In Support of Children and Families

• What does the author mean when she speaks of the “child in culture”?
• In what ways does the author connect culture and children’s interactions with culture with Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model? 
• What is “cultural capital,” and what is its significance in relation to equity and social justice for children and families?
• In what ways is the question of bilingualism or multilingualism relevant in relation to equity and social justice?
• In what ways, according to the author, are high culture and popular culture related to equity and social justice?

See attachment of text to read in order to answer the questions.

Having spent some time thinking about the child in society and the child beginning to use symbols we now turn our attention to the child in culture and exploring it. So we look at how children are inducted into their culture and how they define themselves and are defined by others. This introduces the theme of self-identity, which we explore in more depth in Chapter 7. We also touch on a consideration of the capacities children have to make informed choices within their cultural contexts.

Luigi is 7 years old. He lives in a small village in a relatively unspoiled region of Italy where his mother is part of a group of people who cook together and then set up tables in the streets where friends, neighbours and the odd visitors can come and eat delicious food. He is described by his family as ‘the best pasta maker’ in the village and they say this is because when he comes home from school he joins the cooks and spends all his time making pasta. They call it his job. At school his teacher describes him as a ‘very pleasant but rather slow child with no particular aptitude’.

Abdul is 9 years old. He lives in Balkur, Iran. He was asked about what work he does to help his family income and he said that he felt that he could be involved in watering the plants. He said, ‘Now that I am 9 I am strong enough to carry the water from the well. Last year I was too small and weak. Now I have strong hands and good legs. I water our rice field and our garden for two hours every day. I would like to work in the hotel because you get more money but my parents say I am too young. I go to school in the mornings and when I come home I help with the rice fields and the garden.

How would you define Luigi’s culture? Do you see it as one culture or more than one? Might there be a culture of the home, of the school, of the streets and community, or the village itself? And perhaps there is a culture of the country that in some ways touches little Luigi. And how about Iranian Abdul?

We have talked about culture throughout this book without stopping to define it. This is partly because everyone holds a common-sense definition of culture in their heads. This relates to the beliefs, artefacts, values and other things that bind people together. It might refer to the dance, music, food, language(s), religions, rituals, values, celebrations, customs and everything else that make members of a group feel a sense of belonging to that group. This is rather a superficial definition and ignores the role played by the players in making culture and passing it on and changing it. It makes it seem that culture is something fixed and ‘given’ to those born into it, rather than seeing its dynamic nature.

Culture, like language, changes with usage and over time. Pinker (2002: 60) offers an interesting definition of culture: The phenomena we call ‘culture’ arise as people pool and accumulate their discoveries and as they institute conventions to coordinate their labours and adjudicate their conflicts. When groups of people separated by time and geography accumulate different discoveries and conventions, we use the plural and call them cultures.

Cultural tools, as you know, are the artefacts, symbols and systems developed by people within groups and used to make, share and transform meanings. They are often specific to cultures and used to define culture. You have only to think about how we talk about Chinese food, Italian cars, French style, Yiddish chutzpah or English sense of fair play to see how we take single aspects of one culture and use these to create stereotypes. It does not take much imagination to make the next link to ‘Muslim fundamentalism’, ‘black athletic prowess’ or the ‘superiority of the English language’ to see how dangerous this is. You will not be surprised that all three of these phrases occurred in the English press during one week in September 2005.

Did you know about, and are you amused as well as horrified by, the Mapping Stereotypes project, which is the work of Yanko Tsvetkov, a graphic artist who also goes by the name Alphadesigner? His first map presented a Europe made up of competing interests and reductive presumptions. For example Russia was simply labelled ‘Paranoid Oil Empire’ and most of the EU came under the heading ‘Union of Subsidised Farming’. He later made a map of ‘The World According to Americans’, with Kazakhstan renamed ‘Borat’ and the Falklands marked ‘British Riviera’.

Tim Dowling, reviewing this work in the Guardian in February 2012, said he was certain that there was potential for every person in the world to take offence at something in his map.

The cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1992) said that People who are in any way different from the majority – ‘them’ rather than ‘us’ – are frequently exposed to [a] binary form of representation. They seem to be represented through sharply opposed, polarized, binary extremes – good/bad, civilized/primitive, ugly/excessively attractive, repelling-because- different/compelling because strange and exotic. And they are often required to be both things at the same time!

(Hall, 1992: 17)

He suggested that children can be defined by others – often negatively – on the basis of their class, their gender, their physical features, their race or their language. So we hear children talk about others as ‘specky four-eyes’ or ‘pakis’ or ‘tub of lard’ or ‘poof’. As children begin to work out who they are (their self-identity) they also try to work out who they are similar to and different from in some ways. So when we identify ourselves as one thing we, at the same time, differentiate ourselves from others who are different in some way. When we say we are women, we indicate that we are not men, for example. There are also within-group variations.

A person who has been an immigrant in this country for a long time will have had different experiences and hence a different identity from a newer arrival although we often tend to talk of them as ‘immigrants’ as if that were a sufficient description of them and their experiences.

Children construct their identities from their experiences and through their interactions. This includes seeing themselves as part of a group sharing a culture. The ways in which they and other members of their group are represented will be crucial in doing this. So, children construct their identities partially from how they (the group) are represented. It will feel very different being the only black child in an all-white class, or being the only girl on the football team, for example. How children define and identify themselves is a complex process and one that essentially involves their self-esteem. The reactions of others to them or to their group impact on self-image and hence on self-identity. Children who encounter few images or predominantly negative images of themselves and their group will suffer damage to their self-esteem and the whole process of identity construction will be difficult.

In their remarkable book, Minority Education: From Shame to Struggle (1988), which is now regarded as something of a classic text, Skutnabb-Kangas and Cummins include a moving piece by Antti Jalava called ‘Nobody could see that I was a Finn’. In this disturbing autobiographical piece Jalava wrote about his experiences after his family moved from Finland to Stockholm in Sweden when he was 9 years old. On the first day at school the principal did not know what to do with this little stranger: all she could do was hold the child’s hand as they walked to the classroom: ‘Holding hands was the only language we had in common.’

In class the child was called names and teased.

He tried to adjust: Adjusting was not, however, at all simple. To what did one have to adjust and how? There was nobody to explain things, there were no interpreters, no Finnish teachers and no kind of teaching of the Swedish language. And I was no chameleon, either, for I only wanted to be myself, out of habit and instinct. When the others wrote in Swedish, I wrote in Finnish [emphasis added by Smidt]. But that was something that just couldn’t be. The teacher grabbed my pencil and angrily shook his finger at me. In spite of everything I continued to fall back on my mother tongue (Skutnabb-Kangas and Cummins, 1988: 162).

You get a really strong sense of the child’s struggle to both become part of the new host culture (Sweden and school) but also to retain part of his self-identity (his language). In the italicised sentence this is powerfully illustrated. As the children in the class wrote in Swedish Antii did the only thing that was possible for him as a child who clearly had the capacity to understand the task together with the implied rules and conventions but was not equipped with the essential tool of knowing the Swedish language.

Antii ended up in the principal’s office. That night he threw a stone through the window of the office, and never again wrote in Finnish. He bonded with a band of ‘brothers’ and said that violence became the only language understood by all of them. By the time he moved up to the junior grades he had learned some Stockholm slang and said that the language of the classroom, which he described as middle-class Swedish, was as impenetrable to the working-class Swedish boys as it was to him. He was fiercely homesick and went down to the docks to watch the boats from Finland come and go. He wept in private. But with time the idea grew within him that it was shameful to be a Finn. The way in which he writes about this is both powerful and painful: Everything I had held dear and self-evident had to be destroyed. An inner struggle began, a state of crisis of long duration. I had trouble sleeping. I could not look people in the eye, my voice broke down into a whisper, I could no longer trust anybody. My mother tongue was worthless – this I realized at last; on the contrary it made me the butt of abuse and ridicule. So down with the Finnish language! I spat on myself, gradually committed internal suicide [emphasis added by Smidt] … I resolved to learn Swedish letter perfect so nobody could guess who I was or where I came from.

(Skutnabb-Kangas and Cummins, 1988: 164)

You can see how difference and prejudice can operate against groups and also within groups. This child made the terrible decision to give up his language and become as perfect in Swedish as it was possible to be, precisely in order to disguise his true identity as an individual and his identity as part of a group. The italicized words in the above excerpt illustrate the depths of his despair.

Throughout this book we have been looking at the developing child as more than a constructor of meaning: we have been looking at the child as active, strong, competent and in interaction with others in a range of contexts and settings. Each of these contexts has its own sets of beliefs and values – its own sets of cultural tools. Children, from their first explorations of the world, interact with, contribute to, adopt and change these beliefs and values as they become members of different cultural groups.

Children’s capacities

Writers and theorists are beginning to think in more depth about children’s capacities, which is, in effect, thinking about their competence to make decisions about issues that affect their lives. There is a general acceptance, particularly in the developed world, that adults are competent but children lack competence. In much of the Western world children are generally excluded from the responsibilities of the adult world, keeping them apart from participation in activities that might confer social status. They are still perceived of as physically, socially, emotionally and economically dependent and spend longer and longer time at school. It is as though they live in this protected cocoon of ‘being a child’.

Yet children in many countries are critical of the fact that adults do not acknowledge the responsibilities they take and they recognise that adults often fear that children might become a more vocal and powerful group. Mayall (2002) talked to children between the ages of 9 and 12, some of whom talked of teachers who offered double standards by expecting much responsibility and a lot of work at school, whilst treating the children as unreliable, and lacking in a sense of moral agency. It was felt that teachers often accused them of being deceitful or dishonest. Some of the children also noted that the independence and respect they sometimes gained at home through being responsible and helpful did not transfer to how they were viewed by teachers. Children throughout the world may be concerned with the levels of respect accorded them in their different cultures. For example, adolescent boys often feel that they receive no respect at school but can earn respect on the streets through their adoption of the culture of the streets.

Bissell (2002) carried out a piece of research in Bangladesh examining the perceptions children had of themselves and she found that they described themselves as either big or small, not on the basis of their physical stature or the wealth of their families but in terms of their own autonomy. One example was of an 11-year-old girl who described herself as small. When the interviewer asked her why she did this she explained that it was because she could not make decisions or do any work. It emerged that she did, in fact, work in the garment factory, but her self-esteem remained low because she earned less than her parents. In her terms that made her remain ‘small’. Another girl talked about how her image varied from medium to small according to whether her mother was away from home or present at home. When her mother was away she was expected to make decisions and carry some of the responsibility for the family. This made her medium, but when her mother returned she reverted to being small. In school she saw herself as small because, she said, ‘I don’t know anything’ (Lansdown, 2005).

Social and cultural expectations play a vital role in the demands made of all children. This clearly affects their capacities to exercise responsibility. In Nepal girls take on the adult work roles at the age of 12, whilst boys do not do this until two years later. Indian girls are perceived to reach adulthood at the age of 14 years whilst boys do not attain this until they are 16. In Bangladesh children are perceived to cross a threshold that separates out a stage of innocence (shishu) to an age of knowing. This transition is not associated with specific ages. Tonga children of both sexes in Zimbabwe participate fully in the money-earning enterprises of the family from the age of 10.

It is clear from this that children make sense of how they are perceived by others in their cultural contexts and often recognise that they are sometimes perceived as not being capable when, in essence and in reality, they clearly are.

Some interesting work demonstrating the capacities of children with disabilities is being carried out through the auspices of Save the Children UK, which set up a project in Nepal where 22 children with disabilities who had been successful in getting some education in mainstream schools were being encouraged to tell their stories about their successes to other children with disabilities. A famous Nepali writer worked with the children and helped them get published in local newspapers. This raised the profile of disability, offered role models and allowed children to raise their expectations of what they can achieve.

Did you know that since the first edition of this book there has been a considerable body of work examining issues relating to children’s rights and capabilities in terms of being able to be active and heard participants in issues affecting them and their families? Read on …

Some of the work is included in a new and valuable book called A Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation: Perspectives From Theory and Practice, edited by Barry Percy-Smith and Nigel Thomas (2010). In this book activists like Gerrison Lansdown and Berry Mayall discuss issues that affect children and young people being able to have a voice, to understand some complex issues and to be heard. If this is an area of interest to you I suggest you read the book. You will find that much of it relates to older children but there is a section written by Priscilla Alderson where she looks at how younger children can start to be heard and taken account of within their homes. She notes the work of Mayall (2007), who found that parents – particularly more advantaged people in the developed world – tend to respect their very young children, seeing them as individuals who are good at interaction and interesting to listen to. Within the context of everyday life very young children can come to take on the views of others and consider issues like fairness, equity, rights and wrongs. My ex-colleague Helen Penn (2004), with a focus on parents in the developing world, found that although they perhaps do not engage in so much dialogue with young children, they do allow them autonomy. Many young children in these families do engage in some work like herding goats and thus contribute in cash or kind to the family. It is salutary to consider that poverty seems to allow children to be given more respect by their parents when they work independently rather than alongside the parents (Invernizzi and Williams, 2008). Alderson herself noted how some young children involved themselves or were drawn into aspects of repeated health issues in the family and thus developed clear opinions on what is right in terms of treatment or maintenance. For example, 3-year-old Maisie always told her mother when she was feeling ‘hypo’, and 5-year-old Ruby could test her own blood sugar level and decide how much cake she could eat at a birthday party.

Did you know that involving children and young people in participating in the wider society is difficult but there are some relatively recent examples worth reading about?

The first example is drawn from a piece by Renate Kränzl-Nagl and Ulrike Zartler (2010).

Stop Child Labour in Albania A nationwide programme was set up to offer non-formal education and psychosocial help to children aged 6 to 16. A major activity was to set up children’s clubs to try and increase the number of children and young people participating and talking about the effects of child labour, sex work, child trafficking and other negative features of the lives of street children like themselves.

The second example comes from a piece by Lucy Jamieson and Wanjiru Mukoma (2010).

Dikwankwetla: Children in Action In South Africa, since the beginning of democracy, attempts have been made to establish and protect the rights of children and a Children’s Bill was made law in 2003. Soon after this the Dikwankwetla project was set up aimed at facilitating the participation in decision-making processes of children who had been made vulner -able through the death or infection of significant adults throughout the AIDS/HIV pandemic. Twelve children aged 11 to 17 were involved, all either orphaned, living in child-headed households or suffering some abuse or deprivation.

A number of NGOs was involved and there followed a series of workshops aimed at enabling children to make sense of legal lang uage, rights and legislation. Interestingly, the approach involved what is called narrative therapy methodology where each child produced a ‘Hero Book’ to illustrate a particular problem and solution. For me this makes a great deal of sense and is something that those working with very young children and wanting to take their thoughts seriously will be familiar with.

The intersecting cultures of childhood

Uri Bronfenbrenner (1979) was one of the first theorists to examine the intersecting worlds of children through his ‘ecological’ model. The classic version consists of four concentric circles; Figure 6.1 is a revised version that refers also to time and is called the chronosystem.

You will see how this model works with the individual child at its centre and then the concentric circles, one within the other, to show the movement from the most intimate contexts of the home to the more remote contexts beyond. So the innermost circle, the microsystem, represents the everyday context of the life of young children, which is usually the home but may move beyond into the extended family, the neighborhood and perhaps the crèche or the nursery setting. The next circle represents what is known as the mesosystem and these are seen to be the links between home and clinic, home and church or mosque or synagogue, between home and nursery or school and so on. More remote yet are things that affect the child more indirectly and these are called the exosystem and include things like community networks and the workplace of the parents, perhaps. Finally, and most remote from the child but still impacting on her life, is the macrosystem which is where social systems like laws and economics and the media and the education system make decisions that affect the child and his or her family. You can see how the child’s cultures come together through this model.

Within each of their cultural groups’ children set about defining themselves as members of that group, using the cultural tools available to them to define their family roles, gender roles, images, languages, in their complex worlds. This, the construction of identity, is one of the earliest tasks for the human infant. Neither identity nor culture are fixed but are dynamic and fluid, and can be considered as relational and relative concepts. So the identity of the child at home is not one thing but might be baby or sibling or competent or difficult according to circumstance and context. Here are some examples:

Masha is very quiet and withdrawn when her Uncle Leo visits. He is a big and noisy man and he terrifies her. But when he leaves she returns to being her cheerful and outgoing self.

Henry is the older sibling and is expected to be grownup and sensible and responsible. Usually he is but every so often he loses his temper and resorts to stamping his feet and shrieking like a 2-year-old.

The identity of the child away from home requires further construction and elaboration. We know that in order to construct self-images in new contexts the child has to come to know which cultural tools are available and use these in order to become part of that context. So children need to make sense of a wide range of things including language or languages, together with relevant dialects and registers; discourse or discourses, which are ways of speaking and acting; religious practices and belief systems; values and norms including knowing what is acceptable and what not; and customs, which can include ways of eating, dressing, speaking, gazing, interacting and learning. So within their separate and their intersecting cultures children learn the relevant tools and sometimes encounter conflicts and dichotomies.

Cultural capital: the ideas of Bourdieu

Bourdieu was a Marxist sociologist who examined aspects of society in terms of things like power and class. In Marxist theory capital is power, which is acquired through labor or work. If you work and earn a salary that salary is your capital and you can use it to acquire more capital in terms of a place to live, possessions and so on. It is capital that forms the foundation of the class system and social structure in many societies. Bourdieu believed that capital should also have a symbolic component – so that it went beyond the economic definition. By symbolic capital he meant things like cultural, social and linguistic facts, which can either benefit individuals or hold them back. Like many theorists his writing is difficult to understand because of the dense language he used. We will take time to define some of the terms he used:

Cultural capital can be loosely defined as being ‘what people know’. Perhaps you are studying for a qualification and when you have completed your studies part of your cultural capital will be what you have learned.

Fields are thing like ‘from home to school’ or places where things take place, or exchanges are held.Social capital can loosely be defined as ‘who people know’. You will be familiar with name-dropping – the habit of inserting the names of famous people or current celebrities into conversation in order to impress people. The people you know may well contribute to your social capital.

Habitus is a system of dispositions, habits or attitudes that explain the differences we see in all societies between and within groups. Put crudely, children with a disposition to enjoy formal education and learning are more likely to succeed in schooling. Habitus is acquired by individuals and by groups through experience and is the product of the history of the family or individual and of their class and cultural context. Within the concept of habitus there is the concept of family habitus. The family habitus of middle-class children in the United Kingdom is likely to be closer to the habitus valued and recognised by teachers.

You will realize that Bourdieu’s use of the concept of cultural capital was a social and cultural analysis of the reasons for the failure of individuals and groups. It situated the reasons within an economic and power framework and specifically stated that failure was not the result of lack of natural aptitude. In other words, certain groups of children may struggle at school because of the effects of poverty or the impact of prejudice, not because of lack of ability. Aspects of the notion of cultural capital have been criticised as offering a rather passive view of the child in her acquisition of capital and some of this relates to the emphasis in some of the studies on how mothers and other caregivers are viewed as being able to ‘give’ their children the necessary cultural capital to allow them to succeed as learners. This is an attempt to explain why in many places poor children fail to thrive in the educational systems. Bourdieu is an important thinker and writer who has contributed much to our understanding of children and culture. Prout (2005), however, reminds us that his theories do not fully allow for children being active agents not only in their acquisition of capital but also in their abilities to appropriate and transform culture.

Children inhabit complex cultural worlds and to each new field or context they bring a store of cultural capital. Where the cultural capital they bring is close to that valued and held by an institution (for example the classroom), they are likely to be advantaged. Their cultural capital is accessible to their educators. Where children bring cultural capital that is divergent from that of their educators, the educators do not know what to recognise and value. For every child the habitus of ‘now’ is the sum total of the culture and class history of the child herself and her family. The case study that follows is that of two of my own grandchildren and how they were active in adapting to and transforming their own habitus in order to become accepted members of the wider community.

In the school attended by Hannah and Ben the family habitus they bring is different from that of many of their peers. Since many of the pupils are members of dominated groups by virtue of poverty, immigration, ethnic origin, or low occupational classification, they may share common characteristics in terms of both their responses to their present situations and also to their hopes and aspirations. It is evident, however, that individuals from dominated groups have become extremely creative and successful in their learning, their lives and their relations. This is an illustration of the fact that there is a difference in how members of these groups are able to exercise agency and change the aspirations of the family or group. Each child coming into the classroom brings with her or him the family habitus but also the potential to develop their own, unique primary habitus. They do this through the strategies they develop to deal with their own experiences in the context of both the family habitus and the school habitus. For the novice to schooling whole new sets of rules and roles and identities need to be mastered in order to become a member of the new cultures of the classroom, of the dinner hall, of the playground.

Children in the classroom and in the playground start to use their own habitus and their cultural capital to create new cultures with new rules, roles, and identities. When Hannah first started school the cultural capital she brought included an intimate knowledge of stories in books and from videos. One of the ways in which she worked to use this cultural capital to become part of a new culture was to ‘play’ the stories that she knew. This seemingly simple act is, in fact, an extremely complex exploration of cultural meanings. In a group of children, each with a unique habitus, some agreement must be reached in order that the children can inhabit a shared imaginary world. Each child has to have an identity and a place within the story and in order to do that the children need to explore their own understandings, many of which will be drawn from their personal exposure to culture – popular and other. Hannah, now aged 7, still takes in the stories she reads at home and sometimes becomes what might be called a ‘cultural leader ‘in that she offers the stories to her group for them to play. Most recently she has taken in a story she has been reading with her mother called Parvana’s Journey by Deborah Ellis, which is a harrowing account of the experiences of a young girl in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. When talking about the play Hannah commented that one of the children in the group had ‘loved the bit where the hands were cut off’. This exploration of extreme physical aggression and unfamiliar notions of justice falls into what Dyson calls ‘unpopular play’ – play that is or contains elements that might be considered unsuitable by adults, or that they might not approve of. As in the children described in Dyson’s study, the children in Hannah’s peer group, creating their playground culture, are exploring complex issues relating to the real world in which they live and where they hear, daily, talk of war and weapons. In London in 2003 there is little possibility for these children, in Year 2, to build on this intense exploration of serious and deeply frightening concerns within the classroom. They spend their days practising for the coming SATS tests. The children demonstrate their skills as creators of culture by doing so in the playground (Smidt, 2004: 81–82).

As these children play the roles they have agreed on, using their own attitudes and dispositions, they begin to create a new culture – a shared culture brought about by the mixing of their languages, their ideas, their feelings and their experiences.

Did you know that the political jazz trumpeter and singer, Hugh Masakela, exiled from apartheid South Africa, has recently gathered together songs of migration. The chants and songs people who had to migrate from one place to another to seek work, earn money, escape torture or war or death, wrote, sang and passed on to their children? Listening to these in the Hackney Empire I was overwhelmed by how many of the sounds encapsulated in the languages, rhythms, words, feelings and pain were somehow embedded in my brain from my own childhood in apartheid South Africa. Although the songs were often in languages I could not understand this music of my complicated cultures (white, privileged, Jewish, atheist, from a politically aware family) was clearly part of my cultural capital.

Languages and culture

Millions of children throughout the world are speakers of more than one language and many of them have to come to understand and use the symbolic systems of these different languages. Some recent studies fall into a paradigm based on syncretism, which was a term used by anthropologists studying how African and European Christian religious traditions overlap and intersect in some Caribbean cultures. Gregory et al. (2004) say the term has taken on broader and more positive connotations and has now come to mean the creative transformation of culture. To elaborate this we need to examine how syncretic studies see development as a creative process wherein people, including children, reinvent culture, drawing on their resources, old and new. And since it refers to cross-cultural exchanges the issue of power is one that has to be considered in the contradictions and sometimes the conflicts that arise. We spoke of the possible conflicts children encounter where there are collisions of culture. Speakers of languages other than English going to school in England clearly have to learn to speak, understand and deal with the host and dominant language (which is also the language of power, education, government and the media) and find ways of being able to maintain and use their home languages. As we saw earlier in the story of Antii, this is one potential area for dissonance.

In summary, the principles of a syncretic approach include the following:

Children are active members of different cultural and linguistic groups and appropriating membership to a group is not a static or linear process.

Children do not remain in separate worlds, but acquire membership of different groups simultaneously, i.e. they live in ‘simultaneous’ worlds (Kenner, 2004: 107–126).

Simultaneous membership means that children syncretise the languages, literacies, narrative styles and role relationships appropriate to each group and then go on to transform the languages and cultures they use to create new forms relevant to the purpose needed.

Young children who participate in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural practices call upon a greater wealth of metacognitive and metalinguistic strategies. These strategies are further enhanced when they are able to play out different roles and events.

Play is a crucial feature of children’s language and literacy practice with siblings, grandparents and peers.

The mediators, often bicultural and/or bilingual, play an essential role in early language and literacy learning. Studies investigate different forms of ‘scaffolding’, ‘guided participation’ or ‘synergy’ as young and older children or adults work and play together.

(Gregory et al., 2004: 5)

Did you know that metacognitive means the ability to think about thinking itself: metalinguistic means knowing about language itself?

We know that children learn to decode and interpret the particular graphic sign systems used by the cultures in which they live. We know too that these signs are socially constructed and that children make meaning from these through their interactions. Recent research looked at how, when children were able to play the role of ‘teacher’ they began to re-interpret their own understanding in order to explain it to their peers.

Kenner looked at what some 6-year-old bilingual children were doing at a Community Saturday School where they were learning to write in their family language whilst con -tinuing to learn literacy in English at their primary school. Peer teaching sessions were set up so that the children could teach one another how to write in Chinese or Arabic or Spanish – three languages with very different graphic systems. Here is an extract from what happened when Tala tried to teach Emily to write a word in Arabic – a language with which Emily was not familiar. Tala wanted to teach Emily to write her brother’s name, Khalid. This is written in two parts, ‘Kha’ and ‘lid’ because, according to the rules of Arabic writing, the letters ‘alif’ (which represent the ‘a’ sound) cannot join to any following letter. Tala wrote the word herself, in front of Emily, telling her what she was doing:

Do that – it’s like a triangle, but it’s got a line like here … go ‘wheee’ like this [as she finished with an upward stroke]. Emily tried to follow this lead, saying as she wrote ‘It looks like an “L” … it looks like steps.’ As Amina had done with Chinese, Emily was interpreting an unfamiliar script from the basis of English and of visual images. However, Tala realized that Emily had over-interpreted her instructions, with the result being too stylized and she commented ‘It’s not exactly like that – she’s done steps’. Indeed, Emily’s version looked like steps in a staircase rather than the fluid curves typical of Arabic writing. This difficulty continued during the lesson and to help her friend produce more appropriate writing, Tala resorted to a technique used by her own Arabic teacher. She provided a ‘join-the-dots’ version of the words required.’

(Kenner, 2004a: 113)

You will see how in this small exchange the children demonstrate a desire to learn from and teach one another, share their skills as experts about their own languages and cultures and learn from their peers. This desire to share meaning across languages and literacies has been well documented by Datta (2000) and by D’Arcy (2002).

Learning styles and culture

In an earlier chapter we looked at play as a learning style and recognised its importance, but realised, too, that it is not the only way in which children and others learn. Romero (2004) looked at the different styles of learning she observed amongst Pueblo children of New Mexico. In North America and in the United Kingdom and through much of Europe there is a strong emphasis on school readiness, with parents being encouraged to ‘educate’ their children in the skills and knowledge that will allow them to succeed in school. In this way parents are being urged to build their children’s cultural capital. In other countries preparation for success at school is less important than preparation for living in their community. In such communities there are things that children need to learn and these are directly related to the cultural beliefs, principles and values, which themselves are linked to the economic survival of the group. Romero’s writing is full of fascinating details about the lives of Pueblo children that we do not have time to explore here. Our focus is on some of the ways in which children are expected to learn.

Pueblo children interact with primary caregivers on a daily basis and with secondary caregivers (those within the community) less regularly. Through all these interactions Pueblo children make and share meanings.

Learning by doing: a key factor in the socialisation of Pueblo children is to allow the children to learn by doing. An example might be learning to bake bread in the large outdoor ovens where women work together and children are close at hand, first watching and then doing. This is analogous with what Rogoff called guided participation.

Silent learning: silent learning is sometimes called legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991) and is where the child is on the periphery of some activity, silently observing and joining in at some level. The example cited by Romero is of a young child going with his father to the house where the older men smoke, drum and sing. The child intently watched what was happening and then silently imitated the behaviours he observed – including smoking his crayons! In an inner London infant school a young boy with Down’s Syndrome in a mainstream class sat and listened to the other children attempting to read, and watched intently what they did. After some months he was able to hold a book and mimic the reading behaviours he had observed.

Role modelling: as in all cultures children spend time watching their family and community members in interactions in the home and beyond. As they do this children begin to understand what behaviours, intonations patterns, and gestures define which roles. We have had examples of behaviours like this throughout this book, including the one of Luigi at the start of this chapter. For the Pueblo children there is some evidence that the roles they observe are the roles they aspire to – for example, to be a traditional leader.

Mentoring: very close to all of the above, mentoring implies that the child will learn from an expert other – perhaps an older sibling or a parent or grandparent or a community member. The example cited by Romero is that of pottery making. At home the children observe the women potters and are exposed to the whole process. They may also go into the mountains with the potter to collect clay and other materials, or they may be given pieces of clay to play with. Sometimes simple instructions are given. Mainly, however, the child is an onlooker and not expected to be a potter until adolescence, which is when specific teaching will be offered.

The family: transmission of beliefs and values

In coming to understand development as a cultural process, theorists have come up with the idea of the developmental niche. This is defined as being made up of three elements within the environments of the children that influence their development. Lansdown (2005) refers to these as:

The physical and social settings of the child, which refer primarily to the child’s family and the ways in which daily and social life are organized.

The culturally regulated customs and practices, which relate to how children are reared, how the relationship between care and education is perceived and what the attitudes to play, discipline or training are.

The beliefs or ethno-theories of the parents, which mean the goals and priorities of the parents for their children together with their views on how their children can best be ‘prepared’ to achieve these goals.

Remember that children do not live monocultural lives but are active players in making and transforming culture. However, there are circumstances that have a daily impact on the lives of children – particularly within the family – which impact on this. In some cultures the passing on of values and beliefs is seen as a way of handing a legacy to the children. It may help children make sense of life and death or develop a set of perspectives to organise their relationships with one another. So the passing on of values and beliefs helps young children understand their roles with regard to obligations, responsibility and rights. It is through the exploration of these concepts that they become able to find their place in the world and explore what it means to belong.

Let us take some examples drawn from the cultures of South Africa where much emphasis is laid on the role of the family in transmitting cultural values and norms. This family socialisation is seen as one way of protecting children and preparing them for life within that particular society. In poor families it may happen that the older family members, aware of the impact and effects of poverty, prepare their children for self-denial and self-regulation. An example is cited in Barbarin and Richter (2001) where a family may deny a child access to sugar in order to prepare her for future life so she will know not to request sugar as a guest. Implicit in African culture is the obligation to cater for the needs of guests. In many cultures, including those of South Africa, one of the tasks of the family is to pass on religious cultural norms and practices. One of these is respect for ancestors. This involves a series of rituals to mark rites of passage, and protect people from illness and harm from the supernatural world. You may have heard about how, in Mexico, the Day of the Dead is one of the most important cultural rituals. The Mexican attitude to death has sometimes been described as national fatalism. Death is feared but also made absurd through the images produced. Made of papier mâché or tin or fabric, skeletons and skulls are depicted riding horses, smoking cigars, dancing in the streets, wearing top hats. You can see clearly here how cultural tools are used to depict society, comment on aspects of it and sometimes transform it.

It is evident that there are many factors that impinge on how effectively families are able to nurture and socialize children. Included in these are family structure, income, health, mobility and so on. In Southern Africa the ability of the family to nurture children and socialize them into the culture is being deeply damaged by the HIV/Aids pandemic. When the first edition of this book was written 4.3 million children had died of the disease and in the worst affected countries of Southern Africa something like 20 per cent of households were child-headed. Other children were and still are being reared by grandparents. You can see from this how poverty itself can impinge on culture. It is pleasing to note that child deaths from AIDS are falling.

High culture: popular culture?

In the first chapter of this book we looked at how images of children have changed over time and considered some of the paintings of Paula Rego, the Portuguese-born artist. We saw how her own experiences of Portuguese imperialism affected her paintings, which are like visual fables, drawn from a range of sources. These include the surreal paintings of Luis Bunuel and the early work of Walt Disney, whom she described as ‘a genius’. Rego’s paintings cannot be described as ‘popular culture’ yet Disney’s work certainly can. Rego is cited here precisely to illustrate tentative ideas of what makes some culture good and some not worthy of academic attention. Involved in some way in the lives of young children, you will know how important popular culture is to them.

For Vygotsky, learning was to do with the transmission of culture: the passing on of the things pooled and discovered, adapted and changed, from generation to generation. This is not a passive but is an essentially creative process. Paula Rego created something new out of her experiences, observations, feelings and exposure to artefacts and other things. In doing that she drew on a range of sources. The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was someone else who melded popular culture into her art. In an attempt to recognise and celebrate the indigenous culture of Mexico as opposed to the imposed Spanish imperial culture, she included the colours, symbols, patterns and materials of this culture in her paintings. Cultures are never fixed, but change and develop. The art produced by Frida Kahlo, drawn from her unique experiences and the meanings she made from this, will be reflected in the work of others to come. Cultures change as innovations are made.

Both Bakhtin (1981) and Vygotsky (1978) recognised that children’s consciousness, by which we mean their awareness of their world and those in it, exists only as part of the social and cultural worlds. Remember that it is others who induct children into the signs and symbols that exist in their world. So it is through their interactions with others in meaningful and relevant contexts that children become part of the world of reading, writing, mathematics, art, music and other symbolic systems. Vygotsky reminds us that children ‘grow into the intellectual life of those around them’ (1978: 88).

Stuart Hall and others at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies in the 1960s and 1970s talked of cultural relativity, looking at the web of strands that link state, society and cultural forms. This model of cultural relativity illustrates powerfully just how multilayered and multifaceted culture is. It is made up of a myriad of discourses and subject to change as individuals appropriate aspects of it.

These are quite difficult ideas to come to terms with but, as is so often the case, looking at an example might help clarify. In our culture there is a divide between what is called popular culture (the culture of the streets or the day-to-day lives of people) and what is known as high culture. High culture is often used to describe things like literature or art or opera or classical music. In effect, however, what is now known as high culture has been elevated to this ‘higher’ status having started off as something for people in their everyday lives. For example, the opera The Magic Flute, originally written by Mozart as a popular opera because he needed the money it would make, was later taken over by the elite and became something performed by highly trained singers and musicians in costly specialist theatres and opera houses. We need now to think about how status and power affect our perceptions. Partly what accounts for the changing view of what is popular culture is the relationship between popular culture and power in society. By power we mean things like control of the media, education and production. Gramsci was an influential Marxist philosopher who looked at how the dominant classes manage to retain their control over those ‘beneath’ them in the social structures. He talked of hegemony, which he described as the process by which influential groups impose their power on others and maintain their hold once it has been established. The class holding power does not need to use coercion or brute force, but finds more subtle ways of imposing a set of ideas, values, principles, beliefs, objectives, cultural and political meanings. In other words, the people need to be persuaded of certain things in order to support them and the persuasion comes partially through popular culture. Think particularly about the American electoral process and how much importance is attached to celebrity support, image, dress, the adoption of key songs and so on.

But popular culture can equally act in the opposite direction. It can become the medium for helping those subject to powerful forces from above to resist. A famous case in point is what happened in Chile in South America, where a strong and popular music developed from folk songs and where the singers were strongly opposed to the forces being massed against the people. The songs they wrote and sang became popular and powerful forces against the government – so powerful, in fact, that some of the singers – like Victor Jara – were jailed and subsequently killed. In apartheid South Africa, too, music became an extremely powerful influence in the fight against apartheid.

The popular culture of children today is made up of a huge number of strands. Cartoon films offer images of violence but also of fantasy and gentleness and humour. Some children will watch Asian films. Some will listen and dance to popular music. Some will spend time dressing their dolls in doll-sized versions of adult clothes. Alongside that is the culture of the Harry Potter and Philip Pullman books and a proliferation of films and DVDs made, exclusively, for the consumption of children. It is a long way from the childhood of the Middle Ages discussed in the first chapter. As societies have changed and cultures become globalised and increasingly commercialised, a whole children’s culture has developed. Lash and Urry (1994) talk of the dematerialisation of products. By this they mean the impact of mass media (like television, the cinema and, of course, the internet) on products. These are dematerialised because of the speed with which such images can be conveyed across the globe. The effects of this may be regarded as paradoxical because they have the potential to bring about global homogenisation (as in the dominance of English as a language; of American images of heroes and villains and so on) but also of global differences. The creation of images of difference may be regarded as one of the outcomes of what is often described as the relativism that global culture brings.

One of the impacts of this globalisation is to make more difficult the concept of society. Societies are less and less able to secure their cultural and defining boundaries. In Tuscany, for example, local people fear that the influx of English home-owners is diluting their culture and their traditions and resent the fact that children want to learn English because of all that is available to them through the internet, the cinema and videos. In the same area the Chinese are feared and hated for ‘stealing’ the designs and processes involved in the textile industry. Pistoia, once famed not only for its art works but also its textiles, feels it has lost an essential part of its culture.

Becoming integrated into a cultural group or niche involves understanding the rituals and rules and the language of that group and of being able to participate in those rules and rituals. Becoming a member of a group, then, means that the rules have to be worked out or inferred. Just as children new to any setting, for example a classroom, have to learn the language and rules of that setting in order to develop the new identity of ‘member’ or ‘friend’ or ‘pupil’, so they have to develop what we might call a repertoire of cultural registers in order to be admitted. Inevitably there are groups with a perceived higher status than others, and, just as in the adult world of work and institutions, aspects of ‘gatekeeping’ operate. Sarangi and Roberts argue that ‘learning “how to be” and “how to act” involve developing an understanding of events, feelings, roles and statuses … as relative newcomers participate in new social practices’ (2002: 200).

Although Sarangi and Roberts are looking at adult newcomers to professional institutions (medicine), their analysis can equally well apply to children. At the age of 8 Hannah wanted to be part of a particular group of girls who were perceived by her to be ‘high status’. In order to do this she analyzed what shared cultural capital they had and then set about working on her own cultural capital so that she would be able to use the languages (in the broadest sense) they used to allow her access to the group. The group she wanted to join were interested in pop music and dance. The children already in the group were effectively the ‘gatekeepers’ – the ones who decided who to admit and who to exclude. Hannah engaged in the intricate cognitive task of working out how to align her actions to those of the group. She had not, of course, had to sit down and read the works of Bourdieu to do this. She had to work out for herself what would allow her access to the chosen group. In other words she made herself develop cultural competence in an aspect of popular culture. Erickson and Schultz (1982) talk of gatekeeping encounters as being neither neutral nor objective but suggest that they are like a carefully rigged game in favor of those who are most like the members of the group in terms of both social background and communication styles.

Building on culture in play: symbol weaving

In looking at how children draw on culture – including popular culture – in their play, it is evident that children draw on different texts and influences, weaving them together into a new theme. Dyson (1993) described this process as ‘symbol weaving’, where children draw on myriad cultural influences and references as they play or write or draw or model. She reminded us that it is as children that we utilise all the materials we encounter in our lives to use in expressing our thoughts and ideas – unaware, as yet, of the barriers society erects between good and bad, high culture and popular culture. Kress (2000) used the term ‘communicational webs’ to describe children’s ability to draw on a huge range and variety of texts and artefacts in their own attempts at storying and meaning making.

As children move from one cultural space to another they are engaged in what is sometimes called ‘border crossing’. Pahl (1999) observed many examples of border or boundary crossing in the nursery she visited in order to do her research. Those working with children will want to be able to identify and understand the sources children draw on. As children are exposed to more and more influences on television, DVDs, the internet and other media, it becomes more and more difficult for adults to recognise what Geertz (1983) calls their ‘local knowledge’. This refers to the detailed knowledge they carry within them of their home and community plus local details and the detailed personal knowledge they have of worlds in their heads. The old adage of knowing what children know and recognising its relevance remains crucial. It is only by doing this that we are able to have a fair image of the child of the twenty-first century.

Summing up

In this chapter we have moved on to looking at the child in culture and seeing how the child works to use the cultural tools available to her and construct meaning. We have looked at how culture is dynamic and at how children do not live in one culture only, but inhabit the cultures that apply to them in a range of intersecting discourses, one of which involves what is known as ‘popular culture’. Our twenty-first century child is now seen as able to operate differently in different contexts, using what is relevant from her culture to apply to another and able to share aspects of one culture with others.

Things to think about

How would you define your culture? Would you include your rights in this? How does your culture affect the way in which you perceive yourself?

Do you believe that cultural capital is inevitably linked to either success or failure?

Why might you welcome popular culture in your setting?