Literacies as Contexta: Notational Acts During A Day in the Life

Guided by two perspectives, one theoretical, and the other, methodological, we assume that social interactions provide organizing principles for transforming natural human growth into cultural development. From birth onward, the healthy child is primed to be in transaction with their caregivers, their surroundings, co-constructing the narrative, the textum, of their life. We see becoming literate, putting "Minds on Paper", as a context-embedded process, exemplifying the widespread processes through which young children co-construct and share their meanings of the world in which they live. Our quasi-ecological methodology, “A Day in the Life (DITL)” is accomplished by filming an entire day in the daily lives of participants. This approach facilitates capturing emergent ‘literacy’ as ‘literacies’, or the ability to grasp the variously distributed symbolic nature of environmental signs, drawings, musical notations, numbers and see them, as they develop, as expressions of their own minds in concert with the minds of others, across different contexts or settings.