Making curriculum links with homes and communities

2. Core Principles about Language and Learning

1. Learning is cradle to grave and takes place in and out of school.
   The school curriculum needs to take the whole of a child’s learning experience into account
   Successful school learning builds on what children already know:
   “any learning a child encounters in school always has a previous history.”
   (Vygotsky, L.S. 1978 p.84)
2. Homes and communities have their own literacy practices in print and other media and these are often embedded in speaking and listening. Schools need to acknowledge and include these differing forms within their own teaching provision.
   “Literacy is a malleable repertoire of practices, not an unchanging or universal set of skills”
   (Luke in Pahl, and Rowsell, 2005, p.xi)
   In a multiple discourse approach, the literacy curriculum brings together different forms of literacy from different ‘social practices’ (going shopping, going to work) which feature a range of ‘literacy events’ (getting a till receipt, writing an invoice), in different modalities. The kind of literacy taught in school can be seen as just one of these practices.
3. Home is currently the most important factor in children’s school achievement.
   ‘at-home good parenting’ is the single most positive factor to affect children’s school achievement (Desforges 2003). This is not an excuse to scapegoat parents, but to equal in schools what good parents do, by developing open climates, having high aspirations, supporting parents, examining school attitudes and practices and rejecting those that make it difficult for parents to approach the school.
4. Homes and communities have ways of teaching that schools should complement rather than supersede
   In home teaching adults or peers often model expert practice in real life contexts and intervene in child initiated activities using a form of scaffolding in which the child maintains the lead in the learning sequence. Incorporating these teaching strategies into those of school helps learners to integrate all their learning experiences. (Cazden 2001)