Children’s Literature & Literacies [MEd] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

At breakfast club last term, a seven-year-old who rarely chose to read in class spent ten minutes working through the back of a cereal box. He read the maze instructions aloud, argued with a friend about whether 'fortified' meant the cereal had walls, and then asked me to time him reading the ingredients. In his reading group the same morning he struggled through a decodable book about a cat on a mat. I have thought about that contrast often, because it captures the question I want to study: what makes a text worth reading for a child, and how do schools decide which texts count as reading at all?

I studied English Language and Psychology, and my undergraduate dissertation compared six decodable readers used in early phonics teaching with six popular picturebooks for the same age group. I analysed sentence length, repetition, rhyme and the relationship between words and pictures, drawing on Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott's How Picturebooks Work for its account of how images can extend, complement or contradict text. I found that the decodable books tended to use pictures simply to confirm the words, while several picturebooks deliberately left gaps for the reader to fill. My conclusion was modest. I did not argue that one kind of book should replace the other, but that they ask children to do quite different work. A small sample and no classroom data limited what I could claim, and I would like the chance to approach this question with stronger methods and broader reading.

Since graduating I have worked for two years as a pupil support assistant in a primary school, mainly in P1 to P3. I am not a teacher, and my role is to support small groups and individual pupils under a class teacher's direction. Within that, I have noticed a great deal. I read with the same children each week, keep simple notes on which books they return to, and have learned how much a child's confidence changes when a book contains something they know about, whether football, a younger sibling or a supermarket. Margaret Meek's How Texts Teach What Readers Learn gave me language for this: the idea that children learn the conventions of reading from the texts themselves, not only from instruction. Reading it after a year in classrooms felt different from reading it as a student.

I also run the school's breakfast club two mornings a week. That job is mostly toast, registers and making sure coats go home, but it has shown me how much informal reading happens outside lessons. Children read packaging, posters, each other's trading cards and the instructions on board games. I started leaving comics and a few joke books on one table, and they are usually the first things picked up. I would be interested in studying how ideas of literacy can include these everyday texts without losing sight of the specific pleasures of literature.

Outside work I help my parents with their allotment, which mainly means digging and arguing about courgettes, and I play five-a-side every Thursday. Neither is connected to my studies, but both have taught me that steady effort over a season is more useful than enthusiasm in bursts, which is how I expect to manage part-time or full-time postgraduate study.

I am applying for this degree because I want to bring together my linguistic training and what I have seen in classrooms, and to think critically about children's books rather than only practically. I hope to develop the knowledge to contribute to how schools select and use texts, and eventually to pursue teacher education or research focused on early reading. I would bring careful reading, close attention to children's actual responses and a genuine curiosity about why a cereal box can sometimes beat a reading book.