The Case of the Missing Childhoods

Abstract

Writing studies has been an intellectual playground dominated by the “big kids.” If we are to understand how writing becomes “relevant” to children as children, then we must study them, not for who they are becoming, but for who they are in life spaces shared with other children. This essay on the methodology entailed in studying writing in young school children’s worlds rests on a cultural studies perspective on childhoods and plays with a sociocultural perspective on literacy development. The methodological challenges entail (a) researcher positionality that allows a dynamic, multilayered view of classroom contexts; (b) data collection decisions allowing one to trace the trajectories of official and unofficial (child-controlled) communicative practices and their interplay; (c) a socially embedded view of the semiotics and functionality of literacy; and (d) a global consciousness that constrains a long-standing rush to generalization based on observational studies of Western, often privileged children.

Keywords

ethnography peer culture writing development schooling young children global perspective

Writing should be . . . relevant to [a child’s] life.

—Vygotsky (1978, p. 118)

Ms. Hache, the student teacher, is frustrated, or so suggests the tension creeping into her voice—the quick breath in as she waits for a moment to intervene in the ongoing, fast-paced child talk. She had asked, innocently enough, that the first graders give her nouns, “words that name people, places, animals, and things” (a lesson informed by a language arts benchmark). The children, though, have transformed the lesson into a category game. When Lyron says “Chuck E. Cheese’s” (the name of a fast-food and child-oriented place), Aaron immediately replies “McDonald’s,” and Brittany voices “Burger King.” “Say Taco Bell!” whispers Monique (who has already had a turn) to Ebony, and the latter child complies. The children are into their game, but, says Ms. Hache, the word “restaurant” is all they need. She writes that summary word on the board, thinking, perhaps, that she is back in control. “Fast food,” says Jon grinning. Ms. Hache seems not to hear and moves on.

Naming nouns is not a familiar, meaningful practice to Ms. Hache’s children. Moreover, “restaurant,” as Jon suggests, indexes a socioeconomic world that is not their own, given that they are attending a city school in a low-income neighborhood and are upfront about their money woes. Rather than straightforwardly directing their individual responses to the teacher, the children collaborate in transforming the official language arts lesson into a form of language play, an activity that seems more meaningful and more relevant to them. The relational transformation at the heart of this vignette is also at the heart of this essay on research methodology, writing studies, and young school children. The overriding question is, how do we, methodologically speaking, allow childhood agency and child cultures a central role in research on writing use and development? Undergirding that question is a more pragmatic one: Why should we?

Children learn about the semiotic systems of their families and communities from early childhood on. Globally, though, school is the societal institution charged with introducing children to written language. Indeed, going to school is regarded as the official work of young children, at least ideally, although gender, poverty, and war may complicate or deny children their place in the schoolroom. In school, children are to become literate and, thereby, productive citizens. Literacy is thus constructed as a critical task of contemporary childhoods, although enacted to different degrees and in varied ways in diverse political, religious, sociocultural, and economic conditions (Anderson-Levitt, 2005; Dyson & Dewayani, 2013; Wells, 2009). Young school children’s writing is particularly interesting in this regard. On one hand, as a curricular area, it is a window to societies’ ways of socializing children into literacy through schooling. On the other hand, as a symbolic tool, it is also a potential window to experienced childhoods themselves and, moreover, to written language’s potential role in the dynamic construction of child cultures.

To build on the Vygotsky quote above, any symbolic tool, to be viable, must assume a niche in the symbolic repertoire of a particular sociocultural group, including those consisting of children. Indeed, some kind of graphic symbol making is an aspect of children’s play throughout the world, whether children are creating images and words using sticks in the mud, No. 2 pencils on primary grade paper, or a mouse and a screen (Matthews, 1999). And yet, the concept of childhoods, and of childhood cultures, is a relatively minor dimension of literacy studies, even though adolescent cultures have emerged as important contexts for the field (e.g., Fisher, 2007; Jocson, 2006; Kirkland, 2013). Writing studies has been an intellectual playground dominated by the “big kids” (the teenagers, the undergraduates). But the key theoretical issues of our time are all there in children’s worlds (e.g., an emphasis on textual multimodality, on ideological conflicts as mediated by composing, on the power dynamics of recontextualizing products across geographic and cultural borders, on the hybridity and emergence of Englishes in institutional sites of power).

Nonetheless, children are categorized mainly as individual learners of adult practices; their developmental path is regularly stretched out in linear fashion, their ambitions sometimes assumed (e.g., to be professional writers; Calkins & Mermelstein, 2003). Even in most studies grounded in the anthropology of writing, if small children are included, they are viewed through the life worlds of adults. Those adults are often theoretically located in culturally distinct and separate communities; children are members in training, apprentices to the practices on offer (e.g., Barton & Papen, 2010; Heath, 1983).

Certainly children’s learning is shaped through participation in those practices guided by, and valued by, adults with whom they have important relationships. But if we are to understand how writing becomes “relevant” to children as children, then we must also enter their childhood worlds of relations and intentions, of power and play. That is, we must study children ethnographically, not for who they are becoming, but for who they are in life spaces shared with other children (Wells, 2009). Moreover, those spaces cannot be contained by one-dimensional labels like “kindergarten” or “first grade”; the materiality of local spaces (e.g., their organization of people, the presence of and nature of official and unofficial tools and texts, the valued channels of communication) are infused with structural dynamics (e.g., consumer marketing, language ideologies, societal formations of race, class, and gender; Thorne, 2005).

This essay on the methodology entailed in studying writing in children’s worlds both rests on a cultural studies perspective on childhoods (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998; Kehily, 2009) and plays with a sociocultural perspective on literacy and development (Sterponi, 2011). The interrelated methodological ramifications of the fronting of childhoods involve the following:

Researcher positionality that allows a dynamic, multilayered view of classroom contexts for text production. Pragmatically, this works against the reduction of classrooms to contained “communities”; more than one social world is being enacted in a singular physical setting, and, furthermore, any single text indexes larger societal forces (e.g., gender, class, culture, race).

The evolution of data collection decisions that trace the social trajectories of official and unofficial (child-initiated) communicative practices and their interplay. Pragmatically, this allows children and their actions to emerge from reductive nouns (“learners”) to become social agents.

A socially embedded view of the semiotics and functionality of literacy, which affects how one documents textual productions. Pragmatically, this works against the reduction of literacy to technical skills and of development to uniform “stages.”

A global consciousness that constrains a long-standing rush to generalization, based, as it has been, on observational studies of Western, often privileged children and, pragmatically, makes possible an openness to diverse resources and pathways to literacy.

I begin below with discussions of the framing concepts of childhoods and written language development before elaborating on the above methodological ramifications. As earlier noted, written language fits differentially into children’s lives before and outside of formal school contexts. From a global perspective, schooling is associated with access to literacy; and it is a methodological respect for childhoods in studies of school writing that is the particular focus of this essay.

Conceptualizing Literacy in Childhoods

Those who speak for children are rarely children. . . . When adults—those “outsiders”—act and speak in the name of children, they offer an emblem, a representation of childhood.

—Cook (2002, p. 1, italics original)

Curricula and Childhoods: Imposed and Enacted

Childhood is a complex social construct. Certainly children are biologically vulnerable beings who need to be provided with food, shelter, and clothing, not to mention care and guidance. But beyond those basic needs, childhoods vary historically, culturally, sociopolitically, and geographically. The nature of those childhoods is influenced by societal institutions, including schools designed for them by adults. Implicit in phenomenon like school writing curricula are assumptions about both children and written language, including what is “basic” for children to know and to do as writers, how it is they should learn, the normative pace of skill mastery, the ethics of responsible writers, and even what writing is. The enactment of curricula, particularly highly regulated and scripted curricula, imposes this conception of childhood through recurrent activities and assessments. Children who do not fit comfortably within official school places and paces are problematic—“nonmainstream,” “at risk,” “struggling,” and so the descriptors flow—and, in the process, inform researchers aiming to understand “problems” (see discussion in Gutierrez & Orellana, 2006; McDermott & Varenne, 2010).

In Western societies the dominant ideology of learning, including the learning of written language, is individualism, a stance toward learning compatible with neoliberalism (Wells, 2009). For example, in recent ethnographic work in city classrooms for young children deemed “at risk” (including Ms. Hache’s), I documented how teachers worked, through their writing curricula, to socialize children into such normative values as telling one’s unique “truth” (i.e., one is not “Spiderman”) and “not copying” others’ truths (i.e., one appropriates ideas not from others but from one’s own “thinking”; Dyson, 2013a, 2013b). Globally, schools and their curricula are shaped by class or caste, itself interwoven with societal constructs such as gender and race (Wells, 2009). School learning may emphasize “hand and finger habits”—handwriting, the association of letters and sounds (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 118)—in classrooms sometimes bulging with children who may be led by underqualified teachers or within understaffed schools (e.g., Lisanza, 2011; Sahni, 2001).

However, adult-designed institutions do not dictate children’s lives (Olwig & Gullov, 2003). Children have agency in the enactment of their own childhoods; this is a structured agency, shaped in response to the relational and power dynamics of everyday practices (Ortner, 2006; Rosaldo, 1993). Indeed, childhood cultures are produced in response to adult-introduced rhythms and rituals, bound together by common knowledge, playful practices, shared values, and, above all, by a desire for belonging and companionship in a world of meaning (Corsaro, 2011; Dyson, 2013b; James et al., 1998; Nelson, 2007).

Thus, schools are prime sites for the evolution of unofficial (or child-governed) cultures. Children are kept in close quarters in confined spaces—pleasures and concerns are shared, mutual knowledge (from media, folklore, or institutions like churches) is identified, relations are formed, and practices evolve. Fueled by children’s desires for companionship and belonging, an unofficial child culture may take shape, given at least some time and space (sanctioned or otherwise) for child agency (e.g., Corsaro, 2003; Kalliala, 2006; Thorne, 1993, 2005).

Fronting childhoods does not discount the critical role of adults in children’s learning, but it does acknowledge the importance of children’s agency: Children are not mindless receptacles who need only “pay attention” to learn, nor are they mere apprentices to the adult world on offer. As with any language user (Bakhtin, 1981), their communicative utterances are located in social and ideological space; in the opening vignette, they are socially responsive peers playing a game, assuming some control from the student teacher even as their words point beyond the moment, suggesting their socioeconomic circumstances. Through such responsive relationships and playful practices, children contribute to the construction of their own childhoods.

Evolving unofficial cultures, like official ones, entail particular kinds of social order (i.e., expectations for social participation) and are mediated by varied forms of composing—of deliberate manipulation of symbolic material, including, talk, dramatic play, drawing, and, potentially, written language. Indeed, children’s interest in each other’s activity may help situate their writing within, and contribute to the maintenance and development of, peer cultures (e.g., Christianakis, 2010; Dyson, 1989, 2013b; Wohlwend, 2011). For example, an official assignment to write about a personal experience may be transformed into an occasion for collaborative play on a textual playground, as in the example soon to be shared. In such a way, official and unofficial social worlds are at play in classroom spaces.

This play may not be visible unless researchers abandon their comfortable post as knowing, evaluative adults and become learners in children’s worlds. Before discussing this and other methodological ramifications, I need to introduce the second basic framing concept, that of literacy development.

Literacy Development: The Play of Official and Unofficial Events

In order to understand how people, including children, develop or change, sociocultural researchers study change in the nature of participation in symbol-mediated activities over time (cf. Rogoff, 2003). In this relatively recent view, literacy is not a static set of knowledge or skills but a situated, intention-driven activity; that activity involves the deliberate manipulation of symbolic material, particularly written graphics (e.g., Street, 1984, 2003). Any specific cultural group may contain a configuration of literacy practices—recurrent activities—that organize and mediate social life and, thereby, embody values and beliefs about language, social groups, and power.

Children, then, can be viewed as mastering literacy, not simply as a set of skills, but as a means of participation in a web of activities or practices. Researchers can study how children participate in a repertoire of practices, appropriating ways of participating from one practice to the next, differentiating the powers of different media and the norms of differing practices (Dyson, 2003; Erickson, 2002; Miller & Goodnow, 1995). Developing child writers are thus not envisioned solely as climbing up the literacy ladder of success but also as maneuvering on an expanding landscape with more flexibility and more deliberateness in their decision making. Taking a close-up view, over time, children differentiate the multiple dimensions of textual communication (e.g., the varied symbol systems involved, typified communication genres or practices, punctuation and formatting possibilities) and the flexible use of those dimensions given the constraints and possibilities of practices (including their structural expectations, social relationships, and ideological underpinnings).

Despite this evolving situated view of literacy, childhood scholars have expressed understandable distrust of “developmental” questions; they want neither to limit children’s social roles to “learner” or “future citizen” nor to assume dominant developmental trajectories and “best practices” of Western scholars (e.g., Paradise, 2002; Thorne, 1987, 1993, 2007). However, if a researcher follows children as they move within the official social field in school, an unofficial field may emerge. Children may be seen, then, doing more than differentiating the “options, limits, and blends” of varied official practices (Miller & Goodnow, 1995, p. 12); they may also be seen differentiating those fields—those social worlds in which their resources and agentive identities have variable currency (Hanks, 1996, who draws on Bourdieu, 1983). The youth deemed struggling writers in school but artful composers outside of school (e.g., Kirkland, 2013) do not spring forth when they enter secondary school; they are rooted in histories, including, no doubt, their earliest school experiences. Thus, to understand children’s use of written language, and its links to their understanding of themselves and their worlds, one has to follow children’s participation in official and unofficial social worlds, seeing those worlds as potentially (but only potentially) informing each other.

With those notions of childhoods and literacy development as backdrop, I turn to the methodological ramifications of scholarly respect for childhoods.

Studying Children as Located Somebodies

More often than not, stylistics [or, more broadly, textual production] defines itself as . . . “private craftsmanship” [sic] and ignores the social life of discourse.

—Bakhtin (1981, p. 259)

Imagine a first grade classroom during daily writing time. The classroom is in a socioeconomically distressed urban area, serving low-income children from diverse cultural heritages. On this day, like most, each child has an assigned seat at a worktable; each has a writing book of blank pages; on each book, the owner’s name is firmly printed with a black marker. The assigned task is to write a text of at least three sentences; the official expectation is for a personal narrative, a “life story,” as it is called by Mrs. Kay (Ms. Hache’s supervising teacher). Despite the children’s collective gathering around a table, they are, in essence, to work as if they were in private cubicles, concentrating on the paper in front of them.

As researcher early in my yearlong field work, I notice that Tionna and Lyron have both written about a joint trip to the grocery store. “Do you live by Tionna?” I ask Lyron. “No,” comes the answer. In fact, he has no idea where Tionna lives. The two friends were “just saying that” about going to the store. A “true” experience invented for the teacher, not by a lone craftsperson, but by children in relation to each other; each child’s text is simultaneously a mark of surface compliance and of enacted play among friends.

Thus the children are located not in their metaphorical cubicles but in enacted relationships. There is, at least sometimes, a choreography of texts as children act upon a social field connected to but not equivalent to the official one. Clearly there are communicative skills, indeed, transformative ones on display. How does an adult, one who does not live in the children’s neighborhoods, who differs in age, narrative taste, and, perhaps, in racial and cultural identity (not to mention agentive goals), gain access to that field, particularly when it operates in the underground? How does it form? What practices configure it, governed by what normative expectations? What are its consequences in terms of the outcomes of participation, for example, in the stretching of communicative skills? What are its potential relationships to the official field?

So Many Questions

In this section, I consider the methodological challenges posed for the researcher who aims to investigate these questions in particular schools, with particular curricula, serving particular populations, within certain sociopolitical contexts. To anchor the discussion, I use a text (linked to an official writing event but embedded in an evolving unofficial practice). The multimodal text features a battle in a war game, and it is authored by Mrs. Kay’s student Tionna, close friend of Lyron. (The full analysis of the cultural and semiotic nature of this gendered war is available in Dyson [2013b]; the intention herein is to use that war as an explanatory tool.) To clarify the discussion, I at times refer to a theoretically distinct study that traces children’s participation in a singular official practice (Manyak, 2001); this is an older study but, in my view, an unusually theoretically clear one, grounded in an apprenticeship view of child writing (see Lave & Wenger, 1991). I begin with the most basic challenge of all—gaining access to intersecting but not synchronous worlds.

Researcher Positionality: Gaining Access to Unofficial Space

We are going to play a / wer [war] it will [be] the girls a gints the boys all the girls are going / to bet the boys nobody can stop the girls because we have a 1,0000001500000 [a thousand hundred and fifty million] of misssl and the boys / oldy [only] have one missl no way the boys can bet the girls thay / can’t lay a [hand] on us no you cant stop us not a bit because they / don’t have a nofe things to get adit [attack] us we are tofe girls / we stol there money they Are made [mad] thay oldy [only] have / One tent we have a lot of Cacle. . . .

Above is Tionna’s text; like all written texts, it occupies textual space but unfolded over time (Palmeri, 2012). The text was written in the midst of ongoing dramatic play, itself mediated by both talk and drawing. Perhaps most relevant for this discussion, Tionna’s text did not comply with key dictates of official writing time (i.e., her text was neither “true” nor “independent”). It was a social response, not simply to the dictates of the official world, but to her relations with others in the unofficial world; through it, she took a position in a “figured” or collectively imagined world of pretend battles and gendered war (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998).

For a researcher, gaining access to unofficial worlds, and to their unfolding dramas and mediating texts, entails negotiating a position for the self, one that is as unobtrusive as possible but, still, available for child commentary on the goings on. That position tends to be one of a nonthreatening adult friend. How a researcher negotiates such a position, and the complex social and ethical issues that may be entailed, is a major concern of studies situated within childhoods and child cultures but may be a relatively minor matter if the focus is on the official world.

Gaining access can be difficult in part because public schools are places where the lines between “children” and “adults” are sharply drawn. A hierarchy of age exists, as it is central to the organization of materials, people, space, and, of course, authority. Readers may recall from their own childhoods how, when the teacher steps out into the hall, children’s voices may go up, their actions become more playful—and how a warning, “the teacher is coming!”, returns the expected order. It matters, then, that ethnographers of childhoods are clear about how to distance themselves from adult authority (Corsaro, 2011; Ferguson, 2001; Thorne, 1993).

For example, quiet talks with teachers, in front of the children, may not be wise, since children may assume one will tattle. Adult monitors are not welcome in the cracks and under the surface of the official world, where social action may unfold. Being perceived as a spy, as someone who might tell on children, will rule their social worlds out of bounds; still, being “in” with the children can contribute to feelings of conspiring against the teacher (for a revealing discussion, see Thorne, 1993). Given these varied pressures, the particular researcher role is shaped to the authority relations at hand. When peer play and collaboration is officially allowed during writing, the researcher is in a different position than when such behavior is not teacher-sanctioned.

In Mrs. Kay’s room, the latter situation prevailed. I explicitly discussed my noninterventionist stance with Mrs. Kay before the project began: I would assume no deliberate authoritarian or pedagogical role with the children. After the class had left for the day, Mrs. Kay and I discussed actions we had both noticed, for example, amusing productions or surprising child responses to a peer’s text during the daily sharing time. With the children, I positioned myself using my usual strategy—I was also someone taking orders. “I have to do my work and write,” I told the children, in a tone that suggested that I was feeling a bit put upon with all my work. (I do this too in order to avoid becoming a talking dictionary, a spell-master, and, thus, central to the goings on.) I greeted children with smiles, expressed sympathy or amusement, and listened to stories when asked. (With preschoolers in play-oriented curricula, I also am grateful when offered sand cupcakes or properly “scared” when faced with a plastic dinosaur run amuck.)

Decades ago, an “adult friend” stance was a struggle for me. I identified mainly as a teacher; I saw a child off task, I wanted that child on task. I saw one making an error, I wanted to help. That is, I saw individuals in relation to the official world. To understand children as social beings, researchers have to be curious about their patterns of relations, their expectations toward each other, and how those expectations are organized by ongoing activity—when, for example, composing is mediating affection or its lack, mediating a collaborative improvisation (as was the war text), or coordinating a display of friendship (as were the grocery store texts). In Mrs. Kay’s room, I filled notebooks with graphic depictions of who hung with whom during recess or inside choice time, evolving taxonomies of children’s ways of relating to each other during composing, and lists of references to popular locales, TV shows and videos, rappers and singers.

Complicating the researcher’s stance is the researcher’s body. That body is read through societal codes of age, gender, race, language, and dress. I am White, female, and old enough for senior seating on the train. In Mrs. Kay’s room, the majority of children were African American and Latino and just 6 years old. Two criteria for focal children in all my projects are, first, that the child is comfortable being observed by (but not overly attentive to) me and, second, that the child provides access to other children. Whatever social borders are initially anticipated between the children and me are at least partially dismantled by a “friend’s” acceptance, as well as the passage of time, persistent friendliness, and increasing knowledge of valued places and objects. One knows one is gaining acceptance when the children hide things from the teacher but not from the researcher.

For example, with Tionna, a key focal student in Mrs. Kay’s room, I was quietly attentive, obviously amused when she tried to be amusing, and respectful (did not intervene) when she was talking with her friends. One day in Mrs. Kay’s room, Tionna left early for a dental appointment; before she left she hugged her friends—Mandisa, Janette, Lyron, and me; all were African American except me. Moreover, Tionna took field notes herself, writing down what others were doing, being careful to get their talk right (“What did you say?” she would ask her peers). She also helped me check my transcription of clapping games and rhythmic plays. In addition to being an adult friend, then, I was a learner, and I positioned Tionna as the expert.

In a study in which one is observing children solely in relationship to the official world, there is much less angst about relationships. The researcher might even be a teacher helper; there is no reason not to be. In Manyak’s study, he was “busy” writing when the children were, but his intention was to examine bilingual children’s participation within the relations and resources of a particular teacher-introduced activity: the writing of the Daily News. When the children adopted the roles of reporters (writers) and news givers, they were familiar and playful with each other, but, argues Manyak, that tone was established as appropriate by the teacher. There was no attempt to hide that playfulness. For this reason, perhaps, Manyak did not hesitate in helping the teacher out at times by assuming a supervisory role (e.g., walking the children down the hall), nor did he hesitate in discussing with her his ongoing observations of particular children. In all qualitative studies focusing on so-called nonmainstream children, though, a researcher with a critical political conscience faces one final ethical issue: how does one’s portrayal of children work against deficit or “at risk” views of whole groups of children’s language possibilities (cf. Hall, 1997; Madison, 2012)? I’ll close the essay by commenting on this issue.

For now, this essay is concerned with situating studies of writing within unofficial worlds. To do so, researchers cannot simply trace changes in participation in a singular practice (cf. Rogoff, 2003). Rather, the intention is to follow the complex interplay of official and unofficial practices. Tionna’s war piece, for example, marked her entry into the textual war play as a warrior (not as a damsel in distress, a previous role); the play itself began months earlier as a chase game on the playground. The war practice was adapted to different conditions, assumed differentiated paths, gathered multiplying participants, generated related routines, and, in varied ways, yielded a configuration of practices that contributed to a child culture mediated, at least in part, by writing.

Explorations of Space: Tracing the Trajectories of Official and Unofficial Practices

“Every practice has a history,” write Miller and Goodnow (1995), “and is part of other practices. . . . Development may be regarded as the process of learning about the options, limits, and blends [of practices] that are acceptable to oneself or others” (p. 12). As earlier noted, official and unofficial social fields may entail different notions about what, in the given situation, is acceptable or even required. In apprenticeship studies, like Manyak’s, change in participation in an official practice is traced. In studies of childhood cultures, the evolution of unofficial practices themselves are of interest, as are their interconnections with official practices. Children are conceived less as apprentices, relatively more as social agents, potentially negotiating positions of inclusion and influence.

The notion of unofficial childhood cultures complicates the usual divide between children’s and adolescents’ literacy lives “in” school and “out of school” (Hull & Schultz, 2001). The unofficial literacy lives of interest herein are unfolding in the space of school (Erickson, 1986). This is space as Massey (2005, p. 9) imagines it, space as a multiplicity of evolving relations, or “a simultaneity of stories-so-far.” These relations are organized in communicative practices, as Hanks (1996) envisions them; these are dialogic practices, routine, infused with values, but negotiated in the moment. Children, then, assume positions in official and unofficial practices, as they act within the intersecting social fields that animate space. In those intersections, official and unofficial practices become intertwined and differentiated, linked in dialogue or kept apart.

As in child cultures more generally (Corsaro, 2011), unofficial composing practices often entail transformations of official ones, reworked to allow children control, relevance, and meaning in their lives together (not to mention fun). I know of no simple strategy for locating unofficial practices other than gaining access to children’s talk and actions, observing, and staying alert to possible pathways into the unofficial social field. One begins by surveying the classroom space broadly. In Mrs. Kay’s room, I began with recurrent official activities or practices and the relationships they entailed. At the same time, I observed periods in which children had relatively more agency in determining their activities, for example lunch, recess, and, particularly when wintery or wet weather made the playground off limits, “activity choice” time inside the classroom. Less regular observations were made, in fact, across reading groups, science and social studies lessons, and school assemblies.

In the official world, individual children were to express themselves on paper. The first hint that something unofficial was afoot came as I noted a choreography of—an interrelationship between—child texts, often accompanied by peer talk infused with expectations of how children should participate in the goings on. That is, in the unofficial world, children could collegially respond to each other, deliberately coordinate their actions (like Tionna and Lyron’s trip to the grocery store), assume complementary roles (as did pretend invitees who responded positively to a peer’s imagined birthday party), or, in the case of the war play, collaboratively and dialogically enact a drama. As just suggested by the parenthetical examples, particular modes of relating to each other during writing time could coalesce around certain purpose-driven practices (e.g., planning a birthday party, having a war). These unofficial practices could spread throughout the class and even spill over into those school times when children had more agency.

The history of unofficial practices, then, involves not only tracing participation over time but also over space, as the researcher pores over detailed field notes and accompanying audiotapes and, then, follows the game, so to speak, whenever it seems to be on. To illustrate this, I return here to Tionna’s text and to the practice of composing time war play.

In her text, Tionna begins with an anticipation of a war. This anticipatory stance was common in Mrs. Kay’s room. Each day, when Mrs. Kay modeled her own writing, she often wrote of her fun family plans for the weekend. The children transformed Mrs. Kay’s fun family plans to anticipated peer events—all just pretend (like those birthday parties mentioned above). And the stance was also a schematic aspect of the unofficial practice of war games. “Manny and I are going to have a war,” Lyron would write, as would others, as the textual war practice spread. Along with naming the anticipated recess game, players were also named, sometimes actions were foretold (“I am going [to] croch [crush] Manny’s men”), and the eventual winners declared. “The End,” so to speak, came next.

In Tionna’s text, though, she continues on, slipping into the role of a “tofe girl” who, along with her fellow team members, is ready for battle and, moreover, taunts the boys, who cannot lay a hand on them. “[N]o you cant.” Tionna was, quite literally, talking back to the boys, as I will soon discuss. First, though, I need to back up and, in fact, take readers out to the school playground.

Peer war play itself began on that playground as a team chase game, with minimal language and maximal physical action. Out on the playground, war play had no “good” guys, no “bad” guys, just “your” team and “mine,” as two groups of children (coed, but dominated by boys) alternatively chased each other wildly about. Tionna’s own reference is to the “we” of her team in a gendered battle (although initial teams were not gendered, nor was Tionna a player). The playground battles had projectiles; in fact, throwing pine cones at others seemed to be the initial impetus for the Pine Cone Wars. (Those irresistible objects crowded together in the back corner lot of the playground, where the long branches of pine trees, burdened by the heavy cones, let them fall.)

The conception of teams (as opposed to good guys and bad guys), the dialogic structure of chase and be chased by armed warriors—these seemed related to textual war play. However, during writing time, the players (again mainly boys, at least at first) drew their wars, all the while telling the other what his team would soon do, was doing, or had done to the other. This shift to a greater role for narrative had, in fact, happened on the playground as well. I did not initially notice this, but Lyron drew my attention to it one day when I asked what was happening with the Pine Cone Wars. Snow had happened, as he explained the situation—deep snow, and no one was allowed on the playground’s open field. The children had to stay on the front blacktop area, which pushed against the school building. So two avid war players, Lyron and Manny, transformed the chase game into one involving manipulatives. Their respective teams did not consist of children running wildly about but of small wood-chip “men” stuck in their respective “castles,” represented by snow mounds made by the snow plow on the edge of the black top. This shift to manipulatives yielded a greater role for narrative turn taking during play (i.e., for each boy to say what his team was doing in response to the other), since the teams no longer moved under their own power. Such a shifting of symbolic media is common among young children (Kress, 1997; Matthews, 1999; Pahl, 2005) and sometimes recommended for older students (Palmeri, 2012).

This narrative turn taking that accompanied the manipulative war play on the black top was recontextualized in the daily composing time. The boys’ wood chip “men” became tiny stick figures on paper, and the castles were rendered as large structures with towers, each castle usually topped with a flag marked with a boy’s initials. Improvisational play accompanied drawing, as one child’s drawn and narrated move was answered by another. The play’s drawn format not only suited the display of the spatial positioning of castles and the graphic depiction of action (e.g., arrows, expressive lines), it also provided the players cover. In the official world, drawing was not evaluated, although time spent drawing was monitored. Official pride of place went to the written texts. As already noted, the children wrote short, “true,” anticipatory texts about what would happen during recess.

As war play spread during composing time, Tionna, who sat at the same table as Lyron and Manny, wanted to join in. Lyron objected, as he thought only “men” knew about war. As gender ideology came between Tionna and her good friend Lyron, she became the spokesperson for an imagined girl team who battles the boys. Moreover, she answered Lyron and Manny’s drawn narrative moves not only with her team’s own such moves but also with her written retorts, which led to more writing from the boys. The children were only superficially in the official relational field of individual “truth” telling about an anticipated playground game; the action was happening in the unofficial world and, now, in the text too, where fiction could speak its own truth—girls are “tofe” too.

The history of the war play continued (see Dyson, 2013b), but, for my purposes here, what matters is its evolution from the pine-tree-lined school grounds, as children adapted the play to different spaces, different available tools, and different official expectations (stay off the snow, and, later, stay on task). The history was traceable but not predictable, negotiated by children’s intentions, their enacted relations, their desires for inclusion, and contingency (e.g., those snow mound offerings, however unintentional, by the snow plow driver).

The unfolding interplay of official and unofficial practices matters, in part, because it emphasizes the agency of children, who negotiate their social and intellectual lives with others who matter, including both teachers and peers. Children draw on official and unofficial resources, as Manyak also notes. However, tracing evolving practices, and their constructed links, allows insight into how children recontextualize resources from one practice to the next and, in so doing, “develop” not just as singular writers, but as flexible participants in literate cultures. I am not dismissing the careful tracing of children’s changing participation in one practice as they interact with others. I am noting only that such a focus is not enough for understanding children as writers and as cultural beings. Children are engaged in transformative actions, and they find support in their own histories, in social engagement with others, and in the intense motivation to corral those pesky letters in order to join in the fun. At least potentially what they construct is a network of practices, a culture.

There were other evolving configurations of child practices, all needing documentation. There were composing practices related to the game of love, which began on a scrap of paper declaring the name of, and a drawn heart for, the “liked” (or a pretend such note from the named other). There was also an extensive network of practices related to pretend birthday parties, some of which (e.g., lists of invitees, invitations) were done only outside writing time as they did not fit its requirements. To remain alert to, and trace, unfolding practices requires an ongoing sense of being “on the case,” so to speak, and a design flexibility that is not captured in staid lines I myself have written like “I observed in the classroom 2 times per week for 8 months.” Also not captured in the preceding vignettes are all the threads that knit practices together, for example, numerous instances where gender conflicts arose, the typical (but not fixed) positions of Tionna and Lyron in those conflicts, and the contradictory responses of the good-humored Mrs. Kay. Threads knit together and dangle off narrative lines. There is always the danger of making a linear plot line where there are complex contingencies and influential happenings in surprisingly related horizontal practices (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011).

Following children in and out of (and, of course, sometimes blending) official and unofficial social fields allows insight into how composition, childhood relevance, and schooling may be officially interrelated—or deliberately kept separate (cf. Gutierrez, 2008). At the same time, its methodological attention to time and space is useful in underscoring the danger of a singular, temporal developmental narrative. This danger will surface again as the third methodological issue is raised, which has to do with how writing itself is operationally defined.

Choices of Analytic Units: Opening Up the Semiotic and Social Boundaries of Composing

The situated view of writing as rooted in relationships and intentional activity does not dominate discussions of young children’s writing. Indeed, as I write, another journal article about young children and writing has arrived in my mailbox. Within its pages, a variant of the now familiar set of “stages” is laid out (e.g., Cabell, Tortorelli, & Gerde, 2013). Children first draw and scribble; then they use letters and letter-like forms; next comes letter symbols for salient sounds of words, and then, gradually, beginning, ending, and medial sounds are translated into letters. This narrow developmental pathway is ubiquitous, taken for granted. The popularity of children spelling by “stretching out” words and listening for sounds is attributable, at least in part, to the concern in early schooling that children (particularly low-income children) learn ASAP the “basics” of sound/symbol connections (Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Berk, & Singer, 2009).

I note, in passing, that this view of development is depressingly out of synch with trends in language socialization and even developmental psychology; development is portrayed as intertwined with cultural practices, and, thus, singular developmental paths are abandoned for cobbled paths of engaging practices and relations (Miller, Fung, Lin, Chen, & Boldt, 2012). Herein, though, I want to reimagine the usual developmental portrayal of writing from the viewpoint of a methodological concern with childhoods. (For a critique of the encoding “stages” themselves, see Dyson [1999].)

To begin, I acknowledge that I have, in fact, no objection to providing children with instructional guidance on letters and sounds. However, the usual portrayal of writing development is not, in fact, about writing at all. That is, it is not about children becoming participants in the social practices mediated by the production of texts. The unit of analysis—the form of a written product—is inappropriate.

The dominance of written products in examinations of child composing, and its methodological limitations, seems analogous to the situation in research on child drawing. Phil Pearson explains “why children’s drawings are the center of attention and why this is a problem” (2001, p. 349; see also Thompson, 2003). Researchers interested in children’s drawing, he argues, are fixated on children’s products as artifacts. However, if drawing is a social practice, then researchers cannot focus solely on products; they have to understand the social happening or event; that is, they need to know who draws what, when, for what reason. In short, to apply my own theoretical leanings, they need ethnography of communication (Blommaert, 2005; Hymes, 1972), which allows insight into how products mediate intentions, social relations, and contextual conditions.

If the unit of analysis is an enacted practice (i.e., an event; Barton & Papen, 2010; Street, 2000), the researcher has to move off the page and enter social worlds. There, children can be found, not simply progressing vertically, but maneuvering horizontally among the evolving practices of official and unofficial worlds; they must be socially alert and sensitive to others’ social expectations—and social obligations—for participating in a practice. Social attunement and communicative flexibility are thus basic skills (Dyson, 2013b), although their particular nature will depend on the communicative configuration of children’s everyday worlds. Just as in their social play (Corsaro, 2011), children ask some version of, when and how do I get in on this? What do I need to say or write to be viewed as a player? What symbolic media will others read? In Hanks’s (2000, p. 171) terms, a common social framework allows “participants for, to, and through whom the text speaks.”

Tionna’s war text, for example, cannot be understood as an individual text. It is an utterance, directed to addressees (Bakhtin, 1986), and brought into being when her initial desire to “play war” was objected to by none other than her good friend Lyron. She shoved (no easy slipping) her way in but followed and extended the accepted dialogic structure. The boys wrote that they would win, but Tionna countered that that there was no way the boys can bet the girls because the boys did not have enough things. Manny wrote that We have two big casle. They have ten little tents. But, wrote Tionna, [t]hay oldy have one tent we have a lot of cacle. And on the play went. (Academics sometimes write like Tionna, conforming to certain expectations [e.g., assertions, evidence] but extending them as well [performing metaphorical or definitional feats], as they anticipate objections.)

Bringing social worlds into focus inevitably brings into focus the political (power-saturated) and ideological aspects of literacy practices (Street, 1984). Gender is highlighted in the vignette I have re-created here, but in the larger study there is also an ideology of violence—voiced by a regular playmate who chose not to play war, as well as by Mrs. Kay (cf. Newkirk, 2002, 2009). Other practices made visible ideologies of race and sexuality (particularly in the social field of love). And still others brought into hearing range ideologies of language. Tionna’s performative storytelling for an audience was most telling here, since when she adopted the voices of family members, she used African American Language (see Dyson & Smitherman, 2009). Manyak’s piece, itself focused on an enacted practice, highlights the official valuing of bilingualism enacted by teachers and children.

My point here is that a socially situated view of young children’s actions across practices challenges reductive views of “development.” Clearly there can be no singular pathway, since the configuration of practices will vary (shaped by individuals with different communicative histories, negotiated peer worlds, political and governmental supports and constraints on curricular space and time, regulatory monitors and tests, societal ideologies of schooling, children, and language, technological tools, and on we might go). Situating children’s composing in children’s worlds could open up a host of research questions, yielding better understandings of the kinds of social configurations that evolve among particular children in particular locales, how relations are negotiated, how ideologies are grappled with, and how official and unofficial worlds may themselves come into dialogue or move further apart.

Similar research possibilities open up when the semiotic boundaries of writing are opened up. In print saturated societies, children draw letters as well as actions and images; their movement between the two is often fluid, even as they grapple with the relationship between drawing and writing as semiotic actions, that is, as means of representing and communicating meaning (Dyson, 1982; Eng, 1931; Matthews, 1999; Stetsenko, 1995). Written language assumes a niche in a repertoire of symbolic tools. In any one event Tionna and her peers could use voice, image, and print in situated ways that suggested at least an emerging if unconscious knowledge of the strengths of varied media. For researchers and educators, a focus solely on written text unravels a story made through “symbol-weaving” (Dyson, 1990).

Tionna, for example, was more given to the production of dramatic written text and oral storytelling than she was to drawing. Whether or not she drew “depended”: Her drawing suggested that she at least sensed that spatial location and dramatic action were often better displayed through drawing than writing (see Dyson, 2008); and she knew the specific graphic requirements of the practice of textual war play. Her drawings for war play were not as detailed as her peers, but she did meet the practice requirement of two castles with their respective flags, team members (but not just “men”), and action. Tionna also used talk, so integral to the practice, as the children dialogically narrated their team’s next move; she wrote her responsive boasts. In general, children used print to capture the voice, even if drawn symbols conveyed action.

Attention to the multimodal nature of children’s composing (and even of college composition; Palmeri, 2012) wreaks havoc on the developmental notion of children abandoning drawing and other symbolic tools. That notion has persisted because of the “basic” understanding of the end goal for a small child—written text, not participation in a range of often multimodal practices. However, even in the official school world, children may engage with picture books, multimodal signs and labels, and, at least in more affluent societies, the complex websites and games of digital media. Again, the overriding—the basic—composing skill seems to be the capacity to flexibly adapt linguistic and semiotic resources for participation in the event at hand.

If we as researchers pay attention only to written language, rather than to the social event, then we cannot, in fact, understand the situated nature of children’s composing, nor can we grasp the way written language does (or does not) find a way into children’s semiotic tool kit. Most importantly, perhaps, we cannot understand the dynamic processes through which communicative functions are lost to school, taking shape in unofficial or out-of-school lives (Kirkland, 2013).

Simplistic developmental progressions may provide comfort and confidence to researchers, policy makers, and educators, but they do harm in the world. The narrower the expected pathways of imagined writer selves (i.e., brave individualists not alert social communicators), the fewer opportunities adult researchers (and educators) have to understand the world as experienced by the very young and how composing figures, if it does, in that world.

A Situated, Comparative Stance: Resisting Easy Conclusions and Colonizing Generalizations

It is . . . wise to remind ourselves of the fact that the world is big. . . . Our own environments, from which we so often deduce principles of human communication, may well be (and probably are) highly peculiar environments with norms, codes, and conventions.

—Blommaert (2005, p. 50)

An ethnographic study of a particular case—herein, a childhood culture and its textual play—does not provide findings that can be generalized to some broader population. It is not a sample; it is a case. Its power, to borrow from Geertz (1973), is that it gives us concrete material with which to think about abstract phenomena, like relevance, agency, and equity. How could we think about childhoods and composing without some young children constructing their childhoods in some particular circumstances? Whose meaning matters, we might then ask, in studies of the interplay of childhoods, schooling, and composing? By comparing the studied case to others, the phenomenon itself is probed, its dynamic enactment is better understood, the social factors that matter take shape, and the larger sociopolitical processes the cases entail sharpen. We as a profession learn.

This seems particularly important in contemporary times. Commercial media, economic capital, and people themselves move across assumed borders and construct complex interconnections among us all. For example, globally, commercial media market stories to children (e.g., especially widely through television), bringing plot lines and characters that are available “textual toys” (Dyson, 2003); children, though, select some toys and not others, situating them in their local repertoires for graphic and textual play. Economic restructuring in varied global sites—for example the close of manufacturing places in the urbanized upper Midwest, the opening of such places in formerly agrarian societies—may change the stability of children’s lives, the availability of educational resources, the relevance of taught skills, and even children’s times and spaces for play and, thus, for examining and transforming their identities (Katz, 2004).

The studies we do have of children going to school and learning to write under diverse circumstances, particularly in non-Western countries, have not focused on peer cultures to any great extent. Nonetheless, they do allow insight into how children exploit available time and space to playfully compose with whatever tools are at hand. Their agency may be found in their reinterpretations of official school composing practices, as in the examples discussed from Mrs. Kay’s room, in child-initiated activity in unstructured breaks in the school day (Lisanza, 2011), or even in “permeable” official activities free from the regulatory expectations—the benchmarks of required progress—of designated literacy lessons (Dewayani, 2011). Moreover, there is variation in how children’s unofficial events figure into official school worlds; they may be unrecognized, actively discouraged, or appreciated and, indeed, furthered.

For example, Lisanza (2011) describes the oral and written language lives of children attending a crowded first grade (with 89 class members) in a Kenyan village. The children’s home language was Kamba, but all school texts were in English, except for Swahili class. (Kamba was not allowed.) Writing entailed copying the day’s sentences from the board. Nonetheless, as the children copied, Lisanza could hear quiet singing of church songs in Kamba, pop songs in Swahili, and even English nursery rhymes. In school breaks, children sometimes could be seen writing songs or composing stories in drawing and text, featuring figures from folk stories and everyday life, like snakes. The children’s multilingual and cultural resources and their interest in being together making worlds were evident in the unofficial world and, potentially, could be used to connect to the official world. Still, the crowded conditions of their classrooms, the absence of sufficient tools (even textbooks), and the powerful language ideology of English made their resources invisible and inaudible (analogous to the official inaudibility of Tionna’s—and many other children’s—linguistic flexibility).

To further illustrate, Sahni (2001) both observed and, shifting roles, engaged in action research in a rural school serving poor children in Udder Pradesh, India. During official instruction, the second graders, who often had classes on mats under trees, also copied sentences, in their case from textbooks onto their slates. When Sahni changed to a more active pedagogical role, she began with familiar school activities, like copying, but used known children’s songs and rhymes. Children could copy them on paper and then take the valued material home. With interactive support from Sahni, children began to write their own stories, at first through selective copying, and, then, the new medium, along with drawing and talk, found its way into children’s worlds. It became a means to enact dramas linked to their own recess play—like a game of hopscotch with a declared winner (a calm relative of textual war play); moreover, it could also serve as a means by which lower caste children imagined themselves owning property and being welcome even in their regular teacher’s home. Composing itself—through drawing, writing, and talk—needed Sahni initially if it was to find a way into children’s repertoire for making meaning, enacting peer relations, and, incorporating both, engaging in new forms of play; most movingly, it was potentially a means for imagining a self treated with respect.

A comparative perspective teaches us the similarities and differences of lived childhoods at the very same time it teaches us about possible practices that are stepping stones to diverse forms of literacies. Unfortunately, the dominant voices in the United States (i.e., those that have had the most impact on the official lives of children) have not been formally situated in the give-and-take, the riches, of professional conversation and comparative research.

The most striking example is found in the main pedagogical trajectory of the “writing process” of young children. In 1975, Graves wrote an influential research article on the writing process of 7-year-olds in a middle-class New England school; the study was not ethnographic, but it was observational. Graves’s work was important because it brought elementary school children within the umbrella of the “process approach.” Still, it soon moved from research to pedagogical best practices. The process approach was solidified in a pedagogical book for teachers (Graves, 1983), which referred to observations of children and their teachers from similar elementary schools. As widely as the book was distributed, as diverse as is the public school population, the book gave no attention to linguistic diversity as woven into the U.S. school population, or to potential variations in senses of story, of relating to adults, or of what is tellable at school (e.g., Miller & Sperry, 2012).

Most recently the approach has been transformed by Graves’s former student Calkins (e.g., Calkins & Mermelstein, 2003) into a structured curriculum attuned to common standards in the schools. While Graves’s original study described a child who drew and wrote fanciful stories with another child, both play and fancy are not present in the curriculum for the very young (K-2); student choice is confined to certain genres, particularly the personal narrative; and drawing, if necessary, is a precursor to writing. According to the program’s website (http://readingandwritingproject.com), this program has been adopted by “thousands and thousands of school districts” and used for professional development in “nations as diverse as Jordan and Sweden, Singapore and India.”

Without denying the value of bringing careful attention to the processes of young writers, nor the usefulness of curricular help, there is no research support for the erasure of imagination and play from the curriculum. Indeed, it was just such absences from the official world that led to the particular nature of Mrs. Kay’s children’s unofficial practices. It is as if childhoods, wherever they unfold, are to be colonized, brought under control as young children fall into line on a mandated and complicated path. This essay, though, is not about “writers,” but about the messy, situated, sometimes joyful, sometimes mischievous children who have agency in the construction of particular childhood cultures; children who, like Mrs. Kay’s, may find symbolic tools, including writing, as a means for reaching out to others, managing relations, and joining in the fun.

Toward Finding Missing Childhoods in Writing Studies

“Writing,” declare Barton and Papen (2010, p. 3), “is an everyday communicative practice,” and understanding its role is “at the heart of understanding” social and cultural life as enacted in and shaped by societal institutions, social groups, and individual participants in these entities. In this essay, I have agreed with this key assumption of contemporary writing studies, arguing that childhood cultures should be included in such study. Thus, I have focused on the methodological challenges inherent in studying writing in childhoods. Gaining entry into childhood worlds, tracing practices as they converge and diverge in official and unofficial worlds, broadening conceptions of composing itself, and, finally, engaging in comparative work across cases of particular childhoods—all help us better understand both writing and childhoods.

In the end, we are “accountable for the consequences of our representations and the implications of our message[s]—because they matter” (Madison, 2012, p. 5). A narrow vision of writing’s developmental path, of effective learning tasks, and of appropriate writing functions, based on thin descriptions of children, composed from an official perspective, will inevitably privilege some children over others. A greater respect for, and attention to, the particularities of childhoods as both defined by policy and curricular documents and enacted by children will, I have argued, broaden our notions of childhood resources and the practices children find relevant to their lives. Responsive educators will never eliminate unofficial child worlds, but they may dialogue with those worlds and use them to learn about potential pathways to literacy (Comber & Kamler, 2005; Dyson, 2013b; Gutierrez, 2008).

In the opening of this essay, Ms. Hache was frustrated by her children’s curricular takeover with fast-food sites. Her frustration was understandable, but still the children’s ability to coordinate their efforts for a playful response was quite remarkable. Moreover Jon was explicitly attuned to her academic point, even if he was out of the expected social order. If we enter children’s worlds with an aim to understand children’s ways of meaning making, rather than how they are fitting into the required school slots, we might document literacy learning resources and, at least in my experience, uncover a great deal of joie de vivre.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Data collection in Mrs. Kay’s school benefited from the much-appreciated support of the Spencer Foundation. The findings and opinions expressed are, of course, my sole responsibility. I thank my terrific research assistant, Wendy Maa, for her much appreciated assistance with the burgeoning reference list.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support for research in Mrs. Kay’s school from the Spencer Foundation. [Additional support for research was provided by Michigan State University College of Education. A graduate assistant, who provided bibliographic assistance with this piece, was funded by University of Illinois College of Education through the Vera Nofftz Early Childhood Education Fellowship.]

Author Biography

Anne Haas Dyson is a former teacher of young children and, currently, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A fellow of the American Educational Research Association, she has spent over 30 years studying the childhood cultures and literacy learning of young schoolchildren. Among her book publications are Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write in an Urban Primary School (1993; honored with the David Russell Award for Distinguished Research from NCTE), Writing Superheroes (1997), The Brothers and Sisters Learn to Write (2003), and, most recently, ReWRITING the Basics: Literacy in Children’s Cultures (2013).

References

Anderson-Levitt

K. M.

(2005). The schoolyard gate: Schooling and childhood in global perspective. Journal of Social History, 38(4), 987-1006.

Bakhtin

(1981). Discourse in the novel. In Holquist

(Ed.), Emerson

Holquist

(Trans.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. Bakhtin (pp. 254-422). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin

(1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Barton

Papen

(2010). What is the anthropology of writing: Writing as social and cultural practice. In Barton

Papen

(Eds.), The anthropology of writing: Understanding textually-mediated worlds (pp. 3-32). London, UK: Continuum.

Blommaert

(2005). Discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu

(1983). The field of cultural production. Poetics: International Review for the Theory of Literature, 12(4-5), 311-356.

Cabell

S. Q.

Tortorelli

L. S.

Gerde

H. K.

(2013). How do I write . . . ? Scaffolding preschoolers’ early writing skills. Reading Teacher, 66(8), 650-659.

Calkins

Mermelstein

(2003). Launching the writing workshop (K-2). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Christianakis

(2010). “I don’t need your help!” Peer status, race, and gender during peer writing interactions. Journal of Literacy Research, 42, 418-458.

10.

Comber

Kamler

(Eds.). (2005). Turn-around pedagogies: Literacy interventions for at-risk students. Newtown, Australia: Primary English Teachers Association.

11.

Cook

D. T.

( Ed.). (2002). Symbolic childhood. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

12.

Corsaro

(2003). “We’re friends, right?” Inside kids’ cultures. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press.

13.

Corsaro

(2011). The sociology of childhood (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

14.

Dewayani

(2011). Stories of the intersection: Indonesian “street children” negotiating narratives at the intersection of society, childhood, and work (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Illinois, Urbana.

15.

Dyson

A. H.

(1982). The emergence of visible language: Interrelationships between drawing and early writing. Visible Language, 16, 360-381.

16.

Dyson

A. H.

(1989). Multiple worlds of child writers: Friends learning to write. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

17.

Dyson

A. H.

(1990). Symbol makers, symbol weavers: How children link play, pictures, and print. Young Children, 45, 50-69.

18.

Dyson

A. H.

(1999). Transforming transfer: Unruly children, contrary texts, and the persistence of the pedagogical order. In Iran-Nejad

Pearson

P. D.

(Eds.), Review of research in education (Vol. 24, pp. 141-172). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

19.

Dyson

A. H.

(2003). The brothers and sisters learn to write: Popular literacies in childhood and school cultures. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

20.

Dyson

A. H.

(2008). Staying in the (curricular) lines: Practice constraints and possibilities in childhood writing. Written Communication, 25, 119-157.

21.

Dyson

A. H.

(2013a). The place of childhoods in school writing programs: A matter of ethics. In Larson

Marsh

(Eds.), The Sage handbook of early childhood literacy (2nd ed., pp. 485-500). London, UK: Sage.

22.

Dyson

A. H.

(2013b). ReWRITING the basics: Literacy in children’s cultures. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

23.

Dyson

A. H.

Dewayani

(2013). Writing in childhood cultures. In Hall

Cremin

Comber

Moll

(Eds.), International handbook of research on children’s literacy, learning, and culture (pp. 258-274). Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

24.

Dyson

A. H.

Smitherman

(2009). The right (write) start: African American Language and the discourse of sounding right. Teachers College Record, 111, 973-998.

25.

Emerson

R. M.

Fretz

R. I.

Shaw

L. L.

(2011). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

26.

Eng

(1931). The psychology of children’s drawings. London, UK: Kegan Paul.

27.

Erickson

(1986). Qualitative methods in research on teaching. In Wittrock

(Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 119-161).Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

28.

Erickson

(2002). Culture and human development. Human Development, 45, 299-306.

29.

Ferguson

A. A.

(2001). Bad boys: Public schools in the making of Black masculinity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

30.

Fisher

M. T.

(2007). Writing in rhythm: Spoken word poetry in urban classrooms. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

31.

Geertz

(1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York, NY: Basic Books.

32.

Graves

(1975). An examination of the writing processes of seven year old children. Research in the Teaching of English, 9, 227-241.

33.

Graves

(1983). Writing: Teachers and children at work. Exeter, NH: Heinemann.

34.

Gutierrez

K. D.

(2008). Developing a sociocritical literacy in the third space. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(2), 148-164.

35.

Gutierrez

K. D.

Orellana

M. F.

(2006). The “problem” of English learners: Constructing genres of difference. Research in the Teaching of English, 40(4), 502-507.

36.

Hall

(1997). The work of representation. In Hall

(Ed.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 13-74). London, UK: Sage.

37.

Hanks

W. F.

(1996). Language and communicative practices. Boulder, CO: Westview.

38.

Hanks

W. F.

(2000). Intertexts: Writings on language, utterance, and context. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

39.

Heath

S. B.

(1983). Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

40.

Hirsh-Pasek

Golinkoff

R. M.

Berk

L. E.

Singer

D. G.

(2009). A mandate for playful learning in preschool: Presenting the evidence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

41.

Holland

Lachicotte

Skinner

Cain

(1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

42.

Hull

Schultz

(2001). Literacy and learning out of school: A review of theory and research. Review of Educational Research, 71, 575-611.

43.

Hymes

(1972). On communicative competence. In Pride

Holmes

(Eds.), Sociolinguistics: Selected readings (pp. 269-293). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

44.

James

Jenks

Prout

. (1998). Theorizing childhood. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

45.

Jocson

K. M.

(2006). “Bob Dylan and hip hop”: Intersecting literacy practices in youth poetry communities. Written Communication, 23, 231-259.

46.

Kalliala

(2006). Play culture in a changing world. London, UK: Open University Press.

47.

Katz

(2004). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

48.

Kehily

M. J.

(2009). An introduction to childhood studies. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

49.

Kirkland

D. E.

(2013). A search past silence: The literacy of young Black men. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

50.

Kress

(1997). Before writing: Rethinking the paths to literacy. London, UK: Routledge.

51.

Lave

Wenger

(1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

52.

Lisanza

E. M.

(2011). What does it mean to learn oral and written English language: A case study of a rural Kenyan classroom (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Illinois, Urbana.

53.

Madison

D. S.

(2012). Critical ethnography: Methods, ethics, and performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

54.

Manyak

(2001). Participation, hybridity, and carnival: A situated analysis of a dynamic literacy practice in a primary-grade English immersion class. Journal of Literacy Research, 33, 425-465.

55.

Massey

D. B.

(2005). For space. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

56.

Matthews

(1999). The art of childhood and adolescence: The construction of meaning. London, UK: Falmer.

57.

McDermott

R. P.

Varenne

(2010). Culture, development, disability. In Luttrell

(Ed.), Qualitative educational research: Readings in reflexive methodology and transformative practice (pp. 164-182). New York, NY: Routledge.

58.

Miller

P. J.

Fung

Lin

Chen

E. C.

Boldt

B. R.

(2012). How socialization happens on the ground: Narrative practices as alternate socializing pathways in Taiwanese and European-American families. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 77, 1-140.

59.

Miller

P. J.

Goodnow

J. J.

(1995). Cultural practices: Toward an integration of culture and development. In Goodnow

J. J.

Miller

P. J.

Kessel

(Eds.), Cultural practices as contexts for development. New directions in child development no. 67 (pp. 5-16). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

60.

Miller

P. J.

Sperry

(2012). Déjà vu: The continuing misrecognition of low-income children’s verbal abilities. In Fiske

Markus

H.R.

(Eds.), Facing social class: How societal rank influences interaction (pp. 109-130). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

61.

Nelson

(2007). Young minds in social worlds: Experience, meaning, and memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

62.

Newkirk

(2002). Misreading masculinity: Boys, literacy, and popular culture. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

63.

Newkirk

(2009). Holding on to good ideas in a time of bad ones: Six literacy principles worth fighting for. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

64.

Olwig

K. F.

Gullov

(Eds.). (2003). Children’s places: Cross-cultural perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.

65.

Ortner

(2006). Anthropology and social theory: Culture, power, and the acting subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

66.

Pahl

(2005). Narrative spaces and multiple identities: Children’s textual explorations of console games in home settings. In Marsh

(Ed.), Popular culture, new media, and digital literacy in early childhood (pp. 126-145). London, UK: Routledge Falmer.

67.

Palmeri

(2012). Remixing composition: A history of multimodal writing pedagogy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

68.

Paradise

(2002). Finding ways to study culture in context. Human Development, 45, 229-236.

69.

Pearson

P. W.

(2001). Towards a theory of children’s drawings and social practice. Studies in Art Education, 42, 348-365.

70.

Rogoff

(2003). The cultural nature of human development. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

71.

Rosaldo

(1993). Culture and truth: The remaking of social analysis. Boston, MA: Beacon.

72.

Sahni

(2001). Children appropriating literacy: Empowerment pedagogy from young children’s perspective. In Comber

Simpson

(Eds.), Negotiating critical literacies in classrooms (pp. 19-35). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

73.

Sterponi

(2011). Literacy socialization. In Duranti

Ochs

Schieffelin

(Eds.), The handbook of language socialization (pp. 227-246). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

74.

Stetsenko

(1995). The psychological function of children’s drawing: A Vygotskian perspective. In Lange-Kuttner

Kuttner

G. V.

Thomas

G. V.

(Eds.), Drawing and looking: Theoretical approaches to pictorial representation in children (pp. 147-158). New York, NY: Harvester/Wheatsheaf.

75.

Street

(1984). Literacy in theory and practice. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

76.

Street

(2000). Literacy events and literacy practices: Theory and practice in the New Literacy Studies. In Jones

Martin-Jones

(Eds.), Multilingual literacies: Reading and writing different worlds (pp. 17-29). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.

77.

Street

(2003). What’s “new” in new literacy studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5, 77-91.

78.

Thompson

C. M.

(2003). Kinderculture in the art classroom: Early childhood art and the mediation of culture. Studies in Art Education, 44, 135-146.

79.

Thorne

(1987). Re-visioning women and social change: Where are the children? Gender and Society, 1, 85-109.

80.

Thorne

(1993). Gender play: Girls and boys in school. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

81.

Thorne

(2005). Unpacking school lunchtime: Structure, practice, and the negotiation of differences. In Cooper

C. R.

Coll

C. T. G.

Bartko

W. T.

Davis

Chatman

(Eds.), Developmental pathways through middle childhood: Rethinking contexts and diversity as resources (pp. 63-88). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

82.

Thorne

(2007). Crafting the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research, 14, 147-152.

83.

Vygotsky

L. S.

(1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

84.

Wells

(2009). Childhood in a global perspective. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

85.

Wohlwend

(2011). Playing their way into literacies: Reading, writing, and belonging in the early childhood classroom. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB