- Latent Literacies: Rethinking, Discovering and Unveiling Early Childhood Literacy Practices
Abigail Hackett’s book More-Than-Human-Literacies in Early Childhood decentres the traditional comprehension of what constitutes literacy. She draws on snippets from her ethnographic research, immersing herself in children’s [End Page 256] everyday experiences with their surroundings, to challenge and transform existing research practices that promote a narrow notion of literacy steeped in white, Europeanized capitalist ideologies that thoroughly favour mastery, fluency, and problem-solving. Hackett asserts that demoting other-than-Europeanized forms of literacies as non-literacies creates hierarchical binaries that close off possibilities of other ways of seeing, relating, and eventually transforming research in understanding young children’s literacies.
The book is divided into three parts, each with smaller subsections. Hackett opens with “Starting with Community and Place” to introduce readers to her research methodology: spending her days with children aged between ten and thirty-six months, their families, and their “messy, micropolitics of daily life” (53) in the Northwood playgroup, Hill View playgroup, and Bay Tree daycare in northern England. The common approaches to assess and evolve early childhood literacies involving “age-appropriate educational toys,” “carefully arranged” resources for literacy development, or “guidance flyers for parents” (52) draw on universalized notions of child development which may fail to fully acknowledge the political dimensions involved in young children’s literacies. Hackett proposes that early literacy practices encountered by children in community early childhood settings include activities like adults propelling children to sing (3) or collaborating with them on the art table (49), which are aligned with the underlying political ideology that aims to shape young children and their families toward conforming to a specific “rational human” ideal (63). The book exposes aforementioned engagements with young children that are oversimplified under a “veneer of free choice and open engagement” (64) by alluding to vignettes that reveal a disruption in expected forms of engagement, such as children dismantling or displacing learning equipment or refusing to comply with being shaped into “literate subjects” (7). Hackett adopts “deep hanging out” (30) as her methodology, which involves going beyond surface-level interactions with the young children and opening up to embodied experiences like “sitting in the sandpit and in the dirt with the children” (31). Such an immersive approach acknowledges that knowledge extraction is bound up in shared places. The mutterings, refusals, and silences of young children provide them a certain agency which runs contrary to the progress narrative of the Western way of understanding literacy in young children.
The assumptions about young children’s development and their needs for learning and engaging are also influenced by certain linguistic standards, like favouring speech over silence, regarding “monolingualism as superior to bilingualism” (31), or associating certain dialects with certain social statuses, all of which perpetuate inequalities and may misalign with the messy and diverse realities of children’s everyday lives within their communities. Through a snippet entitled Z plays in the water (122), Hackett invites readers to consider the value of embracing children’s diverse linguistic practices; Z’s first language is Punjabi, and Hackett discusses how her experiences challenge the expectation that young children’s speech should be legible to the staff, who speak the dominant language (English). [End Page 257]
In part 2, “Wild Literacies: Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Literacy through the More-Than-Human,” Hackett expands on Eve Tuck’s reconceptualization of Gilles Deleuze’s theory of desire, to explain what may be achieved by applying the concept of desire to young children’s literacies. Tuck’s reimagining of desire in her essay “Breaking Up with Deleuze: Desire and Valuing the Irreconcilable” is critical of “damage-centered research” that dwells on documenting the pain and brokenness of research subjects to build a case to seek compensation in the form of monetary and other benefits (638). Desire-based research, on the other hand, Tuck says, acknowledges the complexities present in individuals and communities and therefore discards any simplistic analysis that reduces people and communities to “one-dimensional” representations (638–39). Taking desire as her point of departure, Hackett presents a critique...