Abstract

How do children perceive and represent their placed-related identities through reading and writing? In what ways do children’s responses to and creation of texts shape their place-related identities? And how can children’s representations of place-related identities be thought about?

The WRePlace project is an 18 month interdisciplinary project, based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, which aimed to consider children’s place-related identities through their engagement with, and creation of, texts. In this workshop we will discuss the project, its interdisciplinary theoretical framework, and the empirical research we conducted with two year 5 classes in primary schools in Eastern England.

A key text used in our research was My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins. This text is particularly apt because January 26th, the date for this workshop, is Australia Day and My Place is set in Australia, beginning before Europeans arrived in Australia and moving through over 200 years of time and place to 1988.

Drawing on our interdisciplinary theoretical framework, particularly Doreen Massey’s notion of place as a bundle of trajectories , Louise Rosenblatt’s notion of the transaction between the reader and the text, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, participants will be invited to examine pages from My Place, children talking about how this text connects with them, children talking about their sense of place, and maps the children produced of their place.