‘I'm rewriting the law’ when children bring literacy into nursery school

Abstract

Based on an analysis of three literacy events in nursery schools, this article focuses on how literacy forms part of children's social practices and co-creates the language environment in the nursery and how place, affect and materiality play a key role in children's multimodal and embodied meaning-making around literacy. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork in two nursery schools, in which we followed different children through their days in order to explore how they used language in different contexts, what characterised their language practices and what appeared to encourage and constrain their desire to express themselves. It shows how the written word means much more to children than knowledge about the structure of books and identification of letters and how children draw on their own experience and include the place and the available materials in their joint meaning-making processes. Against this background, we argue for the need for a reconceptualisation of what literacy is and can be in a nursery school context and for a discussion of the implications of this for teaching literacy.