The Embodiment of Precompetence: Participation Structures in Early Literacy LessonsChristine Ludwig, Humanities Unit, Education Queensland Australia. AbstractThe public and professional debates about education and schooling, especially those focusing on literacy education, have implications for what constitutes specialist knowledge and practices of teachers. These debates also project differing and potentially competing sets of knowledges and values for the teacher, the teacher educator and ultimately, the child. Childhood is a naturalised category that often seems to slip by critical discussions of schooling, or even the social order and the ideologies that produce and sustain it. This paper will highlight, within a defined set of social practices, the literacy lesson, the everyday social processes that construct and sustain the categories 'childhood' and 'adulthood'. The presentation will draw on ethnographic data collected for post-graduate studies that focus on the literacy practices of students in the early years of schooling. Two analytical approaches for 'naming the linguistic object' and for 'hearing the learner' will be used to examine significant interactions from the study. Taken together, these approaches will exemplify the differing versions of 'child/student' enacted in and afforded by the prevalent interactive features of literacy events in classrooms and homes. They also exemplify how this 'talk' embodies, sometimes with contestation, the precompetence of young children and the competence of adults and the consequences this has for their apparent success as learners of school literacy. |
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