This paper discusses the ways in which young children collaboratively use narrative play and the available space and materials around them in order to exert cultural agency. The collaborative creation of texts is asserted as central to this expression of agency. By presenting an illustrative vignette of a group of 5-year-old boys as they engage in…

Multimedia literacy practices in the homes of young children are changing rapidly, but the use of them in the early years of education is moving slowly. This research was aimed to find out what teachers of 5-year-olds, in their first 6?months of compulsory schooling, think about the children's literacy practices at home, including the…

This work describes a survey conducted in Syros Island in Greece. The intention was to ascertain kindergarten teachers' perceptions about early literacy and the skills and knowledge they consider as important for pre-school aged children. The participants were all the kindergarten teachers of the island (N = 19) and the data were collected during…

This article explores children's imaginative interaction with Internet games in the belief that an understanding of children's life experiences is essential to effective teaching and learning within the classroom. It is underpinned by the idea that imaginative play is, at least in some part, the work of children undertaking identity practice. It…

This article looks at the way in which the changing visual environment affects education at two levels: in communication patterns and research methodologies. The research considers differences in the variance and quantity of types of visual media and their relationship to the written mode in the urban landscapes of Tokyo and London, using "Google…

Although priding itself on high rates of literacy achievement, New Zealand's track record in the last two decades has noticeably declined. Successive New Zealand governments have invested heavily in trying to redress this decline with limited success. Demographic changes in population due to immigration provide a partial explanation, but arguably,…

Images of childhood are ideas and expectations of childhood and children, and are reflections of individual perception and cultural ideologies. In writing children's books, authors draw on their conscious and unconscious thoughts of childhood to create an implied reader. In this paper I investigate images of childhood through examination of the…

In 2006-2007 a non-profit reading institute initiated a reading reform programme in the United States in which demonstration classrooms were established in 13 of the lowest performing schools in Mississippi, a state recognised for its high rate of poverty and low academic achievement. This qualitative study describes the experiences of 12 highly…

This article explores the term "learning lives" by reporting on three research projects conducted by members of the Oslo-based research group TransActions. By stressing the term "learning lives" within a range of social "educational" contexts, the article aims to look at learning within and across different learning sites exploring the positioning…

In this paper we consider the place of early childhood literacy in the discursive construction of the identity(ies) of "proper" parents. Our analysis crosses between representations of parenting in texts produced by commercial and government/public institutional interests and the self-representations of individual parents in interviews with the…

This paper reports the first part of a 2-year longitudinal study, which examined the impact of age of entry to school on the reading development of 60 summer-born boys during Key Stage One. The sample was drawn from 18 schools in six Local Education Authorities operating different admissions policies. Thirty-one had attended nursery part-time,…

The aim of this study was to examine whether the current literacy programmes in European Union kindergarten curricula support and enhance young children's reading and writing development. This study investigated whether the kindergarten curricula of 10 European countries: Britain, Belgium, France, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal,…

This article argues that it is possible to look at children's texts in relation to the lens of literacy events and practices from the New Literacy Studies, and apply this perspective to an understanding of creativity. Teachers can then use the possibilities within a text to ask children different kinds of questions. Drawing on a 2-year…

This paper examines young children's working styles when they are engaged with a peer on a computer-based reading task. Two types of pairing were investigated: (i) "Equal pairs", where the children were of equal reading attainment and (ii) "Unequal pairs", where there was a disparity between the children's reading attainment. The results suggest…

What can listening to children's ideas about poetry teach us? This article considers ways in which exploring primary-aged students' perceptions of poetry can inform teachers' work with children. Using strategies from earlier studies in secondary schools, a small-scale project with Year 6 students revealed their complex and sometimes contradictory…