ABSTRACT
In exploring children’s literacy lives beyond school, the teacher-researchers on the BC:RLL project were invited to develop more sophisticated understandings about what they recognised, regarded and valued as literacy and learning. This required a degree of decentring, and a willingness to take risks on the part of the teachers and their headteachers. Both headteachers and leadership teams were central to the project; they were deemed pivotal to supporting the teachers and developing new whole-school attitudes, policies and practices. Headteachers also played a signifi cant role in supporting their teachers to challenge any pre-existing assumptions and as will be shown, some were also prompted to re-consider their own breadth of knowledge of families and communities and question their own suppositions and working hypotheses about the community in which their schools were situated.
