Illiteracy is portrayed as a family problem, and it is clear from the rhetoric that many believe it is the family that must be fixed.
Taylor, Many Families, Many Literacies, p. xii.
In her 1983 doctoral work Family Literacy: Young Children Learning to Read and Write, Denny Taylor spent time with six families with young children, and wrote about how the actions and ideas of the adults showed up in their children’s emergent literacy; a term Victoria Purcell-Gates defines as how “literate abilities and stances emerge developmentally as children observe and engage in experiences mediated by print in their daily lives” (1995, p. 7).
Over the next decade, Taylor’s description of the transmission of pro-literate skills and attitudes from one generation to the next was re-framed as a prescription for school-readiness. Literacy challenges were “portrayed as a family problem” and conventional family literacy programming “placed an emphasis on transmitting mainstream school literacy practices to the home” (East York Learning Experience, Ontario, “What is Family Literacy”, 2003).
Since then, leading voices in the family literacy field have come to “place an emphasis on the richness of the cultural experience of the home” (East York Learning Experience); recognizing that “language variation between groups reflects community use and norms, resulting in dialects and registers that must be judged not relative to some "perfect" language but rather to their effectiveness in varying contexts (Purcell-Gates, 1995, p. 4). There has been a call "to honor families, to support family members of all ages as they continually develop and share their literacies" (Taylor, 1997, p. 1).
Here at Quality Learning New Brunswick, we think
- families come in all shapes and sizes;
- learning happens in all stages of life;
- older family members also learn from younger members;
- just as individuals learn in families, families learn in community;
- literacy development cannot be separated from culture, health, security and equality.
We agree that it is part of family literacy work to help family members create a space where young children learn to read and write. But we also believe the work is larger than that, and that effective family literacy programs “focus on developing literacy within the family as a whole” (Centre for Family Literacy, Alberta, webpage; our emphasis).
Denny Taylor invites us “to read Many Families, Many Literacies with a pencil” (1997, p. xvi). She describes it as “a work in progress.” We believe this remains an apt description for the whole of today's family literacy field.
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Works cited:
Centre for Family Literacy (n.d.) Programs. Alberta. Webpage: http://www.famlit.ca/programs_and_projects/
East York Learning Experience (2003) Literacy: A Family Focus. Ontario. Webpage: http://www.eyle.toronto.on.ca/Family%20Literacy.htm
Victoria Purcell-Gates (1995) Other People's Words: The cycle of low literacy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Denny Taylor (1983, 1998) Family Literacy: Young Children Learning to Read and Write. Portsmouth, NH : Heinemann
Denny Taylor (1997) Many Families, Many Literacies: An international declaration of principles. Portsmouth, NH : Heinemann.
