Identity and Precompetence in Early Childhood: The Case of School-Literacy Learning

This paper explores the proposition that young children need to discover and actively participate in adults’ theories of childhood. It focuses on reading and writing lessons in classrooms and homes to support and illustrate this proposition. In these and other cross-generation teaching and learning activities, an important part of adults’ theories of childhood relates to what is termed children's ‘precompetence’ in accomplishing certain tasks. To be successful participants, it is argued, children need to find the adults’ preferred ways of hearing ‘wanting to and knowing how to try’. The paper shows ways in which children collaborate in and sometimes contest the need to display precompetent identities, and briefly discusses the consequences, for enculturation in general and for school work in particular, of failing to appear precompetent.