Curriculum Materials in Initial Literacy: An Instrumental Approach in Spain

Abstract

There are many cases of studies that address teaching materials, and the use teachers make of them. Teachers select, combine and adapt resources and include them in the broader management of their classroom practices. This research is part of the European didactic tradition that gives teachers and students a significant role in the process of teaching and restructuring school subjects. This chapter presents the common ground among the approaches to the teaching of initial literacy proposed by curricular materials and classroom practices with students in Early Childhood Education. The aim of this chapter will therefore be to establish the role materials play in the classroom, and specifically the teaching approach to initial literacy they involve and their correspondence with the classroom practices in which such materials are used. All this is set against the background of teaching initial literacy to students aged 3, 4 and 5 in Spain. The research we are presenting here has adopted a case-study model involving real practices. We obtained video recordings of 39 classroom sessions from nine teachers. We applied two qualitative data analysis systems to study the practices for teaching initial literacy in the classroom and the tasks in the materials. The results suggest a moderate alignment between practices and materials, within a curricular context that guides rather than dictates, albeit with a reasonably consolidated didactic culture regarding the teaching of initial literacy.