| Summary: | Abstract
This study explores what counts as literacy for young children in the library. It adopts an ethnographic approach drawing on Lefebvre’s spatial theory to understand how a library space presents literacy to young children and their carers, and how this then shapes the literacy practices and events that happen in this space. Using visual methods, interviews and both participant and non-participant observation, literacy practices involving young children are examined. The study shows that dominant discourses are bound up in what the library staff understand to be their role in promoting and supporting young children’s literacy, and subsequently they organise the space and literacy events in ways that often reflect these. However I will also argue that it is not only the staff that create space in the library, as carers and their children are sometimes seen to create alternative spaces, which suggests that the library space reflects and enables a range of different practices. A discussion of the chosen methodology and effectiveness of the methods is presented, along with an outline for how this study can be widened into a significant piece of doctoral research to incorporate the perspectives of mothers and other literacy spaces in the same town. Therefore this study will be of interest to parents, teachers, policy-makers, community workers, and other researchers of young children’s literacy.
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