“I’m Krishna”: Valuing early childhood literacies in family cultural practices

Abstract

Young children take up literacies that reflect the everyday cultural practices of their families. For families who are newly settled, sustaining family cultural practices may be constrained by dominant cultural norms, especially once children experience education outside their homes. In this article, the early literacies of Aathmiga, an Aotearoa New Zealand-born child, are highlighted in interview conversations with her mother, Vaishnavi, a newly settled immigrant from Sri Lanka. Aathmiga (2 years, 5 months old at the beginning of the study) and Vaishnavi participated in a community playgroup in Auckland that was the site of a year-long multilingual qualitative study of the everyday cultural practices of newly settled families and how these shaped children's early literacies. Vaishnavi's reflections on her family's Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu cultural practices highlighted how Aathmiga read images, films, and artefacts, and composed through song, dance, and play, shaping early childhood literacies that spanned multiple modes and digital media. The multilingual approach to the study amplified the centrality of the Tamil language in the family’s cultural practices and in Aathmiga's early literacies, demonstrating the critical importance of expanding school-sanctioned definitions of literacy to understand what young children know.