On 8 April 2016 one of CRaB’s members, Lexie Scherer, from the University of Portsmouth’s School of Education and Childhood Studies, launched her book Children, Literacy and Ethnicity: Children Reading the Primary School at the university’s local branch of Blackwell’s.
Professor Matthew Weait, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities andSocial Sciences, spoke about the importance of books and bookshops generally, about the importance of children’s reading and literature, and about his pride in a colleague having conducted and published such important research. Lexie then introduced the book, thanking the children involved in her research – mostly ethnic minority and refugee children based in a London inner city primary school – and discussing some of the key findings, in particular that children need to see people like them in the books they read and that levels of literacy and different kinds of reading are crucial to children’s identity formation.
Children, Literacy and Ethnicity is published by Palgrave Macmillan – http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137537362
