Pod Academy

Children develop language and literacy skills in all sorts of settings, but perhaps one of the most overlooked settings is the church, the temple, the mosque -  especially for communities who have recently settled in the UK. Focusing on four groups who have come to London in the last 50 years - the Ghanaian Pentecostal community, the Polish Catholic community, the Bangladeshi Muslim community and the Tamil Hindu community - the three year long ESRC funded BeLIFS project (Becoming Literate in Faith Settings) of the Education Department at Goldsmiths, University of London found that the places of worship, services, classes and home lives of the children, centring around their faith, were important not just for literacy, but for the children's multi-lingual identity. In this podcast, anthropologist Dr Sarah Winkler Reid talks to  Professor Eve Gregory, who headed up the project.  [You can also see and hear Eve Gregory talk about the project in this video] Here is the Transcript: Becoming literate in faith se