Meaning, relationships, identities: An exploration of motive and intent in early childhood literacies

Young children encounter a diverse range of written and multimodal texts in their play and everyday lives. Prior to formal education, children may not be considered ‘readers’ or ‘writers’ in the conventional sense, yet nonetheless, they engage creatively and agentively in everyday literacies. However, little is known about the motives and intentions of our youngest citizens in their activity with text. This paper reports a sub-section of findings from a wider ethnographic involving 3 to 4-year-olds, their families and practitioners at their early childhood setting. Data gathering and analysis were shaped by two distinct theoretical lenses, namely, the neo-Vygotskian concept of perezhivanie and posthumanist affect theories. The study findings are exemplified through two vignettes extracted from data, which illustrate how children’s motives and intent in their everyday encounters with text are underpinned by three overarching and interrelated goals – to make meaning, make relationships and make identities. In addition, building on posthumanist literacy research, this paper considers the nature and emergence of motive and intent in everyday literacies. The study provides more textured understandings and accounts of young children’s everyday encounters with a diverse range of texts.