Furrows in the field, or down in the jungle: re-membering domestic literacy in the early years

Abstract

Embracing qualitative methods in an approach situated at the interface between education, social science and philosophy, the author offers a phenomenologically-oriented account of early family literacy, as experienced by a five year-old girl in Alsace, France. The paper seeks to enliven a fresh look at what we believe we see/understand and how we choose to disseminate this, thus it interrogates orthodoxies with regard to academic discourses and research methodology. The author proposes that to learn is to be in media res in the interminable flux of possibility. It is a never-ending story, which can only be told at a particular cross-section of time and place. Much follows from this insight, foremost among which is to accept that to attempt to understand and learn from learning, and to write academic ‘readings’ of learning, entails abandoning measurables and product-driven orientations in favour of processual ones.

Keywords

• literacy
• methodology
• learning
• children
• home
• family