EditorialLooking beyond the head as the site oflearning and literacyThe dominant way of thinking about learning is stillone that devotes inordinate attention to what goes oninside heads. It is one that attributes enormous statusto a version of ability that is fixed and measureable,and to a version of literacy that can be described interms of objectives and learning outcomes. This is aview that assumes that the source of a person’sunderstanding is inside the skull and skin. In practicethis thinking emphasizes diagnosing, assessing andtesting – often through one-off tests – and it attributes aperson’s successes and failures solely to the individual.It is a view, therefore, that blames marginalized peoplefor being marginal. Inside the head, it is so oftenassumed, is the site of learning and literacy.

If we broaden the lens, however, and look also beyondindividuals to what is going on around them, if we attendto what they know and can do, but also notice what one ispermitted to and constrained from doing, then a muchricher portrayal of learning becomes available. Attentionnow shifts to the nature of the situation, to the particularpeople and their relationships, to the available resources,and to the assumptions and expectations regardingvalued practices, and to who is recognized as successfuland unsuccessful in those practices. This is a view oflearning that is not so much about ability but, fundamen-tally about experience and opportunity to learn, andabout the chance to ‘‘catch up’’ if one had been deniedrelevant opportunities in the past.

Educators and researchers subscribing to this view areinterested in understanding how structures, beliefs andpractices facilitate and constrain learning. They areinterested in how homes and schools operate to fosterand limit different ways of being, knowing, andparticipating. Bridging home, school and communityexperiences so learners can make the most of the textualresources they already have some expertise in andexperience with is very important in this view.While ‘‘what has been learned?’’ is an importantquestion for the educator, addressing the question,‘‘what is available to be learned?’’ broadens out thelandscape to be explored and offers a much moregenerative perspective from which to understandstudent learning. The articles in this issue tend to thesecond perspective just described. I would suggest thatthe first four articles here are about practices designed tosupport the kind of cultural bridging implied by thisperspective.

The first, by Caroline Pearson, extends our under-standing of different kinds of talk in classrooms as she

analyses the manner in which children in one Scottishprimary school ‘‘put on voices, not their own’’, howthey develop their ways of being through talk, andhow they incorporate into their exchanges the voices ofparents, peers, teachers, film personalities and so on.Offering a fresh perspective on literature circles anddemonstrating the relevance of the wide range of talkshe found in the classroom, the author shows howchildren appropriate both official and unofficial dis-courses that ultimately swell their repertoires andenrich their engagement with literature.

In their article on teacher and child talk in active learningand whole-class contexts, Joan Martlew, Sue Ellis, Chris-tine Stephen and Jennifer Ellis highlight the importance ofadopting a negotiated conversational style of interactionin the first year of primary school, a style that is alignedwith play-based experiences and, as such, is in keepingwith children’s experiences before formal school. Theirs isa systematic study, based on careful observation andinterviewing, of the different types of communicativeengagement facilitated by 6 teachers with their 150children. A worrying finding emerging from their studyis how the children from economically disadvantagedsettings had fewer opportunities to engage in peer-to-peertalk than had their better off peers, and overall, theyseemed to benefit less than their better off peers from theactive learning interventions. Among the positive findingsis how changing what they do in school towards morenegotiated styles of interaction can promote learningconversations at home – a very important aspect ofcultural bridging across home and school.

The next article by a US team, Mary Louise Gomez,Melissa Schieble, Jen Curwood and Dawnene Hassett isexplicitly oriented towards the second perspectiveabove. Demonstrating how learning is distributed, thismost insightful paper analyses interactions amongsecondary pupils and pre-service teachers in an onlineenvironment as they foster their understanding ofadolescent literature. Drawing on a new literacies frame-work and recognizing the importance of positioninglearners as knowers and with expertise, the authorsshow us how ‘‘intelligence was distributed across tools,texts, institutional spaces and participants’ culturalschemes’’ and show the affordances of technology inenabling students with multiple backgrounds andperspectives participate fully in their learning. I suspectthis is a paper that will speak to teachers, teachereducators and researchers in equal measure.

As its title implies, Mary Scanlan’s paper is concernedwith bridging home and school cultures. She describes

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Literacy

and evaluates the design and implementation ofactivities that validate children’s out-of-school iden-tities – an action research project that was initiatedwhen literacy pedagogy was more prescriptive than itis currently. Like Gomez et al above, she is startingfrom the premise that power has to be shared andnegotiation has to be facilitated so learners canmaximize the meaning-making potential of the literacyexperiences on offer to them. The author, and no doubtreaders of this journal, welcome the increased flex-ibility that has accompanied more recent curriculumpronouncements from the DCSF (2009).

Jennifer Tan’s paper based on the authority of thetimetable in a residential care home in Malaysia isabout the power of a literacy artifact to shape and ordereveryday life. As a reification it cannot determine itsown use since that depends on the participants andhow they opt to apply it (see Wenger, 1998). However,the timetable became an artifact that is saturated withmeaning for the children in this particular care home,exerting enormous control over their day-to-dayexperiences. What the paper reveals is how thisinfluence varied for different children in the residentialhome, though it was constraining for all, and how itspresence became a mechanism for individual children

to position themselves and be positioned, sometimeswith reference to being or not being literate. Among therather harsh conditions that the children had to endureis being punished for using their first language.

The final paper is a review article by Graham Frater of twopublished reports on literacy, one in England and one inScotland. The paper compares and contrasts the tworeports with reference to their underlying perspectivesand assumptions on learning and literacy. It is a fasc-inating comparative analysis of the two reports where oneseeks to revitalize outmoded views and endorse dominantperspectives on learning while the other is more in tunewith current research and more recent socioculturalanalyses of learning and literacy. Let us hope for the sakeof all learners and their teachers that the more enlightenedone reaches across borders and boundaries and permeatesthe thinking of all educators and policy makers.

Kathy Hall

References

DCSF (2009) Your Child, Your Schools, Our Future: Building a 21st

Century School System. London: TSO.WENGER, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and

Identity. Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press.

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