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Language is a foundation for learning and development, including learning to read and write. Educators have long been focused on promoting early literacy skills as well as children's motivation, meaning making, and joy while reading and writing. Influenced by social, political, and historical factors over the decades, educators have thought about and debated how to effectively do so for each and every child.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1908-1984) was among the educators who advocated for children, especially those marginalized socially and culturally, to learn to read in meaningful, responsive ways. She wrote and taught about connecting children's voices to their literacy learning. She exemplified using children's key vocabulary, tapping into children's funds of knowledge, linking spoken words to print, and co-constructing text to build a repertoire of words. Her thinking and work went against the educational protocols of her time. Yet her intuition and her positive results with children encouraged her to persevere in developing the Language Experience Approach (LEA), a strategy that continues to be successfully and widely used in literacy education. Ashton-Warner was an unconventional pioneer whose legacy remains relevant and applicable to today's early childhood classrooms.
This column introduces the historical context surrounding Ashton-Warner's life and her teaching in New Zealand. It highlights how she conceived of and implemented the LEA, its evolution and use over time, and the enduring principles that current and future early childhood educators can apply in their own settings.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner: A Rule Breaker and Innovator
While building meaningful relationships with students in order to teach effectively may not seem radical now, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, who was born near the turn of the twentieth century, was a rule breaker in many ways (Hood 1988; White 2014). She was a gifted artist, pianist, singer, and writer, and she is perhaps best known in the education field for creating the original LEA with the Indigenous people of New Zealand (Ashton-Warner 1963; Hood 1988; White 2014). Although situated in this field's history and coming from a family of educators, Ashton-Warner initially resisted following in her parents' footsteps to become a teacher. Yet she needed a way to support herself and her family, so she eventually took up the call, beginning in a teaching position considered low status in 1938 and continuing to teach...