Ephemera, Mess and Miscellaneous Piles: Texts and Practices in Families

This article examines children’s meaning making in the home, drawing on an 18-month long ethnographic study of three low income families of 5–8 year-old boys. It is argued that children’s meaning making in the home is a complex activity shaped by family structure and family narratives.There needs to be a more rigorous theoretical framework in which to set children’s communicative practices, visual, textual and artefactual, in the home; one that both attends to the way the home is structured and the cultural resources the home draws upon. In order to make this argument material is presented from the three homes, including the words of the children’s parents. In particular, the article looks at the concept of ‘mess’ in the home and how this impacts on children’s text making.While much of children’s text making may appear ephemeral it is suggested that it deserves serious theoretical attention in order to begin to construct home-based pedagogical structures that support and credit the ever changing landscape of communication that is the home.