Children, Literacy and Ethnicity: Reading Identities in the Primary School [Hardcover]

This book explores children's meaning making of the books they learn to read with, especially relating to the intersections of race, gender and class. Based on research using a participative, innovative design with young children, issues of identity, belonging and classroom hierarchies are explored in complex and poignant ways by the children.

1. Setting the Scene on Children's Reading

2. Children and Reading: Mapping Literacy

3. Research and Fieldwork at Three Chimneys School

4. The Child and Reading: Narratives of Literacy Competence

5. The Materiality of the Book

6. A Politics of Identity: Narratives of Migration, Place and Faith

7. Race, and the Embodiment of Difference

8. A Reflection on Children, Reading and Identity

The book aims to examine the taken for granted processes of learning to read, and these processes mainly appear to be the assessment and benchmarking systems. In this sense, Scherer explicitly shows how learning to read in school is an unspoken social, cultural and political process that makes a significant impact on children. (Kimberly Safford, Children & Society, Vol. 33 (2), 2019)

Alexandra Scherer is Lecturer in Childhood Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Her research focuses on exploring children's literacies, their identity work and their agency.

Mainstream narratives suggest Black and African Caribbean children, white working class children, and boys, are 'failing' to learn to read. This book investigates intersections between race, class and gender in the picture of the 'poor reader', starting with young children's voices. What is the place of home learning in the story of children learning- or failing to learn to read? What do we learn about children's identity formation as they engage with books? Social science l£Ù