Many Pathways to Literacy: Young children learning with siblings, grandparents, peers and communities

Who are the teachers in children’s literacy lives beyond their school teachers and parents? This text is a compilation of studies conducted in a variety of cross-cultural contexts where children learn language and literacy with siblings, grandparents, peers and community members. Focusing on the knowledge and skills of children often invisible to educators, these illuminating studies highlight how children skillfully draw from their varied cultural and linguistic worlds to make sense of new experiences. The experienced team of contributors provides powerful demonstrations of the generative activity of young children and their mediating partners - family members, peers and community members - as they syncretize languages, literacies and cultural practices from varied contexts. Through studies grounded in home, school, community school, nursery and church settings, we see how children create for themselves radical forms of teaching and learning in ways that are not typically recognized, understood or valued in schools. The book challenges readers to examine assumptions and cultural stereotypes about literacy learning as well as their own teaching practices and beliefs. It should be useful reading for teachers, teacher educators, researchers and policy makers who seek to understand the many pathways to literacy and use that knowledge to affect real change in schools.