To appear in: Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 2(1)

We thank Stuart McNaughton and Douglas Kellner for their thoughtful responses to ëAdolescence Lost, Childhood Regainedí. Their comments suggest the broad range of theoretical perspectives that need to be brought to bear on questions of early intervention which, we argued in our initial piece, tends very quickly to get mired in narrow, politicised debates between advocates of particular methods and programs.

Stuart McNaughton approaches early intervention from his extensive experience as an educational psychologist working within sociocultural paradigms. He is engaged directly with the issues of indigenous and multicultural education facing New Zealand society and its educational system. For McNaughton and many others working with indigenous cultures, the project at hand is to develop what we might term a ëpsychology and pedagogy of differenceí.

Douglas Kellner takes up the issue as a leading writer on Frankfurt School critical theory, a philosopher who has in recent years turned to debates over the politics and ethics of education. Kellnerís focus is on the educational philosophies that we need in order to address the emergence of new technologies, new identities and what he and McNaughton rightly describe as the "digital divide".

These are two very different intellectual histories and ëtakesí on the problematic of early intervention, more complementary than they might appear at first read, with each offering something new and distinctive to our understanding of early literacy in new times. At the same time, they share with us a substantive commitment to literacy education as a means of redistributive social justice at a time of great risk for many communities and children.

McNaughton is right to draw our attention to recent studies by psychologists working within social and cultural frameworks, including of course his work on Maori children with Graham Smith, Linda Smith and colleagues (www.auckland.ccaz.cir). They have begun the complex task of "psychological analyses of what counts as effective Ö ëtextsí, ëdiscourses and practicesí and ëconsequencesí"Ö in order to "optimise early literacy instruction". This is a necessary complement to the political analysis of how texts and discourses work in the social fields of homes and subcultures, communities and schools, a task being undertaken by critical discourse analysts and linguists, sociologists and ethnographers.

We agree with McNaughton that current empirical work needs to be closely scrutinised for assumptions about development, and that there is a much stronger understanding of the indeterminacy and cultural contingency of development among those working from social and cultural psychological paradigms. Indeed such work recognises and "plots multiple paths of development". However the extent to which sociocultural psychology actually manages to describe the complementarities and mismatches of cultural practices (including economic practices and laboring capacity), patterns of community-specific socialization (including political and cultural ideologies), and early literacy instruction depends in part on its engagement with the kinds of poststructuralist and materialist analyses described by Kellner.

So we ask a further question: Given the kinds of research breakthroughs noted by McNaughton, what versions of sociocultural theory and analyses of literacy development actually reach early childhood literacy teachers, teacher educators, apprentice researchers, and policy makers? Our initial aim was to highlight the tenacity of lock step age/stage development assumptions and the re-emergence of biological determinism ‚ as part of a persistent ëneo-deficití project and mentality. The popularization and use of brain development research documented in Jerome Brunerís review essay cited in our original piece is but one illustration. Our readings of Australian and American early childhood education teacher education programs, the curriculum documents issued by governments and commercial publishers for early childhood teachers, and the programs of many recent early childhood education conferences suggest that the social and culturally-based "contemporary developmental theorising" described by McNaughton is still struggling to find its way into professional and training programs, and into public educational policy and larger-scale curricular interventions. McNaughton and colleagues in the New Zealand context would be well aware of this, where their demonstration of multiple, multilingual pathways to literacy faces a ëphonics firstí movement, a defacto attempt to legislate a single institutional, pedagogical and linguistic pathway.

It is important that both McNaughton and Kellner call our attention again to the socioeconomic implications of multiliteracies in those postindustrial societies where marginalised families and communities still struggle to gain full access to print literacy. It is the case, as McNaughton argues of New Zealand, that digital multiliteracies are marking out a new binary class divide: between an emergent elite class of "symbolic analysts" and a new underclass of service workers and "end users" (see essays in Alvermann, in press). In Australia and New Zealand, this new class reproduction coincides with neoliberal policies that are supporting elite private schools as the providers of top end digital, higher order and critical capacities, while redefining state, public education as the site for the reproduction of basic print literacy for minorities, indigenous children and the new white underclasses. This is a dangerous situation that threatens an abiding commitment to democratic education and its capacity to generate universal print and digital literacies‚ a persistent theme in Kellnerís reconstruction of Dewey (Kellner, 2000a; 2000b).

These are actual instances of the dialectical moment where, in Kellnerís words, "new multimedia and computer literaciesÖ need to be articulated with print literacy". While we cannot neglect print literacy and must heed McNaughtonís cautionary words, we want to avoid creating a new set of curricular strategies or program barriers that insist on print first, digital second. To fully understand the historical, developmental and social practice relationships of necessity and sufficiency between print literacy and digital multiliteracies remains a crucial educational and political task. To do so will require that we work within a much broader array of analytic and empirical zones ‚ psychological and sociological, philosophical and cultural, modern and postmodern ‚ than those traditionally and currently inhabited by early childhood researchers and educators.

Alvermann, D.E. (Ed). (in press) Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World. New York: Peter Lang.

Kellner, D. (2000a) Globalisation and new social movements: Lessons for critical theory and pedagogy. In N.C. Burbules & C. Torres (Eds), Globalisation and Education: Critical Perspectives (pp. 299-322). New York: Routledge.

Kellner, D. (2000b) New Technologies/New Literacies: reconstructing education for the new millennium, Teaching Education 11(3), 245-265.

Kostogriz, A. (2001) The future of sociocultural psychology and education. Unpublished research seminar notes, University of Queensland, Brisbane.