of many children’s lives in new times.
James (see footnote 2) is also six years old. He lives in a small, semi-rural community on the fringe of a large city. In fact, the characteristics of this area can tell us much about the social and economic outcomes of structural change and the impact of globalization. James’ neighborhood represents one of the many locations of "new" poverty, the emergence of which is linked to the changes in economic patterns and structures associated with globalization. In this particular location, the main sources of employment are manufacturing, construction, and transport. Unemployment, however, is high and growing: at the time of writing, female unemployment sits at around 11.8%, while male unemployment is as high as 12.3%. Unemployment rates are significantly higher in the 15- to 24-year-old category, reflecting the contemporary collapse of the full-time work market for the young–there are fewer and fewer jobs for young, unqualified and underqualified workers, and fewer "positive" role models for youngsters like James. Low income, it is well documented, generally correlates with educational disadvantage and poor achievement. Increasingly, location is also implicated. Edgar (1999, pp. 6—7) notes "the life chances of Australians now depend even more heavily on regional location; inequality in incomes reflects a complex interaction between educational skill levels and geographic industry section concentration." Reflecting these broader trends, there is an identifiable and growing division between a small number of high-income earners in James’ community and a large population of families living at the other end of the wage spectrum. Even though both of his parents work, James’ family sits at the lower end of that spectrum. This is not the only financially struggling family in this community–over 40% of the children attending his school live in families dependent on welfare. Location and social class thus are not likely to work to James’ advantage. Additionally, at home and out of school he spends limited time interacting with traditional texts. His parents work long hours and juggle childcare responsibilities, leaving limited time for, or interest in middle-class "bedtime" storybook rituals; the family watches TV in its leisure time. Writing tasks are primarily limited to list-writing, and household interactions around text are often negative (concerning overdue accounts, new bills, bank and credit card statements). Instead of practices and knowledge concentrating on printed text, James is developing multiliteracies through game-playing and web-surfing. While he does not have a computer in his home, his cousin has Internet access and a range of CD-ROMs of various genres. His best friend has a Playstation, and James spends all of his spare time there. Even at his young age, James has developed the speed and coordination of aural and visual cueing systems necessary for dealing with non-linear texts. His keyboarding skills are not as well-developed as Eve’s, but he has a functional grasp of the skill, which he uses mainly to surf the Internet. He is becoming confident at navigating around the web using various search engines–his current favorite is "Google," having recently moved on from "Dogpile." Like James’ engagement with game-playing, these searches and online activities are done in collaboration with others. In these home and community contexts, he is happy to take risks, to negotiate, to share information and knowledge. This is in contrast to his experiences at school When James goes to school each day, he is greeted by a middle-class teaching cohort with an average age of 45. Most of his teachers were trained before the advent of digital technology, and are not particularly interested in integrating it into their classroom practice. They commented to us that they felt "everybody had to learn how to deal with print before they could engage with computers." None of the teachers at his school live in the community. They commute from the two nearby cities, each of which are around 45—50 minutes away by highway. This is a school that struggles with high rates of transience, the need to accommodate some Aboriginal children, high numbers of children with diagnosed special education needs, and the perception that many of the students, like James, come from "difficult backgrounds." James has not done well on classroom diagnostic tests, and shows little interest in the kinds of texts and activities that take place in his classroom–he is seemingly disconnected from the notion of story reading for its own sake, and has intractably untidy handwriting. He is reluctant to take part in oral reading or deskwork. He is not a particularly disruptive child; however his teacher is concerned at his apparent disconnection from classroom literacies. In conversations with us, teachers stated their view that this was a typical "boys and literacy" problem that was due to poor role models, lack of motivation and interest in education at home, and the increasing physical, motor and affective problems facing boys from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Because James is experiencing "difficulty" with classroom texts, he has been assigned to a withdrawal group for additional basic decoding work–sound-letter relationships and sight words–done individually with a supervising adult. His classroom has two non-networked computers used for basic skill-and-drill activities such as "Maths Blaster." But while James is an enthusiastic techno-kid out of school, he seems disinterested in computers in the classroom environment. Nor does he have the opportunity to work collaboratively and interactively with his friends, as he does on line or on the Playstation. Like Eve, James is a child at risk. He is increasingly at risk of the economic and social marginalization typical of children of his location and socioeconomic profile. In new times, James’s family and community represent the new poor, characterized by lack of access to employment, intergenerational downward mobility, isolation in fringe zones, and tenacious financial insecurity. James’ home literacy practices are disconnected from the print-based literacies of his classroom, and while his teachers have varying degrees of success with explicit phonics and word recognition approaches, it is clear to all that his problems are as much disinterest and lack of motivation to read and write within these frameworks, as they are deficits per se. But it is becoming increasingly difficult for his teachers to disentangle the two. Ironically, the multimodal literate practices that James is pursuing independently are the very ones that we would argue are necessary in new economies. Yet he is unable to convert them into valuable commodities in the print-oriented classroom, where his teachers perceive his interest in video games and popular culture as a distraction rather than a strength.
Literacy education is linked to the construction of knowledge and power. In no way is literacy education a neutral mastery of skill or an inevitable artifact of cognitive and linguistic development. From a critical sociological perspective, literacy education entails the reconstruction of habitus, and the recognition and conversion of cultural, economic, and social capital (Baker & Luke, 1991; Carrington & Luke, 1997). The mastery of particular literacies–as embodied in the habitus and certified by educational institutions–is linked to social mobility and economic payoffs in a broad range of social fields. New family formations, new literacies and technologies then, are volatile and potentially disruptive of the longstanding "rules of the game" for literacy teaching and learning. These rules, stated and unstated, conscious and subliminal, have been built up for over a century to monitor, stream, and produce the print-literate subject, worker, and citizen. They are tenacious, embodied in the message systems of schooling, in our institutional structures, and indeed, in the bodies of teachers and students. The family literacy movement has increasingly brought expectations of appropriate home-based literacy experiences and practices into line with the literacies of school. Family literacy is an attempt to reconfigure the social field of home and family to resemble that of the school. This repositioning has traditionally marked poor, migrant, non-English speaking, and transient families as deficient. It is our contention that the changes to family and home literacy practices that have been invoked in the shift to new economies have the potential to disrupt expectations about the kinds of literacy knowledge and skills that children should bring from home to school, as well as expectations about what counts as "appropriate" home literacy. One of our messages is that "being middle class," "being working class," and, indeed, "being underclass" are not what they used to be. Although they come from very different social and economic backgrounds, Eve and James share powerful out-of-school engagements with sophisticated information technologies. In these community and home sites that they are developing literate practices and knowledge appropriate to new modalities, discourses, and texts (Carrington, 2001). In these community and home sites they are working within and across information environments, often without direct adult mediation or control. The view of the teachers at James’s local school that students are "disconnected" from school is telling. This is the mismatch hypothesis written with a difference, for the disconnection is not between the deficient working-class family and the school–it is a mismatch between the school’s approach to literacy and the emergent information economies and knowledge environments where kids and adults increasingly live and work. Eve, too, has a new literate habitus that shines through her e-mails. She and James are not at risk because of the intrinsic strengths or weaknesses of these new multiliteracies, which no doubt are riddled with gaps and silences. Rather, they are at risk because the residual traditions of print-based pedagogy remain so absolute and powerful, rendering the children’s competencies, knowledges, and backgrounds invisible. The one constant in this picture is the school. Families and identities are undergoing reconstruction in the new economies. It would be exceedingly naïve to assume that if we just wait long enough, we will experience a return to traditional values and practices. The literacies and futures of children making the transition from home to school in this new century are increasingly those of the postmodern–multimodal, "glocalised" (Luke & Carrington, in press) and linked to shifting valuations of cultural capital in a new economy. The literacies of researchers, educators and schools, on the other hand, remain strictly modern–fixated on mastery of specific types of textual practice and the inculcation of particular value systems. Returning to the links between home and school literacies with which we began this chapter, it becomes apparent that the ways in which educators understand these connections must be rethought. The presumption that home can and should be made to resemble school is increasingly problematic. It is not just a question of the dubious ethical position that the state, the institution, and the corporation can tell people how to raise their children, or how to configure their families, or whose cultural version of childhood should count. This has always been the key moral and ideological dilemma faced by the family literacy movement in a pluralistic, democratic society. It is, moreover, a question of whether and how we can in good conscience reconfigure homes and communities in the image of an institution that is showing all the signs of becoming a creaky anachronism, in relation to new economies, cultures and technologies.
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Author Note We wish to
thank Eurydice Bauer for her invaluable editorial persistence. The authors
are listed in alphabetical order. 1
Eve is an actual case, with textual and ethnographic data compiled for
this chapter. (click here to return to text) 
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NEW ECONOMIES AND NEW IDENTITIES 