The significance of early literacy development and the importance of the home for this purpose has been widely recognized by educators. However, the nature of the model by which early literacy best occurs has not been critically addressed. Both home and school are necessary and crucial partners in fostering children's early literacy development. Models cannot be unidirectional in focus but must recognize parents and teachers, homes and schools as co-partners.
 

Early literacy, family literacy, and intergenerational literacy tend to dominate current writing, research, and projects on literacy development. Within the past 25 years or so, the focus on early literacy has shifted from the school to the home (Spreadbury, 1996). This shift was partly based on the realization that early literacy development extends beyond school - that teachers cannot accomplish the task alone (Neuman, 1996), and that parents, regardless of home conditions, are generally interested in their children's educational welfare (Snow et al, 1991). However, many models conceptualizing this shift have become lopsided in that schools have generally being given the role of telling parents what to do to help their children. This approach is most commonly used with lower socioeconomic and poor working class parents whose homes are often viewed by schools from a deficit perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that while early literacy, family literacy, or intergenerational literacy are key to literacy development, a unidirectional model from home to school is not the most appropriate model. If children, especially children from non-middle/upper class families are to have the necessary opportunities and experiences for literacy, then there must be a co-partnership model between school and home.
 

Valuing Home Literacy

One reason why a school-home unidirectional model of literacy development does not work is because it fails to recognize that parents/caregivers are the children's first, continuous, and most important teachers, a point emphasized by Voss (1996). It does not respect parents' knowledge or what they already have accomplished with their children. It ignores the fact that even with few literacy materials in the home and/or with low levels of formal education, parents have the best interests of their children at heart, and often automatically and subconsciously do things which support and foster their children's learning. Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines (1988) found this to be the case even among inner-city families growing up in great poverty.

Purcell-Gates (1997) argues that there is a significant influence on school literacy from the reading and writing experiences of the home. In the home children learn important literacy concepts such as intentionality, written language register, and the alphabetic principle. These concepts are generally learned at home for as Meier and Britsch (1997) point out, literacy is a dynamic and developmental process involving language, thought, and social interaction which children experience from a very early age. In fact, Roskos (1997) notes that the integration of play and literacy by children is no accident. Play and literacy are normal aspects of development - play provides a social context for literacy.

A project, PRINTS (Parents' Roles Interacting with Teacher Support) was initiated by the author and two colleagues in two community centres in St. John's (Fagan, Cronin, Anderson, 1997). This project was based on an asset oriented model. The goals of the project were:

1. To empower parents as early literacy providers.

2. To help parents become more aware of the roles they play and can play in their children's early literacy development.

3. To support parents in initiating positive changes in the home environment to foster literacy development.

4. To help teachers become more aware of the roles they play and can play in children's early literacy development.

5. To support teachers in initiating positive changes in the school environment to foster early literacy development.

6. To help parents and teachers become more aware of each others' roles in early literacy development and to foster co-partnerships. This also entailed acquainting parents with "technical" or "school" terminology whenever the occasion arose.

7. To provide a cost-effective model for fostering home-school partnerships and early literacy development.

Parents were provided opportunity to demonstrate the range of literacy activities in which they engaged their children. They were already very much involved in their children's learning; there was much for which they could be given positive feedback. Parents were aware of their children's knowledge, such as being able to recognize letters, and count. One parent brought sheets of scribbling/drawings of her child to the Program to show what the child could do. Parents sang and recited nursery rhymes to their children, and when the words of the song, Hush Little Baby, was given out in a session, one parent said now she could sing all the words because it was her child's favourite. They played a variety of games with their children. One of the parents, who also had a child in grade four, had enrolled the child in a special reading class offered at the university. They read to their children; they were aware of which books were appropriate for young children. One parent told of how she used a trip to the supermarket to help her child recognize letters by directing the child to the letter which began an item, such as "b" for "beans". The parents demonstrated great patience with their children. When they returned from the centre at the end of a project session, it was not uncommon for the child to be waiting and have the parents read and re-read a book five or six times (books were given to the parents for the children). Most parents knew the stories of the books by heart. Some parents took their children to the public library (a bus ride) to borrow books, and to performances by child entertainers. A parent of one kindergarten child, who wanted to attend the Homework Haven sessions at the centre but who had no homework from school, went to a local general store, and purchased a book with exercises which the child could take to the centre for that purpose. They were very aware of their children's needs and abilities and monitored their children's progress. Two of the parents noted that initially their children (age 2 and 3) were not interested in books and print, but then during the project became very involved and demanded that books be read to them and that the parents make various letters of the alphabet for them. Similar results of literacy in the home were documented in studies as far away as Texas (Williams and Lundsteen, 1997) and Oxford, England (Grimes and Davies, 1997).

Meier and Britsch (1997) suggest that educators have been using the wrong metaphor for home-school relationships - bridging the gap. This metaphor suggests a divide, a chasm, a separation. Instead they promote strengthening connections. Positive literacy experiences already exist in the home as well as at school. The task is to recognize and acknowledge both and to make connections so that one reinforces the other and children become the key beneficiaries.
 

Strengthening School-Home Connections

While home and school entail many literacy experiences, these sometimes differ in their nature and in the contextual setting in which they occur. Purcell-Gates (1997) reminds us that literacy experiences of the home come from the lives of the children - their living rooms, the playground, the streets, their family context and from community involvement. Literacy in school, on the other hand, is usually based on books. Strengthening connections may originate from various directions.

Home-Literacy Projects

In home-literacy projects, the mediator is usually a professional, a community worker, researcher or facilitator. Workshops or sessions with parents (and perhaps the children) are important in early literacy development, according to Williams and Lundsteen (1997) as they "allow parents to be active participants in their children's education" (p. 10).

The outcome of PRINTS was highly successful based on information on parental involvement, expressed satisfaction, children's literacy participation, and parents' knowledge, and adaptations, of literacy tasks according to their children's needs. A project based on a similar model in Oxford, England, did not have such positive results. The differences in results between both can best be highlighted by noting the different characteristics of both settings. A key factor in the Oxford project was the role of the professionals who initiated the project. The authors of the project evaluation (Grimes and Davies, 1997) state that the "reciprocal relationship between parents and professionals is a complex and challenging task for which there are few common guidelines" (p. 1). According to the evaluators the parents felt either intimidated by theoretical language or patronized by simplistic information, or annoyed by suggestions of keeping records, etc. While the project facilitators modeled literacy activities with the children, the parents were not always clear of the purposes of these activities. Also, parent sharing of home literacy activity was often limited and when comments were made, they were not always responded to in terms of explanation and noting relationships to other activities. The evaluators concluded that the organization of the project produced an imbalance of power perception between project staff and parents "which served to perpetuate the common perceptions of their 'expert' and non-expert' roles, respectively" (p. 10).

The PRINTS project did not encounter any of these difficulties.

1. The project was community based. The parents gathered at their community centre and not at a school. They took responsibility for setting times, for opening and closing the centre, use of facilities, deciding on the feasibility of literacy activities for their children (who ranged in age from 2 to 5 years). For a final session, teachers were invited to attend their centre. As one parent commented during the program, "These are our Thursday nights".

2. In order to play down any imbalance in facilitator-parent background, little reference was made to university (from which the facilitators came). In introductions, the facilitators talked about experiences in their lives with little reference to the university setting. (About two-thirds of the way through the project, one of the parents asked a facilitator if he were with the university.) First names were used. Adopting an asset orientation helped in that facilitators expressed interest in the parents sharing about what they were doing and did not promote a perception that they were there to tell parents what to do. There was an attempt to avoid theoretical and simplistic language, but when an occasion arose from parent discussion/sharing, a technical or school literacy term would be introduced as another label for that experience.

3. In the PRINTS project, children were not directly involved. The children were considered the "absent participants". This did not mean they were not important; any activities introduced in the project always kept the children in mind and the children were the beneficiaries of these activities from the parents and in a playtime setting at the centre.

When literacy activities were shared with parents by the facilitators, they were modeled with the parents in terms their rationale and procedures to be used with the children. When feasible, parents were involved in constructing and gathering materials and resources for the activities. Parents were given an "activity cue sheet" to help them remember the activity. These sheets tended to include drawings or non-print cues.

4. The parents were never asked to keep records. This was an issue of discussion, especially with respect to transfer of knowledge. But parents seemed to have very occupied days and "demands" on them may have made the workshop a less pleasant experience.

5. The basic structure of the model on which the PRINTS and Oxford projects were constructed was always visible in the PRINTS project in contrast to the latter. Five contexts in which literacy develops were identified: talk, play, books and book sharing, environmental print, and scribbling/drawing/writing; there were five roles which parents and teachers could take in facilitating literacy development in these contexts: providing opportunity, recognizing/ acknowledging, interacting, modeling, setting guidelines. Wooden blocks (2"x3"x8") were used to build a "stairs to literacy" and each step was labeled as one of the contexts; the supporting blocks for the steps represented the roles. Also the contexts and roles were printed on poster cards and displayed during discussions. All literacy activities shared with the parents were discussed in terms of the five roles although the terms were not always used.

6. One of the recommendations of the Oxford project was that specific practical strategies be developed to be shared with the parents. This was an essential part of the PRINTS project. The first part of each session was devoted to having parents share what was happening in their and their children's lives with respect to literacy, while the second part consisted of the facilitators sharing activities with the parents. There were a total of 34 literacy activities across the five contexts shared with the parents.

7. Unlike the Oxford project, PRINTS facilitators capitalized on any comments made by the parents and extended them and related them to other literacy activities so that the parents could better understand the literacy value of the activities they described. For example, when one parent, said she would "go crazy" if she had to read a certain book one more time, the facilitator talked about the importance of re-reading, and memory of stories, as a way of helping children develop competence in book language (written register). On another occasion a parent brought a drawing of her 3 year old which consisted of different size circles but which represented (according to the child) different members of the family and a story line. The parent excused the drawing as being "not very good", at which point the facilitator talked about the important knowledge the child had developed: the meaning of lines/drawings as a code, an awareness that this code could be used to name people and tell a story, and that it was only a matter of simple transfer between the child's lines/drawings and the use of print for similar purposes.

The one place where PRINTS and the Oxford projects were similar was that initially parents did not contribute much in the way of sharing home literacy experiences. Later in the session, one parent volunteered, "You know, we didn't really know what you were looking for. We thought you expected something special. We never knew you were interested in day-to-day things."

Kindergarten-School Contexts

There is no doubt that kindergarten and school contexts differ from home contexts; the question is the extent of these differences and the implications for literacy development. Purcell-Gates (1997) points out that while the home is bounded by the family and community context, and the use of literacy within these environments, literacy in school is bounded by school uses of print which may differ to a greater or lesser degree. The fact that there are more books in kindergarten classrooms may not make a difference, a point demonstrated in research by McGill-Franzen and Allington (1997). They studied a number of kindergarten classrooms in the Philadelphia area under three conditions: providing a significant number of books, providing the books and training sessions (30 hours) for the teachers, and a control condition with neither. It was only the classroom with the books AND training that resulted in a marked improvement in the literacy of the children.

A surprise finding in a study by Meier and Britsch (1997) in preschool settings was the lack of reading to children. Since school eventually moves into more "print contextualized" versus "environment contextualized" demands, the importance of story reading is crucial as Meier and Britsch point out. They maintain that story reading "introduces children to a situation in which language alone is used to create experiences. Since language becomes more and more central to learning as children progress through school, story reading in preschool provides essential preparation for a style of teaching that is frequently part of later school experiences" (p. 14).

But it is not simply a matter of reading stories to children according to Lo (1997). Children benefit most from story reading when the interaction between story reader and child is one of co-construction rather than of a question-answer nature. Neuman and Roskos (1997) maintain that children best develop literacy expertise through social practice. There must be engagement of the children in real life (or simulated) literacy tasks and that such experiences should be available in kindergarten. Meier and Britsch (1997) note that teachers identified lack of consistency in home literacy experiences for many of the children as a problem. If the focus is on making connections, rather than bridging the gap, then kindergarten should form a transitional experience from home to school. Kindergarten should promote socially based literacy activities. The role of kindergarten should not be intervention or remediation, but one of continuation, collaboration, congruency, and challenge. Teachers must foster the interweaving of social and academic factors. While independence for the children may be a goal of kindergarten, this may not be a meaningful goal for children of some families where there has been little parental supervision. The children may already have attained great independence. The teacher's task then is not to help the children attain independence but to develop with them a sense of ownership and responsibility. However, to provide this kind of transition, the kindergarten teacher must understand the home environment.

Williams and Lundsteen (1997) suggest that kindergarten teachers be knowledgeable of the earliest literacy development so that they can understand the continuity from home to school. The PRINTS project is based on the premise that children, especially from non-middle/upper class families, will more likely attain success in school if parents and teachers become co-partners. For that reason, PRINTS was also implemented with kindergarten teachers in a school which the majority of the children from one of the communities attended. The teachers were exposed to the very same model as were the parents, except that the school context became the focus for the literacy activities. Information on literacy activities in the home was shared with teachers, and from school settings with parents by the project facilitator.

Parents and Educators

The perceived role disparity between parents and early literacy professionals may also apply to parents and educators/teachers. Since there is a common basis (children), the role disparity seems to result from knowledge base, language used, perceptions, and attitude. Expectations by teachers for parents to have taught their children certain things before entering school seems to be a recent rather than an historical occurrence. In the PRINTS project, the teachers placed more emphasis on activities that were more print related. They believed that parents could be expected to (a) teach their children their address and phone number, (b) introduce the alphabet and beginning sounds, (c) help them develop fine motor skills through such activities as stringing beads, and cutting, (d) ask questions about things, (e) take time to answer all the children's questions, (f) engage in discussion, and (g) help them read. In fact, school expectations were so dominant that they were known to the parents and influenced what the parents did. Consequently, the parents were more inclined to involve their children in tasks that contained letters or words. They often had difficulty seeing how "play-like" literacy activities would assist in their children's literacy development while they readily saw the connections of print based activities. However, one parent pointed out that "not all parents will have their child up to the expectations of the school so the teacher must do whatever she can to help these children." The parent added - in a low voice suggesting a possible unfamiliarity with a new term that had been introduced during the project, but with pride that she was able to understand and use it - "that is scaffolding, isn't it?"

If parents and teachers are to be co-partners, then the parents must have some access to the technical terminology used to describe literacy development. Such terminology cannot be taught didactically such as a vocabulary class in school. Rather the terms must describe activities or situations shared by the parents and introduced at that time. Some of the terms introduced in this way during PRINTS were:
 

• emergent literacy

 
• environmental print

 
• invented spelling
 
• setting (as in a story)
 
• metaphorical language/figurative language
 
• scaffolding
 
• phonics
 
• sounding words by analogy
 

As a result parents gained considerable confidence in themselves and in their knowledge. At the start of the project, they were cautious about who would be involved. Towards the end when a Department of Education primary coordinator expressed interest in visiting the project, the parents were excited and anxious for the person to arrive. They were likewise enthused that the teachers were to meet at the center for the wrap-up session.

Williams and Lundsteen (1997) provide an interesting suggestion for making connections between parents and kindergarten teachers. They advise that parents and teachers be shown how, and encouraged, to keep portfolios of their children's literacy work. A parent in their study commented that portfolios contained "evidence" of what the parent knew about her child's literacy development. By sharing examples from portfolios, parents and teachers can better appreciate the similarity and differences in home and school contexts.

A study by Graue (1991) showed how the parents of two communities (one an upper middle-class suburb, and the second a rural working class community) differed in their behaviour during parent-teacher interviews. The parents from the middle-class background usually brought their own agenda, initiated questions, and shared information about their children. The parents from the rural working class community perceived their role as attending and listening. The teacher as authority was to inform, tell, explain, and advise. If parents keep portfolios for their children, then these can constitute starting points for parents (regardless of SES) to share, explain, and advise about their children during parent-teacher interviews.
 

Socio-cultural Factors

Making connections between home and school is not a simple matter. Teachers may not come from the same backgrounds as many of the parents and may not even understand their communities and their lives. Teachers have developed a particular philosophy on literacy development which may or may not correspond to current thinking and research in the area. A big mistake that is often made in providing for connections between school and home for parents of non-middle/upper class status is that parents within this group are homogeneous. Nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout the PRINTS project, the authors learned that there is a hierarchy of parents based on interest, determination, and involvement in the literacy/education of their children. Given the opportunities, these parents will likely match middle/upper class parents in supporting their children's literacy development. Roskos (1997) points out that literacy is a different experience in different SES settings, but as the authors of PRINTS discovered, literacy is a different experience in different families, regardless of SES. A challenge in making connections between school and non-middle/upper class families is to reach all, especially those parents whose children have the least enriching and productive literacy experiences.

A second important sociocultural factor is the influence of transgenerational experiences and attitudes. A study by Kaplan, Liu, and Kaplan (1997) with students in junior high and with the same group as parents twenty years later, found varying impacts of transgenerational factors. They state, "Parents who have not had successful school experiences may consciously or unconsciously expect and end up reinforcing the negative school experiences of their own children. On the other hand such parents may remember their own negative school experiences, and they may want to do whatever they can to reduce the likelihood that their children will experience the same types of negative events at school as they did" (p. 10). Whether parents who have had negative school experiences transfer this effect to their children depends on a number of factors, such as the experiences which the children themselves have, the degree of contact between parent and child, the emotional bond between them, the perceptions of the child of parent support, the birth order of the child, and the current relationship between school and the parents. Parent influence may also be based on their experiences in academic programs (GED, ABE) in which they are currently enrolled. The nature of the instruction they receive may become a powerful mediator influencing their expectations of the nature of school learning for their children. For example, one setting in which parents are expected to do much of the work on their own, read information to answer questions or complete "tests", and to redo these tests until they get the expected mark, is going to generate a vastly different model of expectations for learning than a setting in which parents and instructor co-construct problems and solutions, in which the parents as learners are challenged to think, read, and write critically, and engage in literacy related action, when appropriate.

Another factor that has implications for building school-home connections is the gender of the parent who becomes involved. In the case of PRINTS, all parents/grandparents were female. This was also the case in the Meier and Britsch study in California. The reasons for fathers and grandfathers not getting involved, and the significance of this non-involvement needs to be investigated.
 

Summary

Making connections between school and home is vital if all children are to advantageously engage in literacy development. A quote from Meier and Britsch (1997) provides an excellent summation of this goal. They state there is a "need for a continual and evolving emphasis on central aspects of literacy teaching and learning in early childhood settings, and in particular, the role of literacy as community in the process of better understanding central factors influencing the quality of the collective literacy experiences between teachers, students and families" (p. 3).
 

Fagan, W.T., Cronin, M.C., & Anderson, J.G. (March, 1997). Parents and teachers as co-partners, learners and helpers in early literacy development in two low-income communities. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.
 

Graue, M.E. (April, 1991). Construction of community and the meaning of being a parent. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Education Research Association, Chicago.
 

Grimes, J., & Davies, C. (March, 1997). Understanding partnerships with parents: Does the ORIM framework help? Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.
 

Kaplan, D.S., Liu, X., & Kaplan, H.B. (March, 1997). Transgenerational continuities of negative school experiences: Contextual stability and intervening processes. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.
 

Lo, D.E. (March, 1997). Individual differences in the social construction of knowledge with young children over a storybook reading. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.
 

McGill-Franzen, A., & Allington, R. (March, 1997). Print-rich kindergarten classrooms dramatically enhance learning. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.
 

Meier, D.R., & Britsch, S.J. (March, 1997). Building a literacy community: The role of literacy and social practice in early childhood program reform. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.
 

Neuman, S.B., & Roskos, K. (March, 1997). Early literacy learning from a social practice perspective. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.
 

Neuman, S.B. (April, 1996). Are opportunities enough? Examining the effects of a social-construction approach to family literacy on children's concepts of print and responses to literature. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Education Research Association, New York.
 

Purcell-Gates, V. (March, 1997). A sociocultural lens for understanding early literacy learning. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.
 

Roskos, K. (March, 1997). An ecocultural view of early literacy learning. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.
 

Snow, C., Barnes, W.S., Chandler, J., Goodman, I.F., & Hemphill, L. (1991). Unfilled expectations: Home and school influence on literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
 

Spreadbury, J. (April, 1996). Cross-text, parent-child interactive book reading behaviours of different books across three different genres. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Education Research Association, New York.
 

Taylor, D., & Dorsey-Gaines, C. (1988). Growing up literate: Learning from inner-city families. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
 

Voss, M. (1996). Hidden literacies: Children learning at home and at school. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
 

Williams. P., & Lundsteen, S.W. (March, 1997). Home literacy portfolios: Cooperative tools for assessing parents' involvement in their prekindergarten child's literacy development. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.