| This invited paper was originally presented as part of the first IRA Multilanguage Literacy Symposium, held in July 2002 in Edinburgh, Scotland, following the 19th World Congress on Reading. Find other papers from this symposium here. |
Getting to Know Strangers: A Sociocultural Approach to Reading, Language, and Literacy
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But I actually think that everything starts off best with a story. I always learn most through stories, so I want to start by telling you a story myself — something that happened to me and that was very inspirational for my own thinking, although not necessary in a positive way. But I think what came out of it eventually was very positive. Many years ago when I started my own Ph.D. I was working in an infant school (a school with young children, aged from four to seven), and I wanted to collect together a group of families for my research. I wanted to look into their school and their home literacies, and I wanted to involve children from different social, cultural, and linguistic groups. One of the children was Tony, a four-year-old from Hong Kong. Now, Tony’s family owned a small take-away shop, a restaurant. He lived with his grandparents and his parents, who spoke almost no English. They had come across from China to Hong Kong and then to Northampton, a town in middle England. Tony started school very well — he beamed, he rushed to the name table in his classroom and found his name. He sat and put his hand up all the time although he could very rarely answer the questions. He seemed to love to repeat everything the teacher said. He would go around saying, “What’s that? What’s that?” and then repeat the answer over and over again after the teacher: “It’s a table. It’s a book.”
My aim is to introduce you to sociocultural approaches to literacy learning. First, I want to look very briefly at what taking a sociocultural approach actually means. Then, I want to ask about the implications of taking a sociocultural approach to literacy research. And finally, I want to outline three principles for you to consider.
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At first the teacher thought this was wonderful, that Tony was learning in the way a young English child would learn. The other thing that he could do brilliantly was to copy pictures out of books, bit for bit — every bit of print, every bit of illustration would be copied immaculately. But after a few months when he was still saying, “What’s that?” the teacher began to get a bit worried. She was also worried because “he doesn’t seem to be able to play. How’s he going to learn English?”
Since play was the center of her child-centered curriculum, as she saw it to be in those days, she asked me to take to his family a beautiful dual-language book and leave it with them. She wanted me to ask his parents to read him the Chinese version, whilst she read the English in school. I went to his family and noticed a much colder response than I had originally noted when they were so keen for him to start school. Tony’s grandfather looked at the book and said, “You must take this away, or else I will put it on the shelf for him to have later.”
I said, “But why?”
He replied, “First of all, Tony must learn the words; than he can have the book.” He then pulled out an exercise book which Tony was using in his community school — in other words, the mother tongue school the he attended every Saturday. It was filled with rows and rows of immaculate ideographs, which he had been practicing over and over again. His grandfather said proudly, “Look, this is from his community class, this is what he can do in Chinese.” And then he pulled out a scrappy piece of paper, which was from his English school. It was recycled paper because the school did not have enough money to give him fresh paper each time. On one side was a drawing of a transformer and at the top, in the corner, was “ToNY” — written partly in lowercase and partly in capital letters. “Look,” Tony’s grandfather said, “this is rubbish. This is what he does in his English school.”
Now what was happening there? Tony’s teacher thought that his parents and his grandparents were not interested enough in his education actually to read at home with him. Tony’s father and grandfather ( I couldn’t speak to his mother or grandmother because they didn’t speak English) thought that Tony’s teacher was not actually interested enough in Tony to teach him properly. There was a breakdown of communication. In fact, Tony’s grandfather and father were extremely interested in his education, and had they been able or invited to speak to his teacher, this could have been expressed.
Now, I’m telling you this story really to show how it’s a way into understanding the importance of sociocultural research and taking a sociocultural approach to research in literacy, particularly where language is an issue. I’ll come back to this, and we’ll think about Tony again.
But first of all, what does taking a sociocultural approach actually mean? Just a few points: What a sociocultural approach does is that it rejects the difference between psychology and anthropology. So often we have research studies in psychology, which focus on the individual, on cognition, on the experimental, the analytic, and on explaining, whereas anthropological studies have often focused on culture, the group, on observation, on the holistic approach, and on description. But the crucial point about sociocultural research is that it really transcends academic disciplines. It’s not just interdisciplinary, it actually transcends disciplines. And it focuses on the inextricable link between culture and cognition through engagement in activities, tasks, or events.
And so to understand Tony and his situation we can’t just look at the way he performs individually in the classroom; we have to look at Tony as a member of a cultural group, learning in his community class and bringing some of that learning to his English school. I want to just briefly read to you what I think are three very inspirational quotes, illustrating a sociocultural approach. One, of course, is from Michael Cole — so important in sociocultural studies. He says, “Mind is interiorised culture; culture is exteriorised mind” — just to show you how closely the two interlink. And then there is a very important quotation from Vygotsky: “Any higher psychological function appears twice, or on two planes. First it appears on the social plan and then on the psychological plane. First it appears between people as an interpsychological or interpersonal activity, and then within the child as an intrapsychological or intrapersonal activity.”
In other words, when we think of Tony, we think of him first as a social being. Now Tony, it seemed, had to make a choice somewhere in his mind. Was he going to support his father and his grandfather thinking that his English school was rubbish and his Chinese school was all-important, or was he going to reject that? Now, he actually chose his Chinese school in the end, and his behavior in the British school became very difficult. Many luckier children are able to mesh work and play from their community classes and from their homes and the official school. Some aren’t.
And finally, a quotation from Clifford Geertz: “Culture is located in the minds and hearts of people who are at the same time actors and creators of social interactions.” I really like that quotation, and I hope you do, too.
Finally in this very brief first part of what I want to say, as part of a sociocultural approach it is crucial that we understand the role of mediators of culture, those who actually facilitate the taking of one language or one culture into another: our mother tongue teachers in schools, and our indigenous language teachers in countries where there are indigenous language teachers in teaching. Or, indeed, siblings who are older and able to facilitate the movement of young children from one culture and language to another. So, a sociocultural approach means understanding of the role of the mediator in enabling a child to, in Vygotsky’s words, “step across that zone of proximal development” — in other words, to become head and shoulders taller through learning a new language and culture.
This process has been called “scaffolding” by Michael Cole and Jerome Bruner. It’s been called “guided participation” by Barbara Rogoff, as in her excellent studies in cross-cultural contexts. It’s also been called “collaborative learning” by people including Gordon Wells, who’s done a lot work in this area. Or, more recently, I’ve written quite a lot about “synergy” between siblings, because I feel very much that it’s not just one person who does the teaching or facilitates the learning; with siblings, both older and younger child are learning together — whether it be a new language or a culture.
Part two of what I want to address briefly is “What are the implications of taking a sociocultural approach?” I want to illustrate that particularly through a package of Persil laundry soap. Now, I don’t whether everybody has Persil. I assume that it’s a big multinational, so everyone does know about Persil. But a colleague of mine, Ann Williams, with whom I’ve done a lot of work, came rushing in one day when we were in the middle of our siblings project and said, “Look at this. This is exactly what we are fighting against. How are we going to manage it?”
And just look! Here is a wonderful illustration of how fixed we often are in the Western hierarchy of cultures. This package of Persil, produced in the “Year of Reading,” was pushing a familiar cultural practice in the West: the bedtime story. Now, what you see on the package is the white middle-class mother with her sparkling white blouse and her little girl with her sparkling white outfit on the sheets, holding a teddy bear and looking at a book — illustrating the bedtime story. There’s also the text: “Brilliant non-bio cleaning for people who want things comfortable next to their family’s skin, it doesn’t contain enzymes, and it’s dermalogically tested for extra reassurance so you always sleep soundly.”
But what the package seemed to be doing so strongly to us was actually to link participation in a certain cultural practice with cleanliness. You know: If you don’t participate in this practice of bedtime stories, than there is something severely wrong with you — almost like you’re dirty. Now, I know it’s funny. But actually it’s very deep, I think, especially for children like Tony — like so many children in many countries, and also in Britain — who do not participate in this particular practice. What message is the Persil package actually giving? And what message is it actually giving to teachers, who often find it difficult to step outside their own assumptions and cultural practices?
And so, following up from that, I want just to highlight what I think are some implications of taking a sociocultural approach. One is recognizing the importance of home and community literacy practices and learning styles, and how these are taken from home to school. Now, if Tony’s teacher — and if the teacher of the Bangladeshi British children with whom I have been working who also participate in community language classes — had known about the beautiful work that they were producing in those language classes, then things might have been different.
Second, it means realizing bilingualism and biliteracy as giving cognitive, social, and cultural advantages. Cecelia Thorne’s talked about this [in another presentation at the symposium], and I’m sure that we all know it — so I’m not going to go on about it at length. But in many British schools, it is not considered an advantage to be bilingual unless you speak a prestigious language — or what we refer to as “elite bilingualism.” Taking a sociocultural approach also means tracing the syncretism taking place as children blend new and old practices. Nobody — and certainly not young children — is fixed in any particular way of learning. As we traced the learning of siblings together, we noticed how crucially they have been blending strategies from home, from their community language classes, and from their English schools to produce a new type of literacy learning. Taking a sociocultural approach means understanding the crucial role of “important others” who assist pupils in the learning process. These might be people from school, like indigenous language teachers or mother tongue teachers, or they might be grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, neighbors. They do not have to be parents. Also for me, taking a sociocultural approach means enabling participants in your research to express their own understanding of the learning process. It’s very, very easy to go from our own assumptions, but we need to go from our participants’ understandings.
So, some questions and principles for sociocultural research: Gregory Bateson says, “We come to every situation with stories, patterns of events that are built into us. Our learning takes place within the context of what important others did.” This has been very important for me and all my work. What I think we need to investigate are the following: What are these stories that people come to school with, or come to their new lives in a new country with? Who are the important others and what role do they play in learning? How do people express the stories with which they come to school, and how do we express them to ourselves and to other people?
And so finally, the three principles I want to highlight: The first is based on Michael Cole’s expression: “Where culture and cognition create each other.” It’s to uncover the language and literacy knowledge held by people, as well as ways of learning in their communities, and to become clear about how these may either contradict or complement those which count in school.
The second principle is based on Jerome Bruner’s expression, “The joint culture creation between teacher and pupil.” We need to document the role of crucial mediators of languages and literacies in different contexts and how this mediation takes place in the dynamic syncretism emerging, so that new and existing practices come together.
And for the final principle, I go back to Fred Erickson, a very brilliant ethnographer, who says, “What ethnography is all about is giving a voice to those whose voices would not otherwise have been heard.” And so, crucially, my third principle is to go from what people themselves view as being important in education in their lives, rather than from what we think they should be seeing as important.
Those are the three principles that I want to conclude with: Uncovering the funds of knowledge in peoples’ lives; looking at the joint culture creation between teacher and pupil; and giving pupils and their families a voice in their own education.
About the Author
Eve Gregory is Professor of Language and Culture in Education at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, England, where she works principally with doctoral students and as head of the Department of Educational Studies. Her books include One Child, Many Worlds: Learning to Read in a Second Language (Sage, 1996), One Child, Many Worlds: Early Learning in Multilingual Communities (Teachers College Press, 1997), City Literacies: Learning to Read Across Generations and Cultures (with Ann Williams; Routledge, 2000), and Many Pathways to Literacy: Early Learning With Siblings, Grandparents, Peers and Communities (with Susi Long and Dinah Volk; Routledge, 2004). She has recently directed a project on the role of siblings in multilingual literacy learning and is now co-directing research on the role of grandparents in children’s early literacy learning.
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Citation: Gregory, E. (2002, July). Getting to know strangers: A sociocultural approach to reading, language, and literacy. Paper presented at the Multilanguage Literacy Symposium, Edinburgh, Scotland. Available: http://www.readingonline.org/international/inter_index.asp?HREF=edinburgh/gregory/index.html
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted November 2003
© 2003 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232