Acknowledging and interrogating multiplicities: towards a generous approach in evaluations of early literacy innovation and intervention

INTRODUCTION In policy and practice, early literacy provision has long been supported by charities and other agencies working in homes, communities, libraries and other settings, as well as schools. In promoting innovation or intervention, these diverse groups, building on different assumptions about literacy and literacy learning, have designed programmes, provided guidelines and/or refined models for developing effective partnerships with families aiming to enrich, support and value early literacy. Interest in this work from policy makers and research funding bodies has intensified in recent years in recognition of relationships between young children’s early literacy experiences and their later attainment at school, but this interest has increasingly been accompanied by calls for ‘hard evidence’ that captures quantifiable measurements of the impact of literacy innovation and intervention through randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-experimental studies. Policy-makers and funding organisations, working with limited resources, frequently require organisations to demonstrate the effectiveness of their programmes in ways that are quantifiable in relation to specific outcomes, linked for example to literacy attainment or changes in behaviours associated with literacy attainment. The emphasis on ‘hard evidence’ is problematic for a number of reasons, not least because interventions get interpreted differently in different sites, because programmes need to be locally relevant, and because results can be misleading. This article makes a distinctive contribution to such critique by drawing on Law’s (2004) notion of ‘method assemblage’ to argue that interventions get constituted differently through different evaluation studies, and that therefore specific interventions need to be seen in terms of ‘multiplicities,’ a term used here to capture the multiple ways in which things associated with interventions such as objects, activities, principles and indeed interventions themselves, are constituted differently through different kinds of studies.