Researching Early Childhood Literacy in the Classroom: Literacy as a social practice. New book written by Lucy Henning published

Uta Papen and I, the series editors of Routledge Research in Literacy, are very pleased to announce that the publication of this book by Lucy Henning.  We discussed her work back in August here. From the publishers’ description:

This volume demonstrates how the ethnographic approach to research demanded by a ‘Literacy as Social Practice’ perspective can generate fresh insights into what happens when young children engage with schooled literacy tasks.

Researching Early Childhood Literacy in the Classroom argues that the lived experience of young children encountering formal schooled literacy curricula should be the foremost consideration in educational reforms intended to improve rates of literacy acquisition in schools. To make this argument, the author suspends traditional concerns with ‘learning’ and ‘progress’ to concentrate on ‘practice’ and ‘meaning’ in a careful analysis of key classroom incidents. The author concludes that such insights suggest a need for re-considering the assumptions upon which educational policy rests.

This book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, and libraries in the fields of Literacy Studies, Teacher Education, Education Policy and Applied Linguistics.

Lucy Henning is Senior Lecturer in English Education at the University of Roehampton. Before joining Roehampton, Lucy worked as a primary class teacher, school literacy lead and a literacy consultant for the Primary National Strategies.