Navigating Languages, Literacies and Identities: Religion in Young Lives

Navigating Languages, Literacies and Identities showcases innovative research at the interface of religion and multilingualism, offering an analytical focus on religion in children and adolescents’ everyday lives and experiences. The volume examines the connections between language and literacy practices and social identities associated with religion in a variety of sites of learning and socialization, namely homes, religious education classes, places of worship, and faith-related schools and secular schools. Contributors engage with a diverse set of complex multiethnic and religious communities, and investigate the rich multilingual, multiliterate and multi-scriptal practices associated with religion which children and adolescents engage in with a range of mediators, including siblings, peers, parents, grandparents, religious leaders, and other members of the religious community. The volume is organized into three sections according to context and participants: (1) religious practices at home and across generations, (2) religious education classes and places of worship and (3) bridging home, school and community. The edited book will be a valuable resource for researchers in applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, socio-linguistics, intercultural communication, and early years, primary and secondary education.

Vally Lytra is Lecturer in Languages in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her books include Play Frames and Social Identities (Benjamins, 2007), Multilingualism and Identities across Contexts: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Turkish-speaking Youth in Europe (co-editor Jens Normann Jørgensen, University of Copenhagen, 2008), Sites of Multilingualism: Complementary Schools in Britain Today (co-editor Peter Martin, Trentham, 2010), and When Greeks and Turks Meet: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Relationship since 1923 (Ashgate, 2014).

Dinah Volk is Professor Emerita, Early Childhood Education, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio. She is co-author of "Diversity as a verb in preservice teacher education" in Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood and co-editor with Gregory and Long of a special issue of Journal of Early Childhood Literacy on syncretic literacies.

Eve Gregory is Professor Emerita at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her books include City Literacies (joint author, Ann Williams) (Routledge, 2000), On Writing Educational Ethnographies: The Art Of Collusion (joint authors J. Conteh, C. Kearney & A. Mor-Sommerfeld) and Learning to Read in a New Language (Routledge, 2008).