ABSTRACT
We began this book with a story about a newborn named Hayden and the literacy contexts surrounding her birth. We end with the conditions that young children need and deserve for their early literacies to grow in school and out to become productive members of a democratic society. Upon birth, children are embraced by the literacy practices that constitute their families and communities as they make meaning. And then they go to school, where the rules of meaning making may be consistent with their home and community; or, the distances between home and school may be so vast as to leave them disoriented, confused, withdrawn, threatened, wounded, or scared. Looking across the body of work in this volume, we suggest a new idea about school, which we call Second School. Second School, which we explain in the rest of this chapter, comes from two
of the big ideas presented in this book. One big idea comes from Goodman and Goodman (Chapter 9) who explain that children are natural language learners and users. In schools, an erroneous commitment to teaching reading and writing as subjects has reified them into content areas, rather than using them as processes for meaning making. Second School is a place where reading and writing are not directly taught; in Second School learners and teachers rely upon and learn many literacies because they need them, just as children needed to learn oral language and did so without being systematically taught each letter, sound, and word. The second big idea comes from Cambourne (Chapter 2) who urges us to create our own way of talking about literacy teaching and learning that is free of references that evoke the frames of those currently in control of our schools.
