`Show me a child before s/he is ...'? Prior-to-preschool literacy experiences of children in Australia.

Reid, Jo-Anne

Children's prior-to-preschool home lives are the focus of this article. Carried out as a part of DEETYA Children's Literacy Project (Hill et al., 1998), the research characterises the differences between the prior-to-preschool literacy experiences of these Australian children in terms of the material, social and cultural resources that their families have available to them in their everyday lives and that which the children take up as their own as part of `themselves'.

Introduction

It is clear that the school and preschool are not the only settings in which small children learn to be literate. Further, these are not the only settings in which children experience what can be seen as formal literacy practices. In this article I focus on the home as a category for explicit attention. In 1996-97, Sue Hill, Barbara Comber, Bill Louden, Judith Rivalland and I studied the connections between literacy prior to school and in the first year of school for 100 Australian children across five research sites funded by DEETYA as a Children's Literacy Project (Hill et al., 1998).(1) Twenty of these children have been the focus of case studies, and our analyses indicate that these children's prior-to-preschool home lives can be broadly categorised in several significant ways, in spite of sometimes marked differences from each other within and between our research sites.

The differences in the prior-to-preschool literacy experiences of these Australian children can be characterised most clearly in terms of the material, social and cultural resources that their families have available to them in their everyday lives, and that which the children take up as their own as part of `themselves'. For children such as Paul and Erin, Aston, Christianne, Allan and the others we studied, the time they spend at home and with members of their families is not like the time they spend at preschool or school. For each of them, though, this time is more or less like time at school, in terms of the language interactions and literacy experiences on offer. The family literacy practices of the children in this study, however, vary far more than the literacy practices of the different preschools and schools to which their families send them.

Stephanie Gunn (1997) has already noted that one of the recurring themes evident in national children's literacy research projects funded in Australia to date `is that literacy practices and activities in the schools have more in common than the literacy practices at home and in the community'(1997: p. 3). She cites work by Breen et al. (1994), and Cairney et al. (1995) to note the similarity of school literacy practices in schools `regardless of the location or type of school population' and the lack of adjustment made by schools in response to differences among clientele (Gunn, 1997: p. 3).

On the basis of our analysis of the case studies developed during this project, I want to argue here, along with many other Australian and international researchers (e.g. Heath, 1983; Luke, 1992; McCarthey, 1997), that some of the literacy events in some homes draw on official literate traditions and cultural practice. These can also, at times, be seen as literacy events which actually fit more institutional definitions of the literacy curriculum, like those on offer in preschool and school settings. Learning literacy, and being a (pre)literate preschool child, therefore is a matter of contexts (ways and means of engagement and interaction in social practice involving literacy) as well as of content (knowledge and information about how literacy works). It is a matter of what is available in children's homes, of how children engage in literate practices that enable them to learn, as well as what they learn. From such a perspective, there is quite clearly a home literacy `curriculum' in some families, in which school literacy knowledge is a mode of communication, and which `naturally' places the children of these families at an advantage when they begin school literacy learning.

I begin here with a discussion that brings together a range of critical and post-structualist social theory, which we have found helpful in trying to come to a clearer understanding of how we might deal usefully with, and go beyond, a structuralist reading of our findings. These findings seem to indicate, yet again, that economic and cultural advantage continues to predetermine school success and risk of school failure. Following this, I move on to briefly address the social and community contexts for literacy at the present time. Then I provide a few samples from the case studies that we developed, illustrating the range of literacy practices in the homes of some of the focus children.

Helpful theoretical perspectives on children's home-school literacy connections

Our analyses and findings can be usefully understood in relation to the theoretical distinction made by Gee (1991) between primary and secondary discourse acquisition. I want to link this closely to Bourdieu's (1991) work on the symbolic power of certain privileged forms of language and social practice over others, along with Foucault's (1977, 1988) account of the subject in discourse. I consider that these post-structuralist theoretical accounts are very useful for educators and policy workers trying to understand why our best efforts at teaching literacy to our school population don't (and can't) work for all children, and why it is increasingly important to address the complexity of this situation as a matter of urgent reappraisal and attention in early childhood literacy education. I will first discuss these positions very briefly, before providing several illustrative examples of the sorts of difference that we found characterise home literacy practice for children starting school in Australia each year. The illustrations suggest that there might well be value in pursuing a closer contact and sharing between an informed teaching service in local school situations and the homes of the children they serve.

This discussion does not provide any simple solutions, though I do think that it enables us to move beyond existing assumptions about the nature of early childhood literacy education, in order to imagine ways in which we might try to approach the problem of children at risk of failure within existing practice `differently'.

Acquisition and learning

In any family, particular forms of everyday, and naturalised, interaction and practice constitute the primary discourse of the home, in Gee's (1991) sense, and they produce what Bourdieu (1977) calls the habitus. For the children in many families, the foundation and preparation for formal literacy instruction is easily and effortlessly acquired in this way. Literacy does not have to be formally learnt as a new, secondary discourse; it already forms part of the individual habitus of the child in its everyday life. But this is a matter of a child's cultural and social location rather than a natural aptitude or predilection. And it makes a big difference to how well children are able to take up the literacy practices on offer to them in preschool and school settings, and therefore to how they perform on measures of how much and what sort of literacy they can learn from a formal curriculum.

For Gee (1991, p. 1), a discourse is a way of `using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group'. Acquisition, as Gee explains, involves the unconscious `embodiment' of particular forms of social practice `by exposure to models and a process of trial and error, without a process of formal teaching'. This occurs in `natural settings which are meaningful and functional' (1991, p. 5). Learning, by contrast, `involves conscious knowledge gained through teaching, though not necessarily from someone officially designated a teacher'. As Gee notes, we are always better at what we acquire, because we don't have to think about it. Citing the work of Heath (1983) and others, he explains:

Some cultures highly value acquisition and so tend simply to expose children to adults modeling some activity and eventually the child picks it up, picks it up as a gestalt rather than as a series of analytic bits [...]. Other cultural groups highly value teaching and thus break down what is to be mastered into sequential steps and analytic parts and engage in explicit explanation.

(Gee, 1991: p.6)

In this way, learning literacy in formal settings outside the home is a matter of formal learning for some children rather than an extension of acquisition, as it is for others. For Gee, this is a fundamental problem. He claims that literacy is mastered through acquisition, not learning, an insight that is very important for us to address in a consideration of literacy curriculum in the different but related contexts of the home, preschool and school (Reid, 1997). Becoming successfully literate, then:

[...] requires exposure to models in natural, meaningful, and functional settings, and teaching is not liable to be very successful -- it may even initially get in the way. Time spent on learning and not on acquisition is time not well spent if the goal is mastery in performance.

(Gee, 1991: p. 8, emphasis added)

The subject of literacy

Gee's formulation allows us usefully to bring together Bourdieu's (1977) notion of habitus (elements of embodied practice and predispositions for thought and action) with a Foucaultian notion of discourse as structuring systems of language and thought. This is helpful to a discussion of literacy curriculum prior to school and in the early years of school, as it allows a contradictory explanation of dominant understandings of difference in school literacy attainment as deficit or deviance, which lead to school failure for many children. Unlike preschool and school literacy curriculum, literacy practices in Australian homes do not constitute a generalised national curriculum. Nor is the habitus pertaining to the ready learning of school knowledge generally available to all children before they enter preschool or school settings. Yet learning school knowledge is important for children, as school performance remains powerful coinage for individuals in our society as well as a general indicator of schooling success for government. The problem for governments, of course, is that there are some parts of the population who do not succeed as well as others, no matter how thorough and powerful the institutional provision of certain forms of literacy teaching might be. And each Australian state has begun to institute its own version of what is considered to be a powerful, successful approach to early literacy education. Yet `power'-ful programs (like those institutionalised by schools in programs such as First Steps and Keys to Life, and national benchmarks for reading and writing, etc.), are never absolute, as Foucault reminds us, and can never be guaranteed to `work' to effect desired ends.

The characteristic feature of power is that some [people] can more or less entirely determine other [people's] conduct -- but never exhaustively or coercively.

(Foucault, 1988: p. 84, cited in Lacombe, 1996)

The language we acquire at home as children, our primary discourse, along with the ways and means we naturally behave around books, print material and literacy technologies, shapes us as part of our unconscious, bodily habitus. This is much more powerful as a determinant of school literacy learning than any literacy program. Bourdieu, for instance, reminds us that our literacy learning practice is not rational: rather, it is `structured into' our bodies and thoughts. Only rarely is it the outcome of conscious deliberation or calculation, vis Frank Smith's (1981) famous dictum that children learn all the time, even when they are not being taught, so that there is often a problem of what they are learning about themselves as learners. In his introduction to Bourdieu's Language and Symbolic Power, John Thompson explains this clearly:

... by virtue of the habitus, individuals are already predisposed to act in certain ways, pursue certain goals, avow certain tastes, and so on. Since individuals are the products of particular histories which endure in the habitus [...] practices should be seen as an encounter between a habitus and a field which are, to varying degrees, `compatible' or `congruent' with one another, in such a way that, on occasions when there is a lack of congruence (e.g. a student from a working-class background who finds himself or herself in an elite educational establishment), an individual may not know how to act and may literally be lost for words.

(Thompson, 1991: p. 17)

Although Bourdieu has never addressed his attention specifically to early childhood literacy, of course, the value of his work for our deliberations here is undeniable. Baker and Luke (1991) note that the importance of this sort of cultural capital is high, and allow us to make clear connections between the work of Bourdieu and Gee in this regard.

To `look like a reader' -- by accident, fortune or design -- is effectively a cultural and political resource in the classroom. To not have acquired the look of a reader is a liability.

(Baker and Luke, 1991: p. 261)

Not all children arrive in school looking like readers, however. Like the body of research upon which this study has built, our work shows that the literacy stories told in Australian homes in the late 1990s are very different for different children. For some children, many of the literacy events of the home are now centred around telecommunications media, and involve television, video, electronic games and computers. For others, literacy events are predominantly centred around functional, social and economic interactions of buying and consuming. As Moll et al. (1992) have shown, all children are born into families with existing and extensive `funds of knowledge' and social networks which may involve forms of literacy and literacy events more or less similar to those on offer through social educational institutions.

Similarly, Heath (1983) and Luke (1992) have described the mismatch between school literacy knowledge, the secondary discourses of school curriculum, and the different knowledges that many children bring to the institutional setting. They remind us that the `discourses and practices that organise the routine, everyday life of classrooms and schools are discourses and practices that work in and across local sites to produce educational advantage and exclusion'(Baker & Luke, 1991: p. 263). Where children are exposed to reading and writing practices which position them as having more, or less, knowledge/power than others, their apprehension of their own subjectivity or identity as a literate subject is enhanced, or jeopardised. Some children find themselves, on their first day of school, already, always `behind'. What they are learning, often, is a sense of their own powerlessness as the subjects of the `secondary discourse' of school. Rhetorical emphasis on cultural difference and the richness of different cultural literacies may well be misplaced in school settings where only one culture's literacy, or one form of literacy, is made standard and valued.

I will go on now to provide a brief overview of community contexts for literacy, then address aspects of literacy curriculum practice on offer for several of our focus children in their homes, prior to them beginning school, and outside of any formal preschool experience.

Community contexts for literacy

Literacy is both a political and popular concern at the present time, as Green, Hodgens and Luke (1997) illustrate in their discussion and analysis of the history of literacy debates in Australia. Several of our case studies (Hill et al., 1998) report the rate at which some parents are buying literacy workbooks and `supermarket books' for their children as part of their preparation for literacy. The chain bookstore at a shopping plaza near one of our research sites, for instance, claims that its biggest selling discount line is in children's books selling for under $10. Further, during the new school year period in another research site, a bookstore was reorganised for the back-to-school sales with three trestle tables covered with piles of `Basic Skills' books for preschoolers. These are publications from what is described as an `expert' team of educators: ex-primary school principals, a psychologist, an ex-`Director of Guidance', an ex-inspector, experienced junior-primary school teachers, and experienced authors of school textbooks. Parents of preschool/ kindergarten children are encouraged to purchase such titles as:

* Basic Skills -- Kindergarten

* Phonic Reading/Spelling

* My First 1000 Reading & Spelling Words

* Introductory Creative Writing!

They have `removable answers' to encourage children to practice their skills of completing pencil and paper matching and word recognition tasks at home. These are `skills', the books assume, that parents might consider essential for success in school. The store obviously anticipated that the books would be big sellers. There was replacement stock stacked under the tables and a ready supply of catalogues available for parents to take away and browse. Literacy, it seems, is well (and singularly) defined in the popular consciousness, and it is this version of literacy that has been adopted by many parents who are wishing to give their children a head-start upon entering school.

There are no primers for children entering preschool, however. The `skills' needing development at preschool have not traditionally been recognised or acknowledged as literacy skills. The preschool, with its focus on care and nurturing the development of the individual child, is much less competitive in this sense. Preschool does not require such a head-start in Australia -- at present at least. As the parent of one of our focus children has noted:

[My wife] doesn't believe in pushing children before school. There is time enough for them to be taught properly at school. She strongly believes it is important not to force a child, under five, who is not ready to learn to read.

(Case study: Erin, Hill et al., 1998)

The discourses of child literacy learning evident in this statement are clear. `Pushing' is unnatural. Children, nurtured and shaped appropriately, will mature in their proper time. This comment reveals the interplay of discourses of reading `readiness', and the arbitrary specification of the age (five) at which nature might no longer be left to take its course; it demonstrates the complex interweaving of the dominant legacy of eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century Romantic and Child Study movements which still inform much present-day popular educational and everyday child-rearing practice (Reid, 1996).

Home literacy practices

But why did we find it so difficult to characterise the range of home literacy events that have been experienced by the 100 children involved in this project in the five sites around Australia? I go on now to elaborate a selection of extracts from several case studies (Hill et al., 1998) completed within the project. These extracts are taken from information provided by parents of the focus children, observation by the research team, and discussion with parents and teachers during the mediation phase of the study.

Erin, the child whose parents are quoted on the previous page, for instance, has three shelves of books in her bedroom. These were:

... neatly categorised into about 50 Golden Books and about 140 Lollipop Books. Eva buys the Lollipop books, which cost about $2.00, each time she goes to the supermarket. Eva said that Erin knows all the books off by heart [...] because the older children in the family have read them to her many times.

(Case study: Erin, Hill et al., 1998)

Erin has not been `pushed' to read by her parents. In her family, reading is something that children do with each other. When Erin chants, by heart, the words of the books in her room, she reproduces -- in her voice, and in the way she holds the book in her hands -- the body knowledge of reading in school provided by her older siblings. Time and testing will tell to what extent this pleasurable modelling has allowed her to acquire an embodied set of literacy practices that can be just as easily and pleasurably developed as she is taught, and learns more about, reading and writing in school.

In the case of another child, Freya, we noted the following aspects of life at Freya's house, introducing a catalogue of literacy-latent possibilities for the children with a comment that involvement with, and interaction around, explicit literacy practice is high in this home.

The phone rings often, and notes and messages are taken. There is a recipe book on the kitchen shelf, for instance, and numerous papers, home renovation magazines, newspapers and the computer at hand in the family room. Both parents have briefcases, full of paper, books and pens, and although they mostly leave their work till the children are asleep, there is a clear sense that many if not most aspects of life in this household involve literacy, and that use of reading and writing is an integral part of being a person. There is a calendar, marked with important events and reminders, on clear display, referred to often to plan and organise the week.

(Case study: Freya, Hill et al., 1998)

Another child, Christianne, lives within an extended family which regularly gathers to share time together. Her grandmother explains:

YAYA: We are a big family. My Mum she's got nine kids and five is here. The other ones are overseas. That's what we got in Australia, you know close family. Every Friday everyone go to my Mum and Dad's then after that they come to my place for coffee. Everyone is together actually -- our kids, the grandchildren. It's a crazy house every Friday. But I like it. It's good for kids ...

(Case study: Christianne, Hill et al., 1998)

In this situation, Christianne also receives many opportunities to engage in literate practice. She shares stories with her Yaya, and the rooms of her home are decorated by photographs of family events and occasions. She likes to write and draw for her own pleasure, and her Yaya said that she wished she could sound out the words in English to help Christianne read:

YAYA: I was very sad yesterday because Christianne asked me to spell dog and cat and I said to her mother I couldn't tell her. My daughter says d-o-g is dog, Mum. But it's very hard for me. [...] I speak in Greek but she answers in English.

(Case study: Christianne, Hill et al., 1998)

Although Christianne's grandmother is concerned that she cannot provide the specific information that Christianne needs to refine and master her skills in reading and writing because of the differences between Greek and English, it is clear that this does not stop her granddaughter from writing and reading and listening to Greek stories and songs at home. The family discourse which Christianne has acquired is different from that on offer in Freya's house, where family stories are told on film, and there are usually only four people around on a Friday night. Yet in Greek or English, the literate body `looks' the same, and storytelling is valued, and children imitate their adults when they play with the practice of reading and writing.

The case studies from another remote-area site, by contrast, provide little evidence of the sort of home literacy curriculum that would produce children with the habitus of the literate subject and which can be easily `developed' in the preschool and school. As we noted in the Reena case study (Hill et al., 1998), not all of the Aboriginal families sending children to school here live in houses. Some live in informal camps constructed of wire mesh and trailer tarpaulins. Others live in one of several out-stations, in groups of what were once called transitional houses: small steel sheds with a bathroom and laundry attached. There is little opportunity, in houses without walls, for bookshelves. In a town with only one shop, supermarket books are difficult to come by.

But several of the children here also enjoy the social interaction of a large extended family and the opportunities it provides for the child to acquire and practise the particular primary discourse of the home. Aston is one of these children. He is depicted as a self-sufficient child who often needs to organise his own shelter, food, activity and companionship when adults are otherwise engaged. He is thus operating at a very `mature' level, if the norm for the behaviour and `maturation' of children is understood as that of `the normal child' of twentieth-century first-world cultures (Aries, 1973; Jenks, 1996). This child makes his own choices about where he sleeps, for instance, and where he goes. While such autonomy may not be unusual in the discourse of Aston's family and community, it does not fit easily with the discourse of school, where his teachers see him as `neglected' and he is at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to acquiring Standard Australian English literacy.

Another child, Alan, has suffered long periods of illness as a young child, and he is described as having acquired a habitus that does not provide him with the `look' of a child ready to learn literacy. This is clearly in spite of a number of other family practices which do offer him the opportunity and practice to enter and engage with, and thereby acquire, literate behaviours.

A picture begins to emerge of a family engaged in a number of activities together, including the siblings working on the collage, the bike-riding and its associated rules and the way Carol has cajoled Alan into doing gym through his older brother. Carol goes on to say how well he's doing with gym, but with reference to the kindy [preschool] underlines once again his difficulty with contacts with other adults.

CAROL: And they're very shocked because a four and a half year old shouldn't be able to do a somersault and he'll do it. He'll defy anybody. The only thing is when he first started kindy I just said to them, `Just shove him along like a sheep. Don't touch him because if you touch him he'll retaliate.' Well they didn't listen to me and they tried to touch him. Next minute the whole place was rearranged. He kicked the whole place in.

MARGIE: What's that about, do you think? The touching thing?

CAROL: 'Cos he's been so sick.

Carol, it seems, has a history of mediating between Alan and official people in institutions, trying to prepare the way for him and to warn others of some potential problems. Sometimes she has felt that doctors and teachers don't listen.

(Case study: Alan, Hill et al., 1998)

At the same time, some families have made explicit efforts to teach their children literacy skills through the use of purchased preschool teaching materials. In Paul's house, for example, both his parents and grandparents have expended considerable effort in ways which make the primary discourse of the home incorporate a focus on literacy. There appears to be an almost seamless connection between the primary discourse of this home and that of the school. Paul's mother explains:

SUSAN: I bought a couple of tapes when they were two or three, two and a half or three. They had these little tapes that they could play at the time on our car cassette. I bought them all for the learning experience really. And reading skills. So that they were listening to things and learning. We've got little magnetic letters on the fridge. I joined the `Hello Reader' group at the kinder through their book club. So we get two or three books each month, and they come along with magnetic letters so we'll often make little words on the fridge. He's got little signs, you know, `lift' signs on the door, little signs for `up/down' on the window, `push/pull' ...

(Case study: Paul, Hill et al., 1998)

Not all of Paul's literacy activities at home are directed or instigated by his parents. He already appears to have acquired the confidence and familiarity with print and text to be able to utilise both the print medium and the number system for his own ends, and as a source of personal pleasure and power.

INTERVIEWER: Do you use the TV guide and things like that yourselves?

SUSAN: Yes. Paul drew one, one time. And mostly he had the times right and all that -- so he understands what that means.

GRAHAM: He wanted to know yesterday how I knew the movie started at two o'clock and I had to show him in the newspaper the times.

(Case study: Paul, Hill et al., 1998)

It is clear that Paul has been provided with and has acquired a great deal of cultural and symbolic capital that he will be able to invest to his advantage as he moves through his schooling. It is the difference in this educational `coinage' that different children have to spend at school that confounds the best efforts of teachers, systems and the state in their efforts to `improve' literacy achievements and `standards' across the board.

Conclusion

On the basis of a small selection of data from our case study materials (Hill et al., 1998), I have tried to demonstrate that of the large variety of discourses available to children growing up in Australian families at the present time, none is identical to each other, nor to the discourse of the school. Further, there is a wide range of approximation to the `norm' of school literacy practices in this regard. Our study has shown clearly that there is no stereotypical child emerging from our observations and analysis of these children and their literacy practices. Rather, we have found a wide variety of complicated young people, each with a particular repertoire of social practices and preferences (Case study: Daniel, Hill et al., 1998).

Paul, for instance, is used to directing his own activity at home, and in this regard he is just like Aston. But unlike Aston, Paul is able to gain pleasure from literate practice in his home setting, and use the power of his developing literacy to direct his adults to meet his needs. However, even though he may well have acquired the habitus and look of a reader and writer at

home, he has still not acquired the habitus of a school child, and in this he can again be compared with Aston -- and also, to some extent, with Alan.(2) They have all found difficulty settling into the regimes of their Prep/Kindergarten/ Reception classrooms because of this. The significant factor here is that these three boys, so like each other in some ways, are so different in others, and that on the basis of school literacy achievement, they are placed at widely disparate positions in relation to school success. There is no single, simple solution to this problem. Not `looking like a school reader' is not an impediment to school success, it seems, if you have other coins to cash. It is only when you don't have the cultural or symbolic capital to invest in other ways that your learning and literacy suffers.

In these ways, the complexity of the issue of home literacy curriculum, and of the bodily, emotional and cognitive knowledge acquired by children through engagement in the literacy practices available to them in their families, becomes a central issue to school literacy learning. Each of the children involved in this study leaves home each morning to come to school. Yet not one of them leaves the primary discourse of the home behind. As Barbara Comber (1997) has argued, a child's `background' is never out of the picture, and home is not simply a `background' to formal literacy learning.

A child's development as a social subject, though, requires movement outside of the family and into wider social groupings, of which those of the preschool and the school are especially significant. While preschool curriculum focusses on language and literacy practices in relation to the discourse of whole-child development of social, physical and emotional capacities, it clearly plays a significant part in providing for children without redeemable capital for school learning some of the necessary `ready'-ness they need to enable them to cash in on the school's much more narrow focus on the `basics' of reading and writing. This is where the complexity of the problem becomes most acute. From Gee's work, we can take the point that `acquisition' of a school-like discourse will be more useful to a child than the `learning' (and teaching) of such a discourse. How can early childhood teachers in preschool and school settings help children like Aston to `acquire' what children like Paul have already been acquiring for years? Can they? And in asking this, perhaps, are we asking the wrong sort of question?

It seems to me that at classroom, school and systems levels, we need to acknowledge that we can't `help make everybody the same', and that social practices, like literacy learning, are not conducted on a level playing field. As I have shown here, the wide range of home literacy experience we have found among the children in this study suggests a need for close contact and sharing between an informed teaching service in local school situations and the home cultures and environments of the children they serve. But this is not in order to mould the differences in children's home background towards an ability to participate in a homogenous, single set of classroom literacy practices. Rather, the challenge of working with, rather than against, difference in classroom literacy teaching and learning may provide us with a means of finding and acknowledging the potential benefits of social diversity in language and literacy rather than simply focussing on `overcoming' diversity and difference.

(1) The views expressed in this article and in the report itself do not necessarily represent the views of the Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs.

(2) There would appear to be fairly obvious differences between the bodily display and disposition of the boy children and girl children selected as exemplars in the discussion above. This was not deliberate, nor consciously represented as an issue of gender here, though we are making no claims in this regard before further analysis of the available data. Any comprehensive discussion of literacy learning, though, must acknowledge the gendered practices of schooling and school work (Kamler et al., 1994), and we would wish to take these matters further elsewhere.

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Reid, J. (1996). Holding firm the bonds of convention: Child study, primary English teaching and the competencies debate. Paper presented at Symposium on Curriculum History, Primary Education and Curriculum Research. Joint ERA-AARE Conference, Singapore, November.

Reid, J. (1997). Generic practice. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 20, 2, pp. 148-55.

Smith, F. (1981). Demonstration, engagement, sensitivity. Language Arts, 58, 1, pp. 103-112.

Jo-Anne Reid has taught at the University of Ballarat for the past two years, and has recently been appointed to the University of New England. She is interested in the potential of post-structuralist theories of practice to assist researchers and teachers to reconstruct practices of teaching and learning, and has focussed her own research practice around key sites of transition and change for students as subjects. With Sue Hill, Barbara Comber, Bill Louden and Judith Rivalland, she has recently completed a study of the connections and disconnections in literacy development in the year prior to school and the first year of school -- 100 Children Go to School (DEETYA, 1998).

Address: School of Curriculum Studies, Faculty of Education, Health and Professional Studies, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2350.