Research: Home-school Literacy Practices

Question: How can teachers incorporate home literacy practices in the classroom?

Answer: “This study offers ways in which Head Start teachers (and all teachers who experience/d literacies which differ from their students’)  may start to authentically incorporate home literacy practices in their classrooms, challenging traditional roles of students as recipients of knowledge. Teachers alone cannot singularly redesign processes that represent and include students’ home literacy practices in the classroom. Students are the ones who are full participants of such communities of practice and as such should be positioned as experts.” P. 175.

Comment: This study seems to have two purposes. The first is to learn the literacy practices of the home/community and use them in the classroom. The second seems to resist looking at the students as passive receivers of knowledge, becoming the “experts” in conveying the home/community literacy practices. Home visits by teachers were a requirement of the study. The researcher and two Head Start teachers and their students and the students’ families were the participants in the study. RayS.

Title: “Challenging Ethnocentric Literacy Practices: [Re]positioning Home Literacies in a Head Start Classroom.” Mariana Souto-Manning. Research in the Teaching of English (November 2010), pp. 150-178.