Early literacy education in rural communities: situating development.

Reid, Jo-Anne ; Edwards, Helen ; Power, Kerith 等

Introduction

This paper argues that literacy development is 'situated': it occurs in and through children's interactions in their local home, community and school settings. We draw on one of a linked set of early literacy research projects conducted around Australia from 2000 to 2002 with the assistance of an ARC Discovery Grant (1). The larger project focuses on the complexity of literacy development for diverse groups of children in preschools, schools and communities in five Australian research sites. The significance of the study relates to the problem that unequal access to rich preschool learning opportunities exacerbates wider social and educational inequalities. Working from theories of development and difference still new in mainstream school education, we have combined a range of theoretical and methodological tools to assist the production of a set of case-studies of literacy development. We aim to document what literacies are made available and taken up across the diversity of educational settings in which Australian children come to school. And we are arguing that situating literacy development in its place means that we rethinking many of the assumptions on which universal notions of literacy development--and developmental literacy curriculum--are based.

Our part of the study is situated in rural and remote areas of the North-Northwest of New South Wales, focusing on children entering primary schools located in these places. The literacy experiences of rural and isolated children are rarely researched, though Breen et al. (1994), Anstey and Bull (1999) and White-Davidson (1999) have all completed significant studies of literacy in rural communities. Our concern is the key issue of development as a social and ecological process rather than a matter purely of cognition (Vygotsky, 1978; Thelen & Smith, 1992). Such a focus requires us to account for the bodies and minds of the children we are studying--for their emotional, physical, social and cognitive functioning, and the geographical and social circumstances into which they are born and grow up. Of particular interest is the importance of their situated socio-geography to the literacy development of children. This understanding has emerged from data collected from preschool settings and primary schools located across three northern NSW education districts--from a small community in the Great Dividing Range in the east, to the remote border area in the north-west. After we outline the theoretical concepts which inform our study, we introduce just two of the localities we have investigated: the school communities of 'Narandoo' and 'Baro'.

We want to illuminate, in these very different and particular instances, two significant issues that have arisen across the ranges of sites we have studied. First, we discuss how teachers across the preschool and school settings strive to assist children to make the transition from home and preschool to school in terms of their local or situated literacy experiences. We note how children in these particular socio-geographical settings often lead home lives quite different from those assumed by early childhood literacy curriculum. We also note the difficulties experienced by teachers in relating the children's situated 'funds of knowledge' (Moll et al., 1992) to desired curriculum outcomes, and observe how children's home experience in these remote locations is often discounted and irrelevant in the school setting (Carrera, 1995).

Second, we examine the difficulties experienced by preschool and school teachers in these isolated settings, and point to some of the ways in which they attempt to overcome the disconnections experienced by children in their communities. We examine how they work to assist in the development of a more situated, 'ecological' notion of development, focusing on the child-in-development as a fully social, rather than merely a cognitive, subject.

Rethinking development: The importance of socio-geography in rural schools

The provision of education in areas remote from the metropolitan centre has been a significant issue and 'a constant problem' for State governments around Australia since the first Anglo-Australian settlement (Barcan, 1965, p. 227). Even though the 'rural' environment had provided a rich supply of educational resources and sites to families living in traditional Aboriginal communities for more than 40,000 years, the great mass of land that the states had to govern was not seen as an educational asset for non-Indigenous Australians. In NSW, attention to 'rural education' officially commenced with the Public Instruction Act of 1880, when it was decreed that any locality with at least twenty children whose parents would guarantee their regular attendance, was entitled to a school (Barcan, 1965). At this time, and for decades after, Aboriginal children were excluded from schools, and Indigenous parents needed tenacity if they attempted to have their children educated by the state. Even when they gained the right, as citizens, to public education, their inclusion in an Anglo-Australian curriculum resulted in further tensions (Eastment & White, 1998, p. 7).

The idea of the 'bush school' in NSW, from its inception, was an attempt at ensuring that all citizens of the colony could have an equal benefit from education, whether they lived in Sydney or 'out back'. But this goal has been almost impossible to realise. Twenty years before Federation, when the government announced its support for rural education:

 Applications for schools streamed in from all
 parts of the state in such a flood that it
 was only possible to provide schools at the
 expense of poorly trained teachers and poorly
 built schools (Crane and Walker, 1957, p. 234).

Over a century later, the 'problem' of rural education continues. In the city, a family's resources, leisure activities, and access to education depend to a large extent on where they live, and neighbourhood schools generally reflect the class composition of their locality. In the country, the history, climate, land use and social demography of small townships can produce very different educational experiences that are far too often generalised under the umbrella of 'rural schools'. Rural schools are not 'all the same', and the education on offer within is similarly diverse and differentiated.

White-Davidson's (1999) study of schooling in rural/remote communities highlighted their 'complexities and diversities'. She notes the importance of continuing to question categories such as educational success and 'development' that are applied without differentiation or sensitivity to the rural experience:

 The different approaches and debates about 'defining
 rural' must continue, and researchers must avoid
 promoting a unidimensional category of 'rural'.
 [...] Any centre-margin discourse must be scrutinised
 for its relevance and the feasibility of the assumptions
 on which it is based. Education policy developers, social
 researchers and rural policy planners need to re-evaluate
 the philosophical premises on which the current concept
 of success is based: success for the individual school
 student, success for education and schooling, and success
 in adult life. (White-Davidson 1999, pp. ii-iii)

With regard to literacy development, for instance, the data collected at Baro and Narandoo indicates that a far more complex and holistic view of children's experience with language, print and meaning is needed than that on which the schools' success is formally judged. As we outline below, teachers in both sites find that preschool emphasis on social communication is far greater than is normal in official preschool literacy guidelines. Where children have little, or narrow-ranging social interaction with other children and adults, the development of print literacy comes second for preschool teachers concerned with providing opportunities for talk, play and practising the sorts of behaviours necessary for success at school. But even this is not experienced in the same way across the two settings reported in this study.

The research sites: Baro and Narandoo

There is a joke among rural educators that goes: 'If you've seen one country town, you've seen one country town.' The townsites of Baro and Narandoo are indeed very different. On our first visit to Baro, twelve hours northwest of Sydney, a local directed us 'over the hill' (the almost indiscernible rise in the photograph below) into town. Baro is the largest town in the Flatlands district, with two silos and about twenty houses, a truck stop, a Police Station and the district Primary School. At Baro the properties are large, flat, broad hectare blocks, primarily used for grains and cotton. Grain silos at railway sidings indicate small settlements and properties hidden by acres of copper-coloured sorghum and dusty green cotton. Big semitrailers laden with grain roar past the school, with its two teachers and 50 students. Only one Aboriginal family is enrolled at the school.

Most of the Baro kids are bused into the school, which is also served by a mobile kindergarten/pre-school service that covers the larger Flatlands region. This 'mobile', run by pre-school teacher Peta Barrie visits small groups of children located on dispersed farming properties weekly. Farm-workers' families make up a significant portion of this community. Baro Public School also caters for children from other preschools run by church and community groups, and a small preschool in another nearby highway town. Marg Henry has taught there for 25 years, since she married a local farmer after her initial posting to the town as a young teacher.

In contrast, at Narandoo Preschool and School Aboriginal families are one of the dominant groups. Narandoo is due east of Baro about 400 km along the highway to the coast, in an area that has been country to Bundjalung people for thousands of years. Many community members live at the mission just west of the river. The country around the town is mountainous, and cattle and timber are grown. Narandoo is a bigger town than Baro, but it is neither as wealthy nor as 'well connected' to political spokespeople and opportunities to travel away from the town. One sub-section of the community is known as the 'Alternates'. These families, attracted by the rainforest topography and climate, typically live long distances out of the village on communes or small blocks of land in the bush.

The school is set in a small village on the east bank of one of the beautiful Northern Rivers, and across the other side is the preschool. Narandoo Preschool has been co-directed by two women for the past 17 years. One of these (Raylene Riley) is Aboriginal and the other (Kate Newstead) is not. Close family links exist between Raylene and another Indigenous woman, Chris Riley, who works as the Aboriginal Education Assistant at the Primary School.

In remote settings such as these there are always difficulties for longitudinal data collection posed by distance and the expense of travel. In order to overcome these difficulties, we have sought to achieve the sorts of understandings hoped for in a longitudinal study by focusing on the accumulated knowledge and experience of teachers who have worked with the children of these communities over time, rather than observing these children ourselves, or speaking with their parents. Rather than a study of individual children, we were seeking a sense of the particularity, differences and similarities across rural settings, as well as a general sense of the experience of early literacy development and the transition to school for the children in these settings. We sought this information through in-depth interviews with teachers, asking them to articulate their understandings of literacy development in each of the research locations.

These teachers are part of their communities, and their accounts and interpretations of the literacy development of their students are therefore 'partial'. They are very much involved and implicated in the educational process, and they are clearly identified as 'the teachers' in their town. The stories our participants tell--because they too are situated--are legitimate and worthwhile accounts of the range of realities of rural schooling, even though we want to stress their particularity. They cannot be seen as the full story about 'rural' literacy development. What remains with us, though, is that in every research site we visited, the teachers told us that nobody had ever asked them to talk about what they knew about their pupils' literacy development before.

The interviews were mostly held on site during the working day, and often in the presence of children. Thus they were not formal, and although they broadly followed a schedule that had been sent out prior to the interview time, they were very much working conversations. Like the names of the towns, these teachers' names have been changed here to protect their anonymity. They spoke frankly, and sometimes with a sense of disappointment in the capacity of the education system they are part of, to make a difference in the lives of the children they teach. In the following section, we discuss the ways in which both preschool and school teachers view the process of transition between home and preschool, into primary education.

Transition between home/preschool and primary school at Baro

Preschool happens once a week for the children in the Flatlands region around Baro. On the day we visited, the mobile van, packed with a variety of equipment, unloaded its activities into an echoing corrugated iron community hall and onto the grass outside. But, as the Mobile preschool teacher, Peta Barrie, notes, even the effort to take preschool education out to children isolated by distance does not reach all of them. A combination of poverty and distance in rural areas means that some parents cannot afford to send their children for even this one day. Seasonal issues in this area also play a big role in the transition from preschool to school:

 Those school readiness programs always happen
 in November and October ... the end of September
 until December I don't see the parents ... they're
 harvesting and they're planting ... In May we pick,
 so I know that nothing will happen then.

Peta has established long-term relationships with families in her area. She knows the schools to which the children will travel when they are ready to start Kindergarten. In her interview she noted several strategies that she utilised in order to ensure that the children she worked with had the best possible start at school. She explained how she 'works the system', where teachers appointed to remote area schools often stay only a couple of years before moving closer to Sydney, to assist the transition to school of children whom she believed might be ill-suited to a particular teaching style or personality. As she noted, she sometimes advises parents not to send a child who is chronologically 'school-ready' if she feels the school is not able to deal with their social-emotional needs:

 We held off on one child until we were sure that
 the teacher was leaving. Because basically the
 teacher's a bully. [With all the children] ... she
 used to be into 'sit up straight, A for apple',
 that sort of stuff. So a couple of weeks before
 I'd sort of coach the kids ... so they'd be a favourite.

This kind of intervention seems highly unusual to those used to the norms of larger communities, where even if a parent is unhappy about a child being placed with a particular teacher, there is usually some opportunity for choice. In this part of the country parents without the means to send children away must take what is on offer. The responsibility that Peta takes upon herself, to provide an alternative for a child she believes may need it, is notable here. She spoke of the way that some other children on her district 'run' were often forced to start school far earlier than their age peers in other locations:

 there is massive pressure on these parents to
 send their children to school early, so that
 the school keeps the bus run and keeps the teacher.

Behind this sort of decision is the economic imperative for many of these rural families, which favours publicly provided school education over the much more costly preschool alternative.

Peta also highlighted the importance of broad social-emotional skills as important precursors to school literacy. In her discussion of what she saw as most important indicators of developmental progress with literacy, she did not confine her notion of literacy readiness to print awareness, instead seeing her role as primarily facilitating the children's social competence:

 [I]t's mostly social, that's the big one.
 It's that ability to [relate to] other children,
 it's to follow instructions, which is a big thing
 for kids because, when you're in a small household,
 you tend to get one on one, and when you go to big
 school it's one on thirty, and ... So they need that
 skill to be able to listen.

Marg Henry, the teacher at Baro, acknowledged the importance of the preschool experience in enabling children's social-emotional adjustment to school. However she was relatively dismissive of the efficacy of socialising activities of some preschools. She was also critical of mandated preschool outcomes for skills such as letter names, formation and pencil grip:

 Well they come with all sorts of variations of the
 names usually, always block letters, and back to
 front bits and pieces ... pencil grips are shocking ...
 and you cannot change that.

Marg felt that much of the preschool assessment before school entry emphasised the child's positive performance at the expense of identifying potential language, literacy and learning problems:

 [One] Preschool has a little one of those picture things ...
 where you've just got to go tick, tick, tick ... they're
 never going to give parents one, which has 'can't' on it.

She also felt that many of the parents in the district underestimated the influence they could have at home. This seems to indicate that she regarded home as a more influential factor in literacy learning than preschool:

 They doubt their own capabilities too much. I mean
 all they have to really do is sit down and read,
 play, y'know, colour in together, and talk together....
 The children who struggle at school are from the
 families where it's: 'Do this, do that, come here,
 get your clothes'.

Marg's observation corresponds with the findings of research into the sorts of home literacy practices that correlate with school success (Brice Heath, 1983; Luke, 1992). But it is not clear whether her statement indicates a class bias, in which books and reading are assumed to be 'part of everyday life as it is in many middle-class non-indigenous homes' (Dunn, 2001, p. 684), or is a comment on the pressures on parents whose working lives do not allow time for the luxury of playing and talking with their children. She was unable to elaborate on whether there may have been other potentially rich forms of verbal and non-verbal meaning making practices in homes that may be erased by these assumptions of 'normal' Australian household practices. This attitude appears to reinforce the denial in the centralised mandated curriculum of the sorts of situated pre-school and out-of-school funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) that the Baro children might bring with them from home and preschool into school.

Transition between home/preschool and primary school at Narandoo

Unlike the Baro. children, most of the children at Narandoo have a more regular preschool experience, and live in closer proximity to other families and children. In this town, according to teachers, a lack of social competence in educational settings is rarely seen in children starting preschool. Chris, the Aboriginal Education Worker did not see the preschool as responsible for teaching more formal literacy skills such as letter identification or formation beyond the immediate and personal. Yet Narandoo preschool has a strong language program that emphasises local 'relevant and useful' knowledge (Dunn, 2001, p. 683).

Kate, one of the Preschool teachers, highlighted the preschool's link with local Aboriginal elders, for their rich local knowledge and their part in promoting reconciliation between cultures:

 [W]e've worked with the Elder, so we've got some local
 traditional stories ... the land, and the river, what
 the kids see so they can relate to it.... They can know that
 part of the river and they know the words ... looking for
 Binging [river turtle]. [We do] more contemporary stuff as
 well too, so there's pictures of themselves eating fruit
 and naming fruit ... a healthy eating program can involve
 eating the turtle from the river or the fish from the river ...
 with sitting down for storytelling, and we'd either have the
 books that we've made with the Elder, or he would just tell
 stories.

This emphasis on Indigenous culture and knowledge did not, however, carry into the Primary School.

In Narandoo, the preschool teachers felt that their advice, based on their observation and knowledge of the children's language development, was sometimes ignored by both parents and school teachers. As in Baro, this could result in children entering school too early, though the reasons for this were less clear than in the Flatlands region, where schools and bus runs needed numbers to remain viable. Kate identified the ability to interact appropriately in a formal situation as an important factor in school readiness for formal literacy instruction:

 ... to sit down in a group and take turns listening to each other,
 rather than demanding all the attention for themselves the whole
 time ... working on a project together, and problem solving
 together ... you can get children who can retell stories and
 events, but if they can't fit in socially that's, that doesn't
 mean anything. They're still not ready.

In the more densely settled and closely-connected community of Narandoo, where people are more visible to their neighbours, though, Kate was unable to intervene in the ways that Peta found possible among the dispersed families further west. There were tensions in the town that are reflected in the disjunction between the teaching and teacher-pupil relationships evident in the preschool and school.

 They're not actually listening to what we have to say about
 the child's development ... [There is] a teacher in the
 kindergarten who all the white middle class parents are
 coming in and saying. 'Oh isn't she fantastic'. And yet we
 go back to the Aboriginal village to see the kids, and there's
 all the kindergarten kids walking around--they're not going
 to school! ... She might be fantastic for white middle class
 kids but what's she doing for the Aboriginal kids, and the
 Alternative kids ?

Kate was concerned that the formal written literacy instruction that the 'white middle class parents' saw as 'fantastic' was not reaching either the Aboriginal children, who stay away, or the 'Alternative' kids, who do not share the cultural backgrounds assumed in the school's curriculum practice. Both Chris and Raylene are strong advocates for education within their community, but found it difficult to counter the disconnections their children experience between home, preschool and the early years of school.

Difficulties experienced by Preschool and School teachers in isolated settings

Our interviews indicate that problems posed by their geographical remoteness from urban centres affect both schools and preschools. These include lack of access to resources. At Baro, several of the wealthier families overcame their children's isolation and dependence on the Mobile preschool, by driving them each day to whatever preschool program was on. Marg encouraged this:

 I've got some who do Goondiwindi, that one [Yarrawindi]
 and this one [Baro] ... Going to places is wonderful! ...
 Anything, anything that gets them out of here.

Although they live much closer to larger regional centres, some of the children at Narandoo also have little, or no, experience of the 'outside' world. Both the preschool and the primary school teachers organise excursions to counter this isolation:

 Some of our kids don't even get to go past Narandoo.
 Honestly. I think it affects them a lot ... some of
 them never get to go to a beach, to Woolies, to go shopping
 with their Mums, they don't even go to town ... all the
 good things are a long way. (Raylene)

Chris saw home schooling (particularly among the 'Alternates' communities) as a further disadvantage in this isolated setting:

 ... the kids were missing out on mixing with other kids,
 the times they'd be out in the hills on their own place
 you know, with no one to play with unless they went to
 the hall as that was the only place they used to meet.

Peta identified the main developmental issue posed for preschool children by isolation as language, compounded by lack of access to support services. In the following extract Peta links language to environmental issues that appear to be impacting on the educational and social health for Flatlands children:

 Parents understand them, and the people on the farm ...
 and because they're not interacting with anybody else,
 they just never learn.... You wait six and a half, 12
 months to get in (to Speech Therapy)! They're going to
 school and they've still got major speech problems....
 If you can speak, if you can articulate what you need and
 what you want, if you can understand what's being said to
 you, you have power ... There's a very high number of
 language problems at Baro, and it's not a genetic thing
 [or really even] to do with socio-economics. [But] they
 wonder about the chemicals ... eight parents here are
 making regular trips to Toowoomba to see a speech therapist.

Though usually not considered a major developmental issue in school literacy, out here, the question of maternal health was also a problem:

 I've got three mums in the next month going up to Toowoomba
 for six to eight weeks to have their babies ... They'll either
 take all their kids up ... in one case, the little boy will
 stay with his grandmother.(Peta)

Toowoomba, across the border in Queensland, is approximately four hours drive from Baro, and this is a considerable distance for children to be separated either from their mothers or their schools.

At the Narandoo preschool, teachers paid attention to modifying various kinds of language use that they know will be inappropriate for primary school and hamper the children's formal literacy 'development' because it will be seen as failing to meet the 'normal' standard of social interaction.

 What I find with my kids coming from home, they swear
 a lot and we just remind them: 'You don't say that at
 Preschool'. It is very hard to switch them from when
 they want to do 'a poo' and 'a wee'. 'Aunty Raylene I
 want to do a piss'. (Raylene)

The requirement for these children to learn an additional, polite language register for schooling, and the success with which they accomplish this, is never measured as an achievement in their literacy development. Their difference from the 'norm' standard of English in school settings is instead noted as literacy failure, or lack of development. As they progress throughout the primary school, their difference from the metro-centric norm is highlighted.

Mandatory statewide testing was seen by teachers in both Baro and Narandoo as an impost added to the interconnected challenges of isolation, cultural and language difference. Further, the children in these locations did not recognise many of the names that are used in test materials:

 They have got things in those rotten tests that put those kids
 at a disadvantage. They use names that they would never ever
 hear ... Most of that Test focuses on what the kids in the city
 would know ... if we was to put a test in and we gave it to city
 kids it, they'd come nowhere near as good as what we would get
 from our kids. (Chris)

Some children also have to cope with a number of other 'discontinuities between home and school' (Hill et al., 1998, 2002). Children who take responsibility for feeding themselves, tending to animals, operating machines, and deciding how to spend their time, find their lack of power in the classroom difficult to get used to. Many things are different in the formal school setting.

Conclusion

The communities we report on here are not typical of stereotypical 'hard to staff' rural schools, where the teachers are city people transported to the bush and themselves marginalised by their difference and unease in the rural setting (McConaghy, 2002, p. 20). These teachers are all very much part of their communities, and will remain so. Broad-brush characterisations of the limitations of rural schooling often fail to do justice to the work of many rural women whose efforts in early childhood and primary education continue to provide both stability and connection for the children and families of their communities. Marg, Peta, Raylene, Kate and Chris are committed to the education of 'their' kids, and want them to leave primary school able to take up opportunities that will bring them success. But they are despairing of the ways in which they, their children, and their shared life experiences are marginalised in formal discourses of literacy development.

As Indigenous women, Chris and Raylene are able to identify with a significant part of the community's population. This is a distinct advantage in their efforts to ensure that all the town's children have access to the preschool, and in the ability they have to be able to recognise the disjunctions between the practices of social relationships at school and at home, for many of the Indigenous children. Their mediation around language assists the children to take part in the relationships necessary for schooling. But as they model acceptable forms of expression, and translate meanings that are beyond the experience of the children in their community in formal testing environments, they are compensating for, rather than working with their difference from the developmental norm. Even the richness of the links the preschool children have with the Indigenous Elders and community practices in the local environment diminishes as the teachers in school strive to achieve curriculum goals more pertinent to the larger population of children in metropolitan schools.

Our research underlines the need for more systemic attention to the large body of research that highlights how unequal access to rich preschool learning opportunities exacerbates wider social and educational inequalities. This is realised in all settings where a narrower range of literacy practices is valued above the wider array that are on offer in different locations across society. In this sense, early literacy development is as different as the settings in which it takes place. It cannot be characterised as a singular trajectory along which all children move through time, and with exposure to an 'appropriate' carefully staged curriculum. This is because children move in and through social and geographical (and emotional) space as well. Development is not just a matter of cognitive growth towards a set of desired literacy outcomes. The literacy events that shape and produce children's facilities and attitudes as literate social subjects are always situated. As Barton, Hamilton and Ivanic argue, literacy is something that is 'realised in social relationships rather than a property of individuals' (2000, p. 13). It is thus difficult to sustain the idea that literacy can be taught as a decontextualised practice and a set of skills which individuals acquire and develop regardless of who and where they are.

Literacy curriculum needs to pay attention to the particular geographical and social circumstances into which children are born, experience reality, and grow up. For many of these children, school is a place you get to after an hour's travel on the bus and where you do not get to play after school with friends. For many of these children the adult males in their lives never take part in literacy practices that look anything like those on offer in school and book reading and writing work at home is something that only Mum has time for. Many children would rather be out on the tractor with Dad than doing homework on the weekend. The children in the Alternate communities near Narandoo have little time for homework after their chores are done and night falls, and the community meets for dinner and storytelling sessions.

Children's home experience in these remote locations is often discounted and irrelevant in the school setting. This creates specific difficulties for preschool and school teachers, who often feel that the requirements of mandated metro-centric curriculum mean they are unable to assist in the development of a more situated, 'ecological' notion of development of the child. If children are to develop competencies and attitudinal stances towards literacy as part of their larger social identities, then we need to continue to interrogate schooling on the margins. Marginal schools must be free to work with what the children bring to school. Their teachers must feel free to use their own judgement of progress and development that is situated and context-bound rather than normative. The curriculum processes they utilise must encourage adaptation, innovation and relevance to the local, situated practice of the communities they serve, as well as the metro-centric norms of the globalised economy and society which is shaping their futures.

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Jo-Anne Reid

CHARLES STURT UNIVERSITY

Helen Edwards Jean Denton Scholar and Kerith Power

UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND

Note

(1) Questioning Development in Literacy, Susan Hill and Barbara Comber (University of South Australia), Bill Louden and Judith Rivalland (Edith Cowan University), Jo-Anne Reid (Charles Sturt University).

A version of this paper was presented to the NSW CCSA Annual Conference, Embracing complexity and risking change. 20-22 June 2003.