Stephen is in a rush. This frustrates his mother who cannot read what he writes. Jody has so many ideas she never knows where to start writing. Michael is very immature. He finds it very hard to be clear about what he has to do or what he is going to do. Chris is also immature, shy and spells phonetically. He masks shyness by being very active. Marie sees everything, yet sees nothing. Her spelling is poor because she sees the whole word but is interested or able to work out when she has spelled a word incorrectly. These children's teachers and parents are concerned about their literacy development. These children are eight years old.

Liam, Christine and Casey's literacy development was documented over the first three years of formal schooling. We looked at their families' life experiences and the guiding principles each family had developed as ways of understanding and operating in and on the world around them.

Liam did not think his reading was valid because he could not read university text books. Like everyone in his family he hid his sense of vulnerability behind academic scientific prowess. He worked hard at deflecting attention from what he saw as his weakness. Christine could not read or write or speak because she did not know how to without using her very well developed sense of humour, which went unappreciated by her peers. She chose not to participate rather than be rejected. After all, she had been given her family's most prized role: the "wag", the family jester. Casey liked to learn in secret and only show her learning when she was sure she had it perfect. As an only child on show at all times, perfection had been vital to her mother's sense of wellbeing. Now this was Casey's lot. So Casey worked hard at distracting attention from her "imperfect" learning.

These family patterns were carried into the classroom and framed how the students were learning. Yes, Liam, Christine and Casey were learning, not according to most literacy theories, but according to their families' understanding of how the world works.

Some of the children, their mothers and teachers took part in activities such as musical chairs and a home-made version of the colour-codebreaking boardgame Mastermind. The latter involved inductive and deductive reasoning to demonstrate how to pay attention to parts of the whole as well as the whole. Musical chairs became Musical Thinking. When the music stopped everyone wrote and/or drew what they were thinking at the time. The activities were designed to explore families' guiding learning principles in a powerful, non- judgemental way.

Students then wrote (with the help of an adult other than their parent) the procedure of the games. Next, they told the procedure to the adult who constructed a story map using the student's instructions. Each student read out their procedure to the whole group and adults explained each story map. This activity gave students an opportunity to take a leading role and to show their maturity. Parents saw how other children worked and students how other adults worked. Musical Thinking helped Jody stop thinking and write, Marie to locate parts of the whole and Stephen to recognise process as important. Masterminding helped Stephen's mother appreciate that his different way of doing things was okay. Chris and Michael became Masterminding 'experts' and were no longer 'immature'. Jody's mother realised she was not the only one who thinks "differently" and is now "going to do something with her life". Marie's mother is no longer anxious about her literacy. Stephen's mother now really appreciates what teachers do. The teachers now see literacy, their students and themselves in new and exciting ways too.
 

Further reading  A.S. Huber (1995) Transfer of Embedded Symbolic Information Between Home and School: A grounded theory of how young children develop idiosyncratic responses during the construction of literacy in the classroom, Unpublished doctoral thesis, Graduate School of Education, University of Wollongong, Australia.

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