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

Authors

  • joan barbara travers simon university of Luxembourg

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.20360/G2NC7T

Keywords:

Literacy, Methodology, Learning, Children, Home, Family

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.

 

 

Author Biography

joan barbara travers simon, university of Luxembourg

Joan Travers Simon is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education at the University of Luxembourg. Her areas of interest cover plurilingual literacy development in the early years in domestic and institutional contexts. She is also the first person to have rewritten a doctoral thesis as a trilingual children’s book.


Published

2012-11-30

How to Cite

travers simon, joan barbara. (2012). Furrows in the field, or down in the jungle: re-membering domestic literacy in the early years. Language and Literacy, 14(3), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.20360/G2NC7T

Issue

Section

Articles