Children develop language and literacy skills in all sorts of settings, but perhaps one of the most overlooked settings is the church, the temple, the mosque -  especially for communities who have recently settled in the UK.

Focusing on four groups who have come to London in the last 50 years - the Ghanaian Pentecostal community, the Polish Catholic community, the Bangladeshi Muslim community and the Tamil Hindu community - the three year long ESRC funded BeLIFS project (Becoming Literate in Faith Settings) of the Education Department at Goldsmiths, University of London found that the places of worship, services, classes and home lives of the children, centring around their faith, were important not just for literacy, but for the children's multi-lingual identity.

In this podcast, anthropologist Dr Sarah Winkler Reid talks to  Professor Eve Gregory, who headed up the project.  [You can also see and hear Eve Gregory talk about the project in this video]

Here is the Transcript:

Becoming literate in faith settings: Language and literacy learning in the lives of new Londoners (BeLIFS)

Sarah Winkler Reid: Faith plays an important part in the lives of many children in Britain, but as Eve Gregory, Professor of Language and Culture in Education at Goldsmith’s University told me, very little research has focused on language and literacy learning in faith settings. Eve’s three year long project aimed to find out about the sorts of learning that happens as children take part in faith activities in places of worship, in faith classes or at home.

The project focused on four groups of ‘New Londoners’, communities of shared origins and faith who have come to live in London in the last fifty years. The Ghanaian Pentecostal community, Catholic Polish community, the Bangladeshi Muslim community and the Tamil Hindu community.

The project was a collaborative ethnography, Eve’s team of eleven conducted participant observation in the faith settings and the children and their families had video cameras so they could record their activities at home. Having recently completed the project Eve told me what had surprised her and her team most about their research findings.

Eve Gregory:  Generally we were very surprised by the scope of learning going on in children lives, we were surprised that in many families, because we’re convinced that our families were not exceptional that actually faith permeates children’s everyday lives. Not only are many children involved in regular worship at the Temple or Mosque or the Church, but they are on a daily basis referring to their faith, using text, narratives, hymns, songs, art work from their faith. So we were surprised at the extent of learning and the way in which faith does interpenetrate lots and lots of different learning.

We were surprised that you couldn’t really separate language and literacy learning. Although the original intention of our project was to focus on language and literacy learning we realised you couldn’t separate them from cultural learning, from aesthetic learning, artistic learning, creative learning and moral learning as well. And all of the formed becoming part of a community, because that was the crucial thing, all of that gave children a framework, a sort of guide book for their lives actually.

[Audio of children singing as part of Children’s day at the Ghanaian Pentecostal Church].

The Ghanaian Pentecostal setting

SWR: Can you give some descriptions of the settings the children were learning in?

EG: Yes there were lots of different contexts; maybe I could just take a couple of contrasting ones. The Polish children were all very fluent Polish speakers.

[Audio of Polish children speaking in Polish in their Catholic faith class]

Polish Catholic setting