‘Once my mam and dad have gone out of my room when it’s bedtime, I unlock my duvet cover on my bed, and I get inside and read’ Listening to Young Children’s Voices: Researching Children’s Experiences of Reading for Pleasure

Graham, Linda (2022) ‘Once my mam and dad have gone out of my room when it’s bedtime, I unlock my duvet cover on my bed, and I get inside and read’ Listening to Young Children’s Voices: Researching Children’s Experiences of Reading for Pleasure. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

Capturing children’s voices when they talk about their everyday experiences has long been a focus for practitioners, researchers, and policy makers. Yet, despite this desire to enable children’s voices to be heard, their voices are still seldom sought in decision making processes and practices. This also applies to young children’s views of reading for pleasure. In response, this research project adopted an emic approach, encouraging children to share their perspectives about how they experience reading, with participation at the heart of the project. To do this the research was anchored in the traditions of educational research, drawing from, and focusing on, the traditions of children’s rights and the sociology of childhood, creating a theoretical framework that utilises four distinct but complementary disciplinary domains: Children’s Literature, Education, Childhood Studies, and Children’s Geographies.
The research asked questions about what, who and where of reading for these children, both now and in the past, in two phases, the first ethnographic immersion in the setting, the second participatory activities informed by the ethnographic phase, so I refer to it as ethnographically inflected. The second phase featured a Mosaic approach using creative methods including scrapbooking, child conferencing, object elicitation, literacy events and storytelling, to record the children participants’ individual experiences of reading. The data from the two phases are intertwined in the findings and discussion chapters.
The findings represent the ‘children’s stories’ and are divided into three sections; ‘children’s choices, agency, and autonomy’, ‘the child and the reading environment’ and ‘communities of readers: sharing stories.’ The discussions surfaced a love of reading, but also an awareness of different kinds of reading. The emotional dimension of reading for pleasure proved central in discussion with the children as participants, teaching professionals and parents/guardians/carers.
From these findings a Reading Spaces Framework was developed to represent the complex multivalent reading environments children operate within. The framework comprises of six key spaces, categorised as textual, imaginative, emotional, functional, metacognitive, and physical. The children not only changed and manipulated the boundaries of these spaces but also confidently navigated, blurred, and renegotiated all the spaces simultaneously. As a result of these findings the research recommends more ‘literacy events’ (Barton & Hamilton, 2000:8), reviews of classroom and home book collections, the co-creation of physical reading spaces in the classroom and the need for teaching professionals to share their enthusiasm and love of books in more explicit ways.

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