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Insights into the strategic ways inwhich two bilingual children in theearly years seek to negotiate thecompeting demands on their identity intheir home and school worldsSarah Rich a & Loraine Davis aa University of Exeter , UKPublished online: 16 May 2007.

To cite this article: Sarah Rich & Loraine Davis (2007) Insights into the strategic ways in which twobilingual children in the early years seek to negotiate the competing demands on their identityin their home and school worlds, International Journal of Early Years Education, 15:1, 35-47, DOI:10.1080/09669760601106919

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International Journal of Early Years EducationVol. 15, No. 1, March 2007, pp. 35–47

ISSN 0966-9760 (print)/ISSN 1469-8463 (online)/07/010035–13© 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/09669760601106919

Insights into the strategic ways in which two bilingual children in the early years seek to negotiate the competing demands on their identity in their home and school worlds

Sarah Rich* and Loraine DavisUniversity of Exeter, UKTaylor and Francis LtdCIEY_A_210630.sgm10.1080/09669760601106919International Journal of Early Years Education0966-9760 (print)/1469-8463 (online)Original Article2007Taylor & Francis151000000March 2007SarahRichs.a.l.rich@ex.ac.uk

This paper reports on the results of a small-scale study into the ways in which two bilingual boysattempt to manage the discontinuities between their identities at home and as members of an earlyyears class at a mainly white primary school in the UK. To do this, a number of semi-structuredinterviews were undertaken with the boys and their parents. The results reveal that while thechildren generally attempt to assume the pupil identity options afforded them at school, thedifferences between these and those they take up in their home environment generally lead them toseek to keep the world of the home and of the school separate in ways that disrupt the school’sattempts to develop home/school partnership initiatives. We argue that a focus on identitymanagement issues for children in the early years allows new and more critical understandings toemerge that can usefully inform the practices that educators can develop to enhance their learningexperiences.

Introduction

Identity, learning and the young bilingual

Considerable interest in recent literature on bilingual children in the early years hasfocused on issues of identity construction for these learners and the impact of this ontheir learning. Employing a view of identity as multifaceted interactional achieve-ment (Ochs, 1993; Wenger, 1998; Harre & van Lagenhove, 1999), researchers areinterested in how a focus on the interface between identity and learning is helpful in

*Corresponding author. School of Education and Life-long Learning, University of Exeter, StLukes Campus, Heavitree Road, Exeter EX1 2LU, UK. Email: s.a.l.rich@ex.ac.uk

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36 S. Rich and L. Davis

deepening an understanding of the experiences of these children and how they maycome to be disadvantaged.

Thus, for example, some researchers have focused on illuminating the ways inwhich Anglicized models of pupil identities and over-generalized and essentialistconceptions of bilingual learner identities in educational debates in the UK may leadto these children being positioned in ways that marginalize them and have adetrimental effect on their learning (Woods et al., 1999; Siraj-Blatchford & Clarke,2000). Other studies have focused more on the significance of classroom practicesand the relationships these children form with their teacher and peers to the waysthey construct their identities and the impact of this on their learning (see, forexample, Toohey, 2000; Day, 2002). As an extension of this, a few studies (such asthose by Hunter, 1997; Platt & Troudi, 1997) have also highlighted the copingstrategies that young bilingual children in the early years develop in their day-to-dayclassroom interactions in negotiating their identities and the role that teachers canplay in helping them develop more successful strategic responses.

The aim of the research reported in this paper is to develop and further explorethe focus in these latter studies on the strategic ways in which bilingual learners inthe early years seek to ‘manage’ their identity. The emphasis here, however, is onhow they seek to negotiate the potentially disparate demands of their in-school andout-of-school identities. This, we suggest, is important owing to the continuedinfluence that the home is likely to exert over the ways in which young children makesense of formal schooling (Bernstein, 1996) and because of the assumed importanceof a sense of continuity between the home and school worlds for a child’s success inearly schooling (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Indeed, the importance attached to home/school partnerships in early years schooling is testament to the significance of this(Edwards & Alldred, 2000; Crozier, 2001).

While a considerable body of research has sought to illuminate differencesbetween bilingual children’s home and school worlds (see, for example, Gregory,1996; Blackledge, 1999; Brooker, 2002; Conteh, 2003), to our knowledge very littleresearch has focused explicitly on seeking to understand the ‘lateral connectivity’(Bloomer, 2001, p. 429) between the identity positions that these children take up inother parts of their lives and those they take up at school, how this informs the waysin which they seek to engage with early years schooling, and how this impacts ontheir experiences of learning.

Identity management and bilingual children in the early years

In this paper, following Georgakopoulou (2002), we invoke the term identitymanagement to capture a sense of children in the early years as active and strategicin the ways they seek to create a sense of coherence or ‘ontological security’(Giddens, 1991) out of the multiple and potentially contradictory subject positionsthey take up in their in-school and out-of-school worlds.

In emphasizing the agentive role that individuals play in actively managing theiridentity, we draw upon the identity positioning theory developed by Harre and van

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Negotiating competing demands on identity 37

Lagenhove (1999). Harre and van Lagenhove argue that the process of identitypositioning reflects the negotiated outcome of who others perceive us to be and whowe believe ourselves to be and imagine we can be. Thus, in their terms, the identityposition that an individual comes to occupy at any given moment reflects the inter-play between ‘interactive positioning’ (others’ attempts to position us) and ‘reflectivepositioning’ (our own attempts at self-representation). Negotiation thereforehappens on two levels, namely between the individual and others but also within theindividual as to which of a number of possible identity positions to elect to take up.

While Harre and van Lagenhove see the process of identity positioning asessentially a ‘local’ conversational phenomenon which begins anew each time anindividual engages in interaction with others, following Pavlenko and Blackledge(2003), we suggest that it is also important to stress that it will be informed andframed by the wider discoursal frameworks within which individuals live out theirlives. With regard to children in the early years there is a need to acknowledge thatboth the broader discourses of schooling and those informing the children’s homeand community practices are likely to be particularly significant to the way in whichthey seek to manage their identities. The former will contribute to the setting ofparameters as to what are acceptable pupil identity positions for children to take upat school and, given that the home is a key site of primary socialization (Bronfen-brenner, 1979), the latter will afford children what Bourdieu (1991) refers to as theirhabitus or relatively durable and subconscious ways of thinking about and acting ontheir social worlds. These frames of reference afford them with the symbolic capitalenabling them to engage successfully in their day-to-day lives (Bourdieu, 1991).

All children in a key site of transition such as the move into formal schooling mayat times be faced with the management of diverse and conflicting demands on thoseidentity positions they take up in their in-school and out-of-school worlds and willfind themselves needing to negotiate their way around what Wetherell (1998) refersto as ‘troubled subject positions’. For those children who experience a considerablediscontinuity between home and school practices, however, it is more likely thatattempting to create a sense of seamless subjectivity across the world of the homeand school may be a particularly demanding and challenging experience. How theyseek to address this is likely to have important consequences for their ongoinglearning.

A number of writers (see, for example, Nieto, 1999; Cummins, 2000) argue thatbilingual learners are children for whom discontinuity between the home and schoolis likely to be particularly marked owing to the fact that their home practices may begiven no or a low status in the curriculum as well as because they will have to negoti-ate their in-school identities through a language over which they will often have alimited command. However, there is, we suggest, a danger in assuming that this willnecessarily always be the case for these children, because, as Connolly (2004) pointsout in his study of boys’ experiences of early schooling, it is unhelpful to overplay asense of causality between one identity category and a child’s experience of school-ing. In reality, gender, ethnic background, other salient markers of a bilingual child’sfamily’s status in society (such as social and economic standing), and familial

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linguistic and cultural practices will intersect in complex ways to afford differentbilingual children with differing degrees of cultural capital in school. This will haveimplications for the nature of the strategic ways in which they seek to create a coher-ent sense of self across their in-school and out-of-school worlds. It is also importantto acknowledge that precisely how bilingual children elect to strategically negotiatetheir identities at home and school and seek to create an interface between theseworlds will reflect the individual and potentially unique ways they elect to exert theiragency and, as such, it is not possible to infer or predict their behaviours purely onaccount of their bilingual status.

With these things in mind, exploring the ways in which two bilingual childrenpersonally make sense of and seek to connect their lived experiences in school and athome, as we did in the study reported below, can, we believe, help contribute to thedevelopment of more sophisticated understandings of bilingual children’s experi-ences of early years schooling and challenge a tendency to overly simplistic essential-ist accounts of this in some of the literature. Second, and more broadly, that such aresearch perspective can help generate new understandings through which to subjectearly years pedagogy in general and home school partnerships in particular to criticalscrutiny.

Design of the study

The participants and the research setting

The study focused on the strategic management of identity by two six-year-oldbilingual boys from two different Arabic-speaking North African countries who werefer to as Mohammed and Ahmed. Both boys were in a Year 1 class of 33 childrenin a predominantly white primary school in a small city in the UK, with 9% of itspupil population being classified as bilingual.

At the time of the study Mohammed had been in the UK for one year. He had anolder sister in the school and a baby brother. Both of his parents were undertakingpostgraduate study at the university in the city and planned to return to their countryone year later. Mohammed and his sister were also attending an Arabic school at theweekends run by the Islamic Centre in the city. In contrast, Ahmed had two olderbrothers and one older sister, all of whom were attending secondary school in thecity. He had been born, and had lived continuously, in the UK apart from threetimes when his family had undertaken extended visits to their North African countryof origin for periods of up to six months. His father had a permanent job in the cityand the family had no plans to leave the UK in the foreseeable future. LikeMohammed, he was also attending the Arabic school at the weekend.

Aims

The primary aim of the study was to address the following research question: Inwhat ways do two bilingual children attempt to negotiate the different demandsplaced upon their identity positions at school and at home?

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Negotiating competing demands on identity 39

Since, to date, there has been very little research into the experiences of bilingualchildren in ‘low-incidence’ areas, a secondary research interest was also to shed lighton particular issues and concerns for these children. As Landon (2003) suggests, itseems likely that in contrast to children in high-incidence areas, these children mayexperience greater pressure to assimilate and conform and a greater sense of isola-tion in school, thereby leading them to adopt markedly different strategic responsesin their attempts to create coherence across the worlds of the home and school.

Methodology

The study, which took place over a three-month period during the spring andsummer terms, sought to develop an ‘emic’ or insider perspective (Silverman, 2000)to an understanding of the experiences of bilingual learners. To do this, data werecollected through a number of semi-structured interviews, conducted primarily inEnglish, with both children and their mothers. Participants were informed that theresearch agenda had developed out of an expressed interest in improving the experi-ence of bilingual learners on the part of the school and they readily agreed to takepart in the study. However, in seeking their consent we also assured them ofanonymity and confidentially and made it clear that they could decide to drop out ofthe study at any stage.

The interviews with the children revolved around different tasks such as drawing apicture, sharing a dual-language book and discussing photographs of school events,and thus reflected the view that young children respond best to flexible participatoryapproaches to interviewing in that this helps them to exercise control over the inter-view process and enables them to participate on their own terms (Kellett & Ding,2004). Most of the interviews were conducted in small groups or pairs involving twoother white children who formed part of a friendship group for the two boys andwith whom the two boys were almost always grouped in class. These children will bereferred to as Sam and James. In addition, a one-to-one interview was conductedwith each child towards the end of the summer term.

The decision to interview the boys’ mothers was, in part, in recognition of the factthat parental attitudes, beliefs, and experiences with regard to teaching, learning andschooling are likely to impact significantly on young children’s views of their educa-tional experiences (Clarke, 1996). It was also hoped that these could contribute toan understanding of the formal and informal pedagogic practices that these childrenencountered at home. Finally, it was hoped that they might shed light on the extentof the tension that these children experienced in their attempts to manage theirexperiences in the different settings (which the children themselves might not beable to articulate in their interviews). In all cases, the interviews sought to addressthe following themes:

● the children’s experiences of learning in the different settings;● issues and concerns these raised;● the strategies employed by these children to cope with these issues and concerns.

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40 S. Rich and L. Davis

Given that research was conducted by two white UK researchers who wereunfamiliar to the children, we were alert to the ways in which this might impact onthe quality of the data collected. In particular, we recognized the problems posed ingaining a sense of rapport and trust with these children and their parents, and thepotential limitations of conducting interviews through English. To address this, wespent a number of weeks undertaking informal classroom observations and engagingin informal conversations with parents prior to conducting the study. In addition,one of the researchers had a working knowledge of Arabic, had been resident in aNorth African country for a number of years and was able to draw upon this inconstructing a sense of shared understanding and in seeking clarification whennecessary.

Results

The results discussed below shed light on both the extent of the discontinuitybetween the demands on the children’ identities at home and at school and theirstrategic attempts to manage these. Where extracts from interview transcripts areemployed in the discussion, the interviewer will be referred to as ‘I’, Mohammed as‘M’, Ahmed as ‘A’, Sam as ‘S’ and James as ‘J’.

Self-representation at home: parental attitudes and home practices

Interviews with the two boys’ mothers were helpful in illuminating their beliefs aboutlearning and teaching, and their concerns about school practices that were likely toimpact on the children’s developing identity positions both at home and at school.They also highlighted considerable discontinuity between home and school practicesand how they felt that their children were stressed and anxious on account of this.

Both parents saw their children as happy at the school but not making as muchprogress as they would have liked or expected. For example, Mohammed’s motherfelt that her child’s language skills should have been more advanced than sheperceived them to be. As she said, ‘He has been in school for nearly two years.That’s more than enough for him to have learned English’. Similarly, Ahmed’smother was concerned about her son’s poor reading ability which she attributed tothe current policy of inclusion for bilingual children, maintaining that her otherchildren had faired better under the old system: ‘the way they put them in groupsbefore of the same level helps them a lot I feel. They progress very very fast. Theothers [her other children] read before him [Ahmed], you know.’

Both parents also felt that the ways the children were grouped in the class mightbe contributing to the problems they perceived their children to have. The childrenin this class were assigned seats in small groups by the teacher. Mohammed wasplaced with Ahmed and two white British children, Sam and James, who wereexperiencing difficulties with reading and writing. Ahmed’s mother felt that groupwork meant they couldn’t concentrate or listen to the teacher enough, which wassomething she felt was necessary for learning to take place. Mohammed’s mother

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Negotiating competing demands on identity 41

focused on how the group her son was placed in impacted on the opportunities hehad to communicate. She was not convinced that the white British children were thebest communication models for her child. As she said, ‘If he was with other morefluent children, he might have been able to, you know, communicate better.’ Thisview was shared by Ahmed’s mother, who wondered how it was helpful for her sonto be grouped with other children who she described as ‘very slow’.

It was also interesting to note that both parents were ambivalent about theschool’s perception of them as active partners in their children’s education alongsidethe teacher. Neither felt very comfortable with this role and, while they endeavouredto try to fulfil this, they were uncertain as to how this should be enacted and hadreservations about how far it could help. As Ahmed’s mother said, ‘From school hewill take it seriously. Just from school. But the teachers think that all this work isnormal for mothers.’ Nevertheless, both parents did undertake to work at home withtheir children, partly to comply with school policy but also to compensate forperceived gaps in their children’s learning. Ahmed’s mother complained how shehad to supplement school work with her own materials and Mohammed’s motherdescribed how she tried to provide additional English reading materials in the formof English books from the library at home and kept no Arabic-language books athome, apart from the Koran, to encourage them to read in English.

The dissonance observed in interviews between parental attitudes with regard toappropriate practices for supporting children’s learning and those practices advo-cated by the school appear on the one hand to reflect the strength of their beliefsabout the nature of good educational practice. However, it can also be argued thattheir assumption that their children were positioned as having learning difficulties aswell as language difficulties in class compounded this and was something they clearlytook issue with. Their attempts to actively seek to compensate for perceived short-comings by employing practices which differed from those promoted at school arenot uncommon among the parents of bilingual children and have been reported inother studies, such as the one undertaken by Ran (2001) into the differencesbetween the views held by the parents of Chinese bilingual learners and teachers.

From the two boys’ perspective, parental interviews suggested that they werefaced with considerable discontinuity between the pedagogic values and practicesascribed to in their out-of-school lives and those they encountered in the schoolsetting. Moreover, as interviews with the boys’ mothers suggested, the childrenexperienced this discontinuity as stressful. For example, Mohammed’s motherremarked ‘He gets stressed if he feels I am not doing what he thinks parents aresupposed to do.’ Similarly, Ahmed’s mother commented ‘When he wants to learnhis spellings, he cries, you know, if I don’t have time to sit with him.’

Managing the discontinuities between in-school and out-of-school worlds

Three main strategies employed by the two boys to negotiate contradictions betweentheir in-school and out-of-school worlds were identified from the data. These arediscussed in turn below.

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Strategy 1: attempting to assume the notions of pupil identity promoted by the school. Itappeared from interviews that both boys had already gained a strong sense of whatwas and was not an acceptable way to represent themselves at school and activelysought to conform to these to gain acceptance and approval from their peers andteacher. Indeed, the two boys were perceived to be successful and well-integratedchildren by their teacher and had developed friendship networks with a number oftheir classmates.

With regard to language choice, both boys seemed to see English as an importantmarker of pupil identity in the school and that not to use it was one way they mightbe seen to be misbehaving and/or not conforming. For example, in the followingextract from an interview with Ahmed and James, the children are discussinganother bilingual child (referred to as Saeed):

J: Saeed is a naughty boy and he always plays around while the teacher is talking.A: I saw him throw something across the classroom one time.J: Yeah.A: She [the teacher] told him off.J: Saeed don’t know much English. He’s very naughty.I: Do you think Saeed is looking for more fun in the class?A: Yeah, but he has to do it outside.

In an interview with Mohammed in which Saeed was also the topic of discussion,there is a clear sense that he also feels it is inappropriate to use his mother tongue(Arabic) in school:

I: Do you speak to him in Arabic at all?M: No! He speaks to me.I: Would it be helpful if you spoke to him in Arabic?M: I don’t want to.I: Why don’t you want to speak to him in Arabic?M: Because—I don’t want them to—to hear.I: You don’t want them to hear?M: Yeah. Hear me talk to him in Arabic—all of them.I: Children in your class?M: Yeah.I: How would it make you feel if they heard you talking in Arabic?M: Not good at all.

Although the school had no stated policy about the use of mother tongue at school,and in fact, their teacher placed cards in English and Arabic next to objects aroundthe classroom as part of her literacy strategy, the two children seem to have made thedecision not to use this at school. If part of a process of gaining legitimacy within thiscommunity is the use of English, it is perhaps not surprising that the two childrenelected to do this. Indeed, there is a sense of their using this to mark their in-groupstatus in the interviews above and to join in in ‘othering’ the boy (Saeed) whoappeared to choose not to do this. Indeed, interviews with the children’s motherssuggested that this was a major force behind their in-school behaviours. AsMohammed’s mother said: ‘They want to be accepted. The children want to be thesame as the others and they can’t be seen to be different’. These findings reflect

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Negotiating competing demands on identity 43

those reported by Berry and Williams (2004) in their study of Hong Kong Chineselearners’ strategic attempts to conform to Anglicized notions of pupil identity in amainly white private school in the UK.

Strategy 2: drawing clear dichotomous boundaries between identity positions adopted at home and in school. This strategy was perceived to be employed by both boys, asevidenced from parental accounts and interviews with one of the children. Forexample, Mohammed’s mother gave an account of how her son and daughter hadboth been concerned to try to remove the henna applied to their hands at a weddingparty at the weekend before returning to school. She described how upset thechildren had been when their attempts to do so had not been successful as they‘didn’t want other children to see it’. Both parents also alluded to the ways they felttheir children sought to mediate the ways they could engage with school. Thus,Mohammed’s mother remarked on how her son did not want her to speak in Arabicto him in front of the other children, was constantly worrying that she did not dothings in the way expected by the school and that she would upset the teacher, andthat he sought to keep his parents out of school. As she said, for example, ‘He tellsmy husband to drop him at the school gate.’ For her part, Ahmed’s motherreflected: ‘He doesn’t have a problem with the school. He has a problem with mebeing in the school! He’s always criticising me.’

These finding are, we argue, significant in deepening an understanding of theimportant role children play in the creation of home/school links, and how children’sdecisions to maintain dichotomous boundaries between their in-school and out-of-school lives in the two different settings might be seen ultimately to destabilize ordisrupt these. In particular, it shows how it is not only parents who may be viewed asprotagonists rather than partners in home/school partnerships (Crozier, 2001) butthe ways children are themselves key players in the ways in which these come to beenacted. These findings resonate with those of Edwards and Alldred (2000) whenlooking at the experiences and perspectives on parental involvement of children froma broad range of backgrounds, and suggest that this is far from a phenomenonpeculiar to bilingual children.

The drawing of strong dichotomous boundaries between home and school wasalso a strategy evidenced in an interview with Mohammed regarding the ways inwhich dual-language books provided by the school could be seen to support hislearning at home. As the interview extract below shows, while Mohammed appearedto see these as useful in school, he did not want to take these books home:

I: How about if you took it home?M: Yeah.I: And then you could share it with them [parents]. How might that be?M: Um, um, in the class.I: You’d prefer it in the class, would you?M: Yeah.I: If he takes it home, his mummy or daddy could help read the Arabic.J: Yeah.

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M: No!J: No?I: No, he—I don’t think he wants that—do you?M: No.

Clearly, this finding raises a number of issues concerning the ways in whichpractitioners in this school promote dual-language books. However, for ourpurposes in this paper, it also serves to highlight how, taking account of the way thatMohammed’s mother tried to support her children’s literacy development bykeeping only English books at home, this strategic response can be seen as a clearattempt on Mohammed’s part to find a way of meeting both the demands of theschool world and those of the home by keeping them distinct.

Strategy 3: attempting to create a link between home and school identity positions. In thecase of Ahmed, an additional strategic approach was evident in his attempt to managethe discontinuities between his home and school identity positions. While, likeMohammed, he clearly invested in the pupil identity model promoted in the school,the boundaries between his home and school world were, with regard to languagechoices, less clearly marked. The interview with his mother revealed that he insistedon using English at home despite the fact that his family all conversed in Arabic andthere was a general sense of disapproval of this. As his mother observed, ‘I speak Arabicand he answers me in English. No one else in the family does this. It’s very strange.’

In interviews, Ahmed gave a clear sense that he was engaged in a process of tryingto understand what it meant to be both a North African and a member of UK soci-ety. During one interview he was at pains to point out to the interviewer ‘I was bornin the UK’ and in another interview said that he was from Africa and that he had tolearn Arabic: ‘I’m from Africa … I have to learn Arabic before I go to Africa becausemine’s African-Arabic.’ Ahmed’s strategic use of English at home may be seen asone way in which he was trying to make sense of this at this point in time and servedas a way of symbolically marking his identity as distinct in some ways from othermembers of the family and of contesting home values and practices to some extent.Thus, while much of the literature on identity contestation has concentrated on howlearners may seek out ways to resist identity positions imposed in educationalsettings (see, for example, Norton, 2000; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2003), this findinghighlights how identity positions acquired through sites of secondary socializationsuch as schooling can lead to new ways of self-representation which may spill overand challenge other identity positions out of school—in other words, how they canlead children to develop contradictory positions with regard to the structural posi-tions that their families hold in society (Siraj-Blatchford & Clarke, 2000).

Discussion and conclusion

We suggest that a number of implications for early years practitioners can be drawnfrom the findings of this study. First, that the findings highlight a need for educators

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to be sensitive to the fact that even when children appear on the surface to be wellintegrated into early years classes, this feat can produce considerable tensions andpressures for children and, as Brooker (2002) concludes in her study, demands theybecome highly skilled and adept at managing the discontinuity between the world ofthe home and the school if they are to be successful.

Second, we maintain that they suggest a requirement on the part of educators tobecome more aware of how, if children seek to draw dichotomous boundariesbetween the world of the home and school, as was the case in this study, this reflectsnot only the possibilities afforded them to bring the world of the home into schoolbut their own agentive decisions as to the extent to which they perceive this aspersonally helpful or appropriate.

In part, Bernstein’s (1996) concept of ‘classification’, to describe the perceivedboundaries operating between categories such as home and school, and ‘framing’, todescribe the types of behaviours and communications permitted within and betweenthese categories, is helpful in explaining why the children in this study appeared inmany ways to see the world of the home and school as mutually distinct. This isbecause, as Bernstein argues, where classification and framing are perceived as beingstrong, individuals may not feel it is possible to conceive of transferring values andpractices from one setting to another. Thus, given that classification and framingmay be particularly strong for bilingual children in schools with a low incidence ofbilingualism, and the pressure to conform to white British pupil identity positionsconsiderable (Landon, 2003), it might be argued that the two boys were positionedin ways that meant they were forced to enact this strategy.

However, while the discourses of familialization and institutionalization and theinterface between them are helpful to an understanding of these children’s experi-ences, these children are also clearly seen to be proactive in exerting their own indi-vidual agency in making sense of their experiences. Edwards and Alldred (2000)highlight a need to acknowledge how a third discourse circulating in society—indi-vidualization—construes children as variable social actors, responsible for their ownproject of self and being able to determine their own lives, and that this affordschildren a ‘space’ within which to determine their own sense of boundaries and in-group identifications. Thus, with regard to the development of home/school partner-ships, for example, as they point out, children can, as seen in this study, confoundattempts by parents and teachers to create links across the home/school divide.There is a need for educators to be mindful of this and to develop strategies toengage children as well as parents in developing effective home/school partnerships.

As an extension of this point, a third implication of this study is a need toacknowledge the distinctive and creative ways in which individual children willdevelop strategies to create a sense of personal coherence in their identity acrossdifferent setting. These will reflect their unique interpretations of the contexts inwhich they operate, their sense of place within these, and of who they imagine theycan be. Thus, it is interesting to speculate how far Ahmed’s decisions to extend hisuse of English in school to his home setting is a marker of his investment in a multi-cultural identity as a result of his family’s long-stay status in the UK and similarly

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how far the short-stay status of Mohammed’s family impacted on his strategicattempts to maintain clear distinctions between his in-school and out-of-school self.While it is clear that more extensive research needs to be undertaken into this, ingeneral these findings serve to remind educators of a need both to recognize thatbilingual children’s experiences and responses to early years education are diverseand multiple and the unhelpful nature of over-generalized essentialist conceptions ofthese things (Siraj-Blatchford & Clarke, 2000).

To conclude, despite the small-scale nature of this study, we believe it has beenhelpful in enabling a number of important insights to emerge into children’sbehavioural responses to their experiences of learning. As such, we maintain, it is afruitful line of enquiry for early years educators to consider in seeking to deepen theirunderstanding of the experiences of all children in their classes and of how best tosupport their learning.

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